Women of War
The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 29 Apr 2025
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
The gripping, true, and untold history of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during World War II, told through the stories of four spectacularly courageous women fighters
From underground soldiers to intrepid spies, Women of War unearths the hidden history of the brave women who risked their lives to overthrow the Nazi occupation and liberate Italy. Using primary sources and brand new scholarship, historian Suzanne Cope illuminates the roles played by women while Italians struggled under dual foes: Nazi invaders and Italian fascist loyalists.
Cope’s research and storytelling introduces four brave and resourceful women who risked everything to overthrow the Nazi occupation and pry their future from the fascist grasp. We meet Carla Capponi in Rome, where she made bombs in an underground bunker then ferried them to their deadly destination wearing lipstick and a trenchcoat; and Bianca Guidetti Serra who rode her bicycle up switchbacks in the Alps, dodging bullets while delivering bags of clandestine newspapers and munitions to the anti-fascist armies hidden in the mountains. In Florence, the young future author of Italy’s new constitution, Teresa Mattei, carried secret messages and hid bombs; while Anita Malavasi led troops across the Apennine Mountains. Women of War brings their experiences as underground resistance fighters, partisan combatants, spies, and saboteurs to life.
Essential and original, Women of War offers not only a reexamination of the elision of women from vital WWII history but also a valuable perspective on the ongoing fight for gender equality and social justice. After all, these were the women who launched a feminist movement as they fought for the future of their country, and what that could mean for its women, all while under Nazi and fascist fire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Cope (Power Hungry) spins a thrilling saga of four young women of the Italian resistance. In interweaving vignettes, she traces how each woman came to join antifascist efforts—some under Mussolini's regime, others not until the 1943 Nazi occupation, but all because they grew to feel that "to do nothing was to side with the enemy." Among those profiled are a bicycle courier who delivered messages to partisan camps outside Florence, a newspaper publisher who organized a mass strike to disrupt Nazi industrial production in Turin, and a smuggler who guided young men out of the city of Reggio Emilia to help them avoid conscription. Cope's narrative rivets as she tracks how the young women escalated their efforts; one woman, who at her first resistance meeting was asked to play Chopin to cover the partisans' voices, ends up a key member of a hit squad. (Her role was to stand at countryside crossroads and offer German soldiers inaccurate directions—straight into an ambush.) By focusing closely on these women's experiences, Cope is able to reflect on how their understanding of events informed their decisions, like how one woman's decision to identify for resistance assassins her former philosophy professor, Giovanni Gentile—"widely considered the architect of the Fascist ideology in Italy"—no doubt took into consideration how Gentile's "reforms" had codified gender inequality in higher education. It makes for a captivating look at how antifascist resistance operated and evolved during WWII.
