The postwar years: a time of martyrs and heroes

In one of the first essays on the role of women in the Resistance, Ada Gobetti, a well-known antifascist and partisan, wrote that ‘women were everywhere … There was no activity, struggle, organisation or collaboration in which she did not take part’ (Gobetti Marchesini Reference Gobetti Marchesini and Amendola1961). Many years later, the historian Anna Bravo confirmed Gobetti’s statement but pointed to ‘the significant exception of enclaves of high power and prestige’ (Bravo Reference Bravo, Collotti, Sandri and Sessi2000). There is no need to recall the variety and diversity of the tasks performed by women in the Resistance: from logistics to the press, from healthcare to the provision and storage of weapons, from administrative tasks to undercover work, from the creation of aid networks for the victims of Nazi/Fascist persecution to the organisation of demonstrations and riots (Slaughter Reference Slaughter1997). Nor is it a secret that Italy at the time was steeped in male chauvinism, including the partisan movement, which relegated women to the sidelines, pushed them into the role of caretakers and often discouraged them from taking up arms. In this article, I focus on the postwar period and the first stories about the Resistance that emerged in the aftermath of the liberation. The wide range of roles and the protagonism that Italian women had experienced in 1943–5 were soon flattened by the reductive and devaluing definition of the staffetta (courier), an ancillary term that was widely used to refer to partisan women but which clearly separated those who gave the orders from those who transmitted them, perhaps with little awareness or understanding of their content.

This process of marginalisation was exemplified in the exclusion of partisan women from demobilisation parades, which were organised in every city in northern Italy at the end of the war. These were important moments of self-representation in which the partisans wanted to give the Allies the impression of a virile, victorious and antifascist Italy; there was no room for the disturbing image of armed women, which would break the male monopoly on the binomial between the duty to fight for the fatherland and the right to vote. The professionalisation of the Resistance – that is, the progressive transformation from guerrilla army to regular army – also meant sacrificing women’s protagonism, as had already happened in the Spanish civil war (Nash Reference Nash1995).

Little changed in the years that followed. The first celebrations and commemorations of the Resistance focused exclusively on the figure of the young male partisan fighter. Partisan women were usually only mentioned in passing in official speeches by male speakers, who thanked women (almost always as an indistinct whole) for their ‘contribution’ and ‘participation’ – terms that imply subalternity and not full membership in the movement. Using an emphatic and emotive rhetoric in which all fighters were heroes and all the dead martyrs, they described the few heroines worth remembering with the masculinising lexicon of ‘virile courage’ (Willson Reference Willson, Kirk and McElligott1999). In addition, the Resistance narrative tended to be choral, making the female component invisible. The decision to join the Resistance had often implied total militancy, involving the couple or the whole family unit, but in public rhetoric the collective dimension absorbed women, who became accessories to the male household (i.e. wives, sisters or daughters) even when they had been the driving force behind the decision, if not supporting actors.

The novelty of gender equality in the partisan struggle thus gave way to stereotyped and domesticated archetypes, first and foremost that of the fallen man’s mother, an archetype that nevertheless struggled to adapt to the conflict; the myth of the sorrowful mother, whose grief redeems and makes all dead children equal, did not fit the civil war scenario (D’Amelia Reference D’Amelia2005). Different, unconventional narratives and iconographies emerged early on but remained sporadic and isolated (Guerra Reference Guerra, Bosworth and Dogliani1999). For example, Marcello Venturi’s short story ‘La ragazza se ne va con Diavolo’ (Reference Venturi1946) tells the story of a woman named Vera, who uses her body to seduce a Fascist commander. After flattering his masculinity and military prowess, she asks him – seemingly innocently – to teach her how to shoot, but as soon as she gets her hands on his weapon, she reveals that she is a partisan, kills him without hesitation and clips his gun to her waist, a symbol of a power that can no longer be only masculine. Another good example is the novel Dalla parte di lei by Alba de Céspedes (Reference Céspedes1949). The protagonist is Alessandra, a woman who ends up killing her husband – an important antifascist leader – as a reaction to her subalternity, which also emerges from the story of their shared partisan struggle: ‘They then illustrated the now famous adventures of my husband … I began to suspect that the bombs I had carried must have been fake if only those of the men were considered dangerous … I was so intimidated that I often stayed in a corner and kept silent.’

