On vacation in Rome in her early 20s, Elizabeth Flock was drugged and raped by a tour guide. She couldn’t defend herself during the attack, and she never reported it to the police. Over the years, she often wondered whether she would be better off if she had killed him the following morning. In The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice (Harper, $32, 9780063048805), Flock, now an Emmy-winning journalist who has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times and The Atlantic, examines three women who did what she couldn’t do. It turns out the answer to her question is “maybe, but probably not.”
The figure of the avenging female is powerful and frightening. Flock notes that the Furies of ancient Greek mythology, who tormented Orestes, were hideous and pitiless—the stuff of nightmares. Flock makes a compelling argument that women who stand up for themselves are still seen in this same light. The three “furies” in the book certainly appear powerful and frightening, at least at first glance. The first, Brittany Smith, a young mother from Alabama, was imprisoned for murder after shooting the man who had brutally beaten and raped her. Flock travels to northern India to report on Angoori Dahariya, a Dalit woman who organized thousands of women to use bamboo canes to punish domestic abusers. In Syria, she reports on Cicek Mustafa Zibo, who joined an all-female militia to protect Kurdish women from the ISIS terrorists who were raping, torturing and murdering them.
Flock deeply admires these women for refusing to accept the terms of a society that prefers a dead, submissive woman to a living one who defends herself. But Flock also sees their frailty and their struggles. Brittany had lost custody of her four children due to her addiction to methamphetamines; at the time of her crime, she was off drugs and “confident all that was behind her.” Angoori can judge situations too quickly, sometimes with disastrous results. And Cicek is so traumatized by her physical and psychic war wounds that she becomes increasingly cut off from her family and her humanity. The women are drawn in shades of gray, and that is what makes The Furies so powerful. Brittany, Angoori and Cicek are not mythical figures, but ordinary, flawed humans who fight for their lives, their dignity and justice—despite the cost.
