The Heroic Women Of The Italian Resistance
Men thought they were too dumb to pull off remarkable feats of sabotage. Ada Gobetti and others proved them wrong
Anyone who’s seen Casablanca has a sense of the fierce loyalty women could have to Resistance movements in World War II. Italy’s female partisans took risks as dangerous as the fictional Ilsa Lund did to help her freedom-fighter husband, Victor Laszlo, in the film.
Yet while popular culture has celebrated the women of French and other Resistance groups, it has largely ignored their Italian counterparts. These daring women began to flex their muscles when Italy, which had entered the war as an Axis power, switched sides after the Allies took Sicily and the Germans, hoping to halt their advance, occupied the north of the country.
All over the unliberated regions, the Italian Resistance emerged. Bands of partisans took up arms to fight the Germans and their Fascist collaborators who stayed loyal to Benito Mussolini, whom the Nazis had installed as the head of their puppet state.
The guerrillas included thousands of women who were vital to their success, perhaps none more so than a fruit merchant’s daughter from Turin whose exploits outshone those of many men.