However, resistant and undisciplined bodies such as those of Vera and Alessandra remained on the sidelines, while the image of the partisan staffetta Agnese, the protagonist of Renata Viganò’s famous novel (L’Agnese va a morire, Reference Viganò1949), entered the public scene and placed the story of partisan women in a more reassuring narrative canon, linked to the semantics of the maternal (D’Angelo and Zaczek Reference D’Angelo and Zaczek2008). This is also what characterised Ada Marchesini Gobetti’s Diario partigiano (Reference Marchesini Gobetti1956), the first key text on the Resistance written from a woman’s perspective (Cooke Reference Cooke2011). Marchesini’s social and intellectual background – like that of many other women who joined Giustizia e Libertà – makes her, in a sense, the spiritual heir of the female elites of the Risorgimento; women like Adelaide Cairoli offered narrative models and the ideal of a mother who was close to and participated in her son’s struggles, pushing gender aspirations and demands into second place. The maternal code ends up dominating the diary, and it is no coincidence that Italo Calvino introduced it as ‘the book of a mother, of a mother who goes off to the partisan war with her son’ (Marchesini Gobetti Reference Marchesini Gobetti1956).

The picture does not change much when it comes to historiographical production. Until the end of the 1960s, the main reconstructions of the Resistance period were produced by the ‘historian-protagonists’: authoritative partisan leaders, usually communists and always male, who intertwined the historical dimension with the biographical one (Peli Reference Peli2022). A good example is Un uomo, un partigiano by the commander and historian Roberto Battaglia. Despite being exceptionally unrhetorical and sincere, the volume (written as early as Reference Battaglia1945) describes the Resistance as a predominantly – and almost exclusively – male endeavour, starting from its title. The disruptive roles that the Italian Communist Party had imagined for women, promoting new legitimising narratives and icons (think of legendary heroines such as Irma Bandiera, Gabriella Degli Esposti and the Arduino sisters), were poorly digested by the more conservative components of the Resistance; they were soon sacrificed for the sake of a unified Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale and the need to gain respect as a reliable and mass party. Although women were extremely frustrated by this change of course, which relegated them from ‘professional revolutionaries’ to assistants to male commanders, they reluctantly accepted it, partly in the name of a total and all-encompassing militancy that had long accustomed them to putting themselves aside for the good of the party. ‘They used to tell me: remember, you are not a woman, you are a communist,’ the partisan Anna ‘Cecilia’ Cinanni recalled years later (Bruzzone and Farina Reference Bruzzone and Farina1976). For many male partisans, the long postwar period was marked by disappointment, the frustration of hopes and expectations for change. But for women, it was a double disappointment, and their stories give voice to the sense of disillusionment with greater intensity than those of the men. As Marisa ‘Lilia’ Ombra writes: ‘For us girls, the transgression ended … our lives would never be extraordinary again’ (Ombra Reference Ombra2009).

The reluctance to grant women the right to vote and the relegation of their political activism to roles almost exclusively associated with care, child rearing and social services (‘politics by and for mothers’) reflect the continuities with which the new republican era began. Clearly, the broad and significant participation of women in the struggle against Nazi-Fascism did not directly translate into a radical rethinking of gender relations, substantive equality or even inclusion in a shared narrative canon. However, this is not exclusive to the Italian Resistance. In liberation movements, the needs of national cohesion often prevail over emancipationist demands, especially those of women (Berkin and Lovett Reference Berkin and Lovett1980), who are easily erased by male nationalist post-liberation rhetoric, and their great wartime contribution is rarely adequately rewarded in the postwar distribution of new rights and roles. Most importantly, it almost never leads to a lasting redistribution of power and authority between the sexes (McClintock Reference McClintock, Eley and Suny1996).

The 1970s and the 1980s: redemption and compensation

At the end of the 1970s, the theme of women’s role in the Resistance exploded in a variety of publications and studies linked to the political and cultural impact of feminism. This new phase not only swept away the rhetoric of subaltern participation and attributed a central role to partisan women in the liberation movement, but it also turned the question upside down. The point was not what contribution women had made to the Resistance, but what contribution the Resistance had made to women’s freedom. This polemical question, which arose in the context of the extra-parliamentary left’s attack on traditional celebratory rhetoric, represents a gendered version of the myth of the ‘betrayed Resistance’, where those who stab women in the back are the antifascist parties and the ‘comrade-enemies’ themselves.

