Female partisans played a vital role in fighting fascism in Italy — but it was a thankless task

‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943:

An insignificant little woman, who has revolutionised her private life — a traditionally female one, with the needle and the broom as her emblems — to transform herself into a bandit… I am not alone.

Ada, one of four female partisans whose interconnected stories weave through this history, knew what few Germans or Italian fascists yet suspected. All across Nazi-
occupied northern and central Italy, thousands of women had started to resist. Factory workers subtly sabotaged the products of their enforced labour; village women spirited away men into the hills, often feeding and sheltering them as they organised into guerrilla units. Others, many still teenagers ‘with pigtails and white socks’, served as staffette — acting as lookouts, liaising between the fledgling partisan groups, transporting messages and weapons, preparing and distributing clandestine literature, and identifying and sometimes collecting the bodies of executed men.

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A significant number would also train in the use of firearms before specialising in rescues, hostage-taking or sabotage attacks, fighting as equals alongside their male comrades-in-arms. Yet this is a history little remembered and even less understood today.

A House in the Mountains opens in the sultry summer of 1943. After 20 years of dictatorship, and three of war, Mussolini is about to be deposed by his own Grand Council, sitting in Rome. A key part of his credo had been that men and women were inherently different. Ironically, perhaps, after his initial downfall, women of both ideological persuasions would feel inspired to defend family and country. While Moorehead recognises the role of the Fasci Femminili (the FF), her focus here is on the resourceful female partisans. As Italy lurched from the energy of revolution to the chaos and horror of civil war, these impressive women gained a taste for previously unknown freedom, activity, camaraderie and respect.