For the feminist generation of the 1970s, studying the Resistance also meant reflecting on the legitimacy of political violence: in particular, on the continuities and discontinuities between the Resistance and terrorism. Mara e le altre (Farè and Spirito Reference Farè and Spirito1979) explored the experiences of female terrorists through interviews with members and sympathisers of the Red Brigades. It contains several stories of partisan women trying to find a role model with which to dialogue; the most iconic figure is that of Cesarina Carletti, ‘Grandma Mao’, a partisan and survivor of Ravensbrück who was arrested in 1974 on the charge of supporting the Red Brigades (Di Cori Reference Di Cori and Ranzato1994).

The cards were also reshuffled as a result of the feminists’ focus on the dichotomy between the public and the private spheres. More attention was paid to the spaces in between, those no-man’s lands in which the women of the Resistance had moved, as well as to the political dimension of certain phenomena (e.g. the hiding of outlaws) that took place in traditionally private spaces (Rossi-Doria Reference Rossi-Doria1999). Behaviours that had traditionally been attributed to women’s supposed natural predisposition to care and nurture changed, entering into the field of political struggle and redefining the boundaries and instruments of the struggle.

It was precisely two researchers linked to feminist movements – Anna Maria Bruzzone and Rachele Farina – who wrote the seminal text La Resistenza taciuta (Reference Bruzzone and Farina1976). Combining history and anthropology, it collects the testimonies of 12 Piedmontese partisan women, presented without any substantial interpretive or explanatory framework, but as life stories, concealing the interviewers’ questions and giving the stories flow and narrative power. The book was a success, and the concept of the ‘silenced’ Resistance was subsequently extended to the many forgotten protagonists of the liberation struggle and even applied to male phenomena outside the heroic-military canon, such as military internment or deportation. Its success was partly due to the iconic title, which conveys the great ambiguity of a Resistance silenced not only by the protagonists themselves (out of humility and modesty), but also by the leadership of the partisan parties and organisations and, in general, by a world in which female protagonism was considered a fault – a world in which there was no room for their stories. Luisa Muraro spoke of an ‘aphasia’ shared by both men and women; the living and raw experience of the Resistance was non-transferable and disciplined into narrative canons that were generally rigid, limiting and stereotypical, as well as penalising for women. On the other hand, Muraro challenged the simplistic and reductive view of women’s lack of recognition, stressing that several women with an antifascist and Resistance background had been able to build brilliant political careers (Muraro Reference Muraro1976).

In addition to feminist activism, a more institutional and academic strand of research also contributed to turning the spotlight on the history of partisan women. Former fighters and leaders of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani demanded recognition and an openness within an organisation that had always been male-dominated. In an attempt to communicate with the new generation of feminists and to denounce the persistent gender division within left-wing movements and parties, the former partisan Giuliana Gadola Beltrami organised the conference ‘The Other Half of the Resistance’, which appealed to different sensibilities. Together with partisan and journalist Mirella Alloisio, Gadola managed to gather hundreds of testimonies from other women across Italy (Alloisio and Beltrami Reference Alloisio and Gadola Beltrami1981).

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation, the Emilia-Romagna region promoted a major research project, distributing hundreds of questionnaires through ANPI sections. The project led to conferences and the first historical publications on the origins of female citizenship in the republican era, edited by Franca Pieroni Bortolotti (Reference Pieroni Bortolotti1978) and Paola Gaiotti de Biase (Reference Gaiotti de Biase1978). Interestingly, their books were published as part of a trilogy that also included a text by a former partisan and researcher, Ilva Vaccari, who described the partisan women’s enemy as follows: not only Fascism, but the ideas about women and the roles that Fascism had promoted and imposed on society (Vaccari Reference Vaccari1978).

All in all, the 1970s and 1980s left historians with a wealth of testimonies, interviews and stories. Bruzzone and Farina paved the way for other researchers who began to interview partisan women in various provinces, recording their memories in audiovisual archives and books. This heterogeneous material was not always properly contextualised and interpreted, but it was of undeniable testimonial value. More generally, these decades gave these studies certain basic characteristics, starting with the attention to subjectivity that characterises the historiography of women partisans in Italy and anticipates the dimension of individuality of choice that was later fully explored by Claudio Pavone (Alessandrone Perona Reference Alessandrone Perona1994). Women’s history thus ‘decollectivised’ the Resistance, which had previously been above all the history of the parties that had sought legitimacy and roots in the partisan struggle. The women’s stories furthermore problematised the heroic-triumphant visions of much of the documentation produced by partisan formations, offering a demythologising gaze that paid attention to fears, emotions, failures, small gestures and the habits of everyday life. In its search for a non-existent historiographical tradition and its attempt to fill an obvious gap, women’s history thus discovered and legitimised subjective and oral sources, opening up to contamination by anthropology and the social sciences.

The 1990s and 2000s: a ‘civil resistance’

In the 1990s, a new and innovative strand of research on the role of women in the Resistance began to emerge. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of bipolarity dealt the final blow to the grand narratives and the heroic epic of the national Resistance movement. Dramatic conflicts in which women and civilians were strategic targets, especially in neighbouring Yugoslavia, raised new questions and established new categories. Moreover, Berlusconism marked the crisis of female citizenship; public discourse became trivialised and women in politics increasingly struggled to be recognised as authoritative subjects (Asquer and Ginsborg Reference Asquer and Ginsborg2011). The de-legitimisation of women’s demands went hand in hand with the rediscovery of the longstanding problem of the weak parliamentary representation of women in Italy, leading many to speak of a ‘democracy split in half’.

All these impulses generated new research questions and claims, as well as the need to identify authoritative ancestors. The creation of equal opportunity bodies within public administrations made it possible to support and finance new projects in collaboration with universities and research institutes. In addition, the growing institutionalisation of gender studies in Italy, with the creation of a scientific society (the Società Italiana delle Storiche) and the inclusion of specific courses in university curricula, allowed scholars to develop new tools. A dialogue developed with ongoing research into European resistance movements, especially in German territory. While there had been no widespread armed resistance in Germany, there had been episodes of opposition to Nazism, and with the end of the paradigm of German guilt, these could now be recognised and appreciated. Attention to unarmed and non-violent resistance also grew thanks to the dialogue with pacifist associations, networks for disarmament and conscientious objection, and the Catholic and evangelical world (Ongaro Reference Ongaro2013).

The real novelty of those years, however, was Jacques Sémelin’s concept of ‘civil resistance’, based on Jørgen Hæstrup’s studies of the Danish resistance. The term described a wide range of unarmed forms of opposition to Nazi-Fascism: from non-cooperation to the creation of social cohesion and rescue networks, strikes and sabotage to block production and transport (Sémelin Reference Sémelin1989). These acts did not concern women alone, who were in fact underestimated in the French sociologist’s analysis, which did not even include Italy among the selected case studies. Yet, in Italy, the category was received marginally in its original meaning and applied almost exclusively to acts of resistance by women. Civil resistance thus became a lens through which to read a whole range of behaviours by women that had previously been difficult to categorise and considered subordinate to the armed struggle.

It was mainly thanks to Anna Bravo and Anna Maria Bruzzone’s In guerra senza armi, a symbolic text of this period, that the concept of civil resistance engaged in a dialogue with the issue of female combatants (Bravo and Bruzzone Reference Bravo and Bruzzone1995). The book relies mainly on oral sources (125 video interviews with partisan women and witnesses to the war in Piedmont), but compared to the previous decades, it places them more fully within a mature interpretative framework. Bravo’s thesis (fine-tuned in subsequent writings) is that the war, rather than accelerating gender equality, reinforced existing inequalities and privileges. The spaces of freedom that the conflict had opened up for women because of the exceptional situation were quickly reabsorbed, and the new roles gained during the conflict rarely found lasting consolidation after the war.

In terms of historical studies, the 1990s and 2000s were marked by the development of particularly rich reflections and interpretations, some of which are still unsurpassed. Once again, the protagonists were women, and important regional studies explored and confirmed, ‘in the field’, new concepts and interpretations. Bravo thus began a series of reflections on the maternal, condensed into the concept of maternage di massa, ‘mass maternalism’. According to the historian, during the Resistance and even later, the narratives that centred on the symbols and actions typical of the mother–child relationship had allowed women to place their experiences in an acceptable and domesticable framework. But they had also created important expectations. The role of the mother who asks little or nothing for herself is almost unimaginable in the postwar demand for rights and compensation. Moreover, the self-representation of the Resistance in these narratives was ascetic and desexualised, and very little attention was paid to the bodies of the women and men who made up the partisan movement, to their feelings and to their emotions (Bravo Reference Bravo1991).

Another example worth mentioning is the project of a group of historians from the University of Bologna, which involved the collection of more than 120 video interviews with partisan women, which were preserved in the newly created Archivio della memoria delle donne, followed by conferences, meetings and publications (Gagliani et al. Reference Gagliani, Guerra, Mariani and Tarozzi2000). Dianella Gagliani fully placed the history of Italian women in the context of the total war, and together with Mariuccia Salvati she developed new reflections on the relationship between the public and private spheres, on the boundaries between the political and the apolitical. This work significantly refined the methodological toolkit of historians, enabling them to study in depth an extremely fluid, multifaceted and vital phenomenon such as the Resistance (Gagliani and Salvati Reference Gagliani and Salvati1992). It was again Gagliani who would later use women’s history for an innovative reading of the Resistance as a movement driven by a profound rejection of war, in opposition to the violence and militarism that had fuelled Fascism (Gagliani Reference Gagliani2006).

In the Veneto region, the ‘white’ alter ego of the ‘red’ Emilia in which the above-mentioned historians operated, Margaret Fraser collected more than 40 life stories of left-wing women. Fraser pointed out how, in a region with a Christian Democrat majority, there was a particularly strong fear of the ‘sexual corruption’ that gang life could have induced in women. This fear translated into a more pronounced system of ‘family resistance’ on the part of Venetian women, whose story was masterfully narrated in those years by two authoritative partisan voices, Tina Merlin and Tina Anselmi (Fraser Reference Fraser1994).

Finally, the ways in which the partisan women described their lives in subjective sources have been deconstructed and problematised in their narrative strategies and silences (Gabrielli Reference Gabrielli2007). Their experiences have been placed within the broader context of twentieth-century Italian women’s history and brought into dialogue with early twentieth-century feminism and neo-feminism. Anna Rossi-Doria’s studies have extended the analysis to the construction from below of women’s citizenship in the postwar period, and to the role of major women’s organisations – the Catholic CIF and the Communist Unione Donne Italiane – that arose from the Women’s Defence Groups (Rossi-Doria Reference Rossi-Doria1996).

In short, the need to recognise women’s full participation in the partisan movement was accompanied by a desire to study the specificities and different forms of women’s involvement in the Resistance, placing it in the broader context of the global conflict and the cultures of war (and peace) in the long term. Rather than adding a piece of history that had been guiltily silenced, women’s studies now managed to make a profound impact on general historiography. They dialogued with other research being conducted in those years, especially that on terrorist massacres and the ‘war on civilians’, shifting the focus from the fighters to other actors, while the contribution to the struggle was no longer counted exclusively in the deaths inflicted on the Nazi and Fascist enemy but also in the lives saved by its policy of extermination (Bravo Reference Bravo1999). In other words, the narrative canon that had been imposed in the postwar period, centred on the male warrior, was completely turned on its head.

If the category of civil resistance has revealed an undeniable heuristic value, over the years it has also proved to be a slippery concept. Stripped of its most problematic element – namely, the nerve of a violence that was inflicted and not just suffered – women’s resistance and civil resistance have been endlessly expanded, even to include ambiguous figures far removed from the decision to join the Resistance. In the public debate, they have often ended up overshadowing armed forms of resistance. There is a risk that the old polarity between man/war and woman/peace is thus reproposed or that the armed partisan women will become invisible again, but also that hierarchies are created between a good and ethical resistance that refuses weapons and a bad and unscrupulous one that shoots and kills. The historiography on the role of women in the Resistance, which has given much thought to the various reasons to take up arms and the consequences of doing so, can perhaps help to avoid oversimplifications. It is true that they rarely shoot, but the partisan women are fundamental nodes in the network of the distribution of weapons; they often act without weapons, but they rely heavily on physical and verbal violence, and the killing of the enemy or an attack is almost always made possible by the information they provide or by their cover. As the most recent contributions show, armed resistance is certainly not the only resistance, but it is the one that makes all other forms of resistance possible and reinforces them, and the decision to become a partisan is based on the decision to risk one’s life, but also on the inexpressible and devastating – even if not personal – decision to provoke death (Filippetta Reference Filippetta2018).

Finally, it should be noted that women have been given little space in the masterpiece of those years, Claudio Pavone’s Una guerra civile (1991). Although he is generally very attentive to the partisan press, Pavone chooses not to thematise the conscious battle for emancipation and the conquest of rights for women that emerge from the press and propaganda of the Women’s Defence Groups. In view of more recent studies on this subject (Alano Reference Alano2003; Orlandini Reference Orlandini2018), it is worth asking whether, in addition to the three wars (patriotic, civil, class) that – for Pavone – coexisted and intertwined in the Resistance, there might have been a fourth one: a gender war, with its own actors, expectations, demands, modalities and hopes.

The current status quo

Today, the history of Italian partisan women is fully integrated into the narrative canon of the Resistance, both in public discourse and in historiography. Historical overviews of the partisan movement that have appeared in Italy in recent years include, problematise and fruitfully dialogue with women’s history, thanks also to the end of compartmentalisation; even male historians now write about partisan women, women’s affairs or gender dynamics (Flores and Franzinelli Reference Flores and Franzinelli2019). New studies have reaffirmed the importance of women in areas that were crucial to the Resistance movement in military terms, such as the urban terrorism of the Gruppi di azione patriottica, small nuclei in which men and women acted in total equality, bound by strict rules of clandestinity (Peli Reference Peli2014). Think also of the Allied missions, in which two of the four partisan women who received the Gold Medal for Military Valour and who did not die in combat were awarded the highest honour that the Italian army granted to women (Cacciatore Reference Cacciatore2023).

Having established its existence and defined its specific features, the history of women’s participation in the Resistance has recently expanded, entering into a dialogue with the broader framework of women’s experiences in the Second World War (Ponzani Reference Ponzani2012). This has led scholars to pay attention to new geographies (especially the South), new types of violence (e.g. bombings and rape) and new periodisations (i.e. beyond 25 April 1945). This potentially enriching approach runs the risk of widening the field to include experiences that are too diverse, once again reducing women to an undifferentiated mass. In the proliferation of heterogeneous categories, there is a danger of reproducing a victimising vision in which all women – including murdered partisan women, rape victims and Nazi lovers punished after the war – are no more than war prey and spoils of war, without choice or agency. It is no coincidence that one of the most aggressive attempts to delegitimise the Resistance in Italy today concerns precisely a murdered Fascist woman, Norma Cossetto, in a narrative that focuses on the pain of women, all victims and strategic targets of war. While complex historical female characters such as Cossetto are reduced to victims, traditionally feminist themes (e.g. gender violence, rape and femicide) are used to legitimise the political agenda of populist parties and the extreme right (Tenca Montin Reference Tenca Montin and Sinalo2023).

Despite the widespread reception of Gabriella Gribaudi’s work on the theme of ‘total war’ and its gendered expressions (Gribaudi Reference Gribaudi2005), there is still a persistent difficulty in studying the theme of rape during the Second World War in depth, through research capable of going beyond formulaic denunciations and political instrumentalisation. This difficulty is partly due to the lack of sources for reconstructing a crime that was often hidden and not denounced, but it is also the result of a persistent insensitivity to sexual violence in Italy, a country that only in 1996 adopted a law that considers sexual violence a crime against the person rather than against public morality.

In this sense, the legal sources of the postwar trials for collaborationism – the focus of a current strand of research – may offer new avenues of interpretation. The tens of thousands of court cases that took place between 1945 and 1947 describe many sexual assaults perpetrated in Repubblica Sociale Italiana prisons and police stations. The recurrence of wartime sexual violence became the subject of debate especially when the amnesty for political offences was granted in June 1946, which provided for aggravating circumstances (later largely disregarded) for those found guilty of ‘particularly heinous acts of violence’. In reality, the link between political violence and gender violence in Fascist mentality and political practice had already been explored in postcolonial studies. However, this field of investigation has found limited reception and application in Italy, mainly because of the country’s resistance to acknowledging its colonial past and the violence it perpetrated in occupied areas. In addition, there is a certain reluctance in ‘Italian-style’ women’s history to use the notion of intersectionality to read the processes of genderalisation and racialisation inherited from colonialism (Papa Reference Papa and Bertilotti2020).

Nevertheless, in 2021, the Italian translation of Maaza Mengiste’s novel The Shadow King offered a unique visual angle – that of the Ethiopian female combatants (arbegnà) who opposed the Italian invaders – that was able to communicate in a new way with Italian readers, who read the arbegnà’s stories in continuity with those of the partisan women. The protagonist is Hirut, an Ethiopian woman-soldier who manages to steal a box of photographs from the Italian soldier Ettore Navarra, who had portrayed her naked in order to humiliate her. Her gesture represents a strong reversal of power relations and denounces the burden of violence behind the family photos kept in many Italian drawers (Mattoscio Reference Mattoscio2022). The still understudied history of Ethiopian partisan women helps to decolonise and de-Westernise the Resistance, to fully identify in colonialism one of the matrices of Fascist violence that has so far remained under the radar, and to reaffirm its hybrid and intersectional nature (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo Reference Lombardi-Diop and Romeo2012). As always, women’s history broadens the concept of resistance, redefining the boundaries between what happens on the front and behind the lines, between the fighters and the defenceless, between the public and the private. The arbegnà thus have the strategic task of blowing the trumpets of war and raising the shouts and chants that incite the fighters, increasing their power to kill. They are the ‘water carriers’ who allow the Ethiopian army to move thousands of kilometres and – like their Italian counterparts – they pretend to be sexually available to gain access to the Italian camps and steal weapons and maps. In fact, their stories reveal an extraordinary congruence with those gathered in Italy. The arbegnà also frequently resort to deception and camouflage, as when some women disguise a peasant as an emperor to make the troops more combative. In a rhetoric that makes their presence on the battlefield more acceptable, many claim to have taken their weapon from the hands of a dead man, responding to the emperor’s call for ‘anyone who had a rifle’ to go to war (Minale Reference Minale2001). Meanwhile, the Italian media’s portrayal of Taitù, one of the characters of the novel, as a warrior queen, a woman in arms, shatters traditional images and captures the popular imagination.

Postwar legal sources have proven useful not only for studies of the link between political and gendered violence under Fascism (Nubola Reference Nubola2016), but also for research on female collaborationism. Thanks to the discovery of female combatants in the ranks of the Black Brigades, it has been possible to establish analogies with the partisan women, which reaffirm the ‘transversal masculinism’ present in both camps. Fascist women, too, were often relegated to caring and nurturing roles, pushed to the margins of the narrative and seen as unnatural women or bearers of sexual disorder if they wore men’s clothing and carried weapons (De Luna and Fedele Reference De Luna, Fedele, Ota, Jaromir and Boris2022). But here, too, there is a danger that the category of gender ends up reducing individual choices to an undifferentiated mass of subjectivities in which personal reasons are justified and placed on the same level. Although it could be argued that, for the female collaborationists of Salò, taking up arms was also a choice to break with the family and social context, we must ask ourselves whether this choice really has an emancipatory value, in which horizon it fits, and what future that break predicts.

Another challenge faced by those studying the Resistance today is that of a return to the quantitative dimension after decades of focusing on the qualitative and the subjective. Since 2017, an ambitious project promoted by the General Directorate of Archives to digitise the documentation relating to the recognition of partisan qualifications has produced large amounts of useful data on Italian partisans (the first results can be consulted at https://partigianiditalia.cultura.gov.it). With these data in hand, the official estimate of 35,000 women fighters and 20,000 unarmed women with the ‘minor’ qualification of patriot will undoubtedly be subject to critical revision. However, they again risk hiding the role of women in the Resistance and reinforcing the legal framework and mentality that guided the granting of qualifications. With regard to men, we may assume that the numbers of those who obtained recognition without actually fighting and the number of those who fought without requesting or obtaining recognition cancel each other out, but the issue is much more complicated for women; many did not ask for recognition because they thought that they were not entitled to it (whether because of their subalternity, lack of awareness of the importance of civil resistance, or plain ignorance) or did not need it (for conscription or pension purposes, for example). Others requested it but did not get it, because of a penalising legislative framework and the limited and chauvinist mentality of the regional commissions in charge of judging their requests. The letter written in 1948 by Matilde Bassani – a partisan from the Jewish community in Ferrara, an intellectual and a close collaborator with the Psychological Warfare Branch – to the commission that refused to grant her the title is emblematic: ‘After what has been said, I am confident that I will be recognised as a partisan fighter as soon as possible and perhaps even receive an apology’ (Finzi Reference Finzi2004).