Buffalo Books: Fredonia native speaking at Larkin Square event Sept. 18

By P.A. Kane

Suzanne Cope is a scholar and narrative journalist, and is the author of Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis (Penguin, 2025) and Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Lawerence Hill Books, 2021). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Food & Wine, BBC, Washington Post, Aeon and others.  She is from Fredonia and is a professor at New York University.

Cope will be in conversation with Maria Scrivani at 5:30 p.m.  on Thursday, Sept. 18, at Larkin Square.

We talked with her about her excellent book Women of War, which profiles the previously untold stories of four female members of the Italian resistance in World War II Italy.  

PAK—What drew you to research and write this story?

SC— About nine years ago, I was watching protests against the treatment of immigrants and refugees and saw how food was being used as a tool for justice — refugee dinners, feeding protesters, raising awareness through shared meals. That inspired me to collect stories of people using food for political and social change. One of those stories was Ada Gobetti’s, who appears briefly in Women of War. That project almost sold, but publishers wanted American stories, so I turned my research into Power Hungry, which focused on figures like Ella Jo Baker, the Mississippi Movement, and the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program.

After finishing that book — mostly during the pandemic — I wanted to return to my Italian roots. When I began researching women in Italy during WW II, I realized Gobetti’s story was just one of many extraordinary ones that had barely been told in English. I dug deep into Italian sources, even re-learning the language to read them.

What struck me was that the heart of these stories wasn’t about food, but about how women used so-called “feminized” work — like cooking, caregiving, and organizing — as powerful tools of resistance in a world that underestimated them. As I wrote, I couldn’t ignore the parallels to today: propaganda, misinformation, authoritarianism. The echoes are chilling, and that urgency made me want to tell this story now.

PAK—Years ago, when I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came away from that book thinking the Italians — the descendants of the Roman Empire — were unremarkable warriors. Hitler and the Nazis had to bail them out in North Africa, and Greece, and Italy as well. Was it that they were unremarkable warriors or was it more that they were tired of 20 years of Mussolini’s fascist rule, which resulted in a lack of commitment to the Axis war effort?

SC— Definitely the latter. By most accounts, Italians were simply exhausted after 20 years of Mussolini’s fascist rule. In memoirs and diaries I read, people often wrote that they didn’t know anyone who truly supported the regime. Even self-proclaimed fascists would privately criticize Mussolini. He still held power because he ruled through intimidation — people feared losing their homes or jobs if they spoke out.

So while Italians gave lip service to the regime, there was little genuine commitment to Mussolini’s wars. Most didn’t care about his campaigns in Ethiopia, and they certainly weren’t enthusiastic about joining the Axis in World War II. In fact, many Italians disliked the Germans more than they did the French or British.

By the later years of the war, estimates suggest maybe 10% of Italians were ardent fascists, another 10% were active anti-fascists, and the vast majority fell somewhere in the middle — apathetic, cautious, or just trying to survive. That large, apolitical middle feels uncomfortably familiar when we look at politics today.

PAK—Throughout, the book provides a sense of exhilaration at the four profiled women’s defiance. In Chapter 24, during the Nazi occupation of Rome, Carla, aided by Rodolfo and Rosario, paints a Soviet hammer and sickle along the staircase of the church of the Trinità dei Monti. Both men are armed, and if caught, all three likely would have faced the death penalty. Why take such a risk, and where did they get such courage?

 
SC— I’m always struck by the moment when someone decides, I’m not just going to sit back — I’m going to risk everything for change. That’s true of the women I wrote about in Italy, but also of movements like the Black Panther Party. They believed deeply that revolution and transformation were possible.

For many Italian women, that courage came from an unexpected place: freedom. Under fascism, they had lived with almost no autonomy. Suddenly, by joining the resistance, they were moving through cities at night, using their intelligence and resourcefulness in new ways, and working toward something bigger than themselves. Over and over, women told me they had never felt so free as in those dangerous years.

So yes, the risks were immense — arrest, torture, even death. But for them, the fight itself was a taste of liberation. And the hope that their actions might secure lasting freedom after the war made the risk worth taking.

PAK—Like all authoritarian regimes, for 20 years Mussolini was in power, he controlled and limited information and political activity, especially for women. Organizations like the GDD — Groups for the Defense of Women, encouraged women’s involvement in politics. As you read Women of War, you come to understand there’s more to it than just the conflict with Nazi-Fascists. There’s also a war for women’s rights. What was the role of women in politics prior to Mussolini? And did the war spur a women’s movement in Italy afterwards?

SC— Before Mussolini, Italian women had begun to gain small footholds in public life — some limited voting rights, involvement in the arts, architecture, and even a bit of politics. After World War I, there was a sense of new possibility and cultural openness. Mussolini’s rise in the early 1920s was, in many ways, a backlash to that liberalization. He worked to roll back women’s freedoms and reinforced a deeply patriarchal system.

The GDD, though framed as supporting men, became Italy’s first real feminist organization. During and after the war, more women took on political roles. Ada Gobetti, for instance, became vice mayor of Turin, and other women entered government and professional life. Explicit and implicit quotas against women in certain industries began to dissolve.

Still, progress was limited. Italy remained patriarchal, and change didn’t happen overnight. Women gained more freedom and visibility, but parity with men in politics and leadership was never achieved. And, like in many countries, Italy has experienced swings — periods of liberalization followed by conservative backlash, as seen decades later under Berlusconi

PAK—The slogan petitioning the government for more food and to stop sending men and Italian machinery to Germany: Peace, Bread, Liberty! And Not a Man, Nor a Machine in Germany! was adopted for the work stoppages in factories at the beginning of March 1944 across the northern industrial part of Italy. The consequences were severe for these stoppages, with arrests, torture and deportations. Were they considered successful?

SC— Yes, the consequences were brutal — arrests, torture, deportations, even concentration camps. But in many ways, the strikes were still a success. Roughly 10% of the population in occupied Italy participated — an enormous number considering how underground the resistance had been until then.

For the occupiers, this was a wake-up call: the movement was far larger and more unified than they had realized. For ordinary Italians, it was the first time many felt part of something collective and powerful. While some factories and sectors won limited concessions, the real victory was in momentum — more people joined the resistance, more saw themselves as allies and the movement grew stronger just as German forces were retreating north.

So yes, the cost was horrific, but the strikes shifted the balance: they proved the resistance had both numbers and resolve, which made all the difference in the final stretch of the war.

PAK—All four women profiled in Women of War, along with countless others in the resistance movement, were incredibly brave. Carla Capozzi, however, seemed to go further than the other women, taking part in deadly bombings and other acts of violence. Unable to fall asleep after shooting a Nazi soldier in a barn earlier in the day, she reflected on who she would be after the war — if she made it out alive. What were some of the psychological effects and fallout for Carla and the others resulting from their actions?

SC— The women didn’t often speak directly about their postwar state of mind, but the fallout was clear in their lives. Anita Malavasi, for example, never married and seemed marked by heartbreak over the loss of someone she loved during the war. Carla and Bianca both married fellow partisans — something fairly common, since many women felt only another partisan could truly understand them — but both marriages ended in divorce. My sense is that these relationships were born out of shared trauma, and those wounds made it hard to build lasting partnerships.

Carla herself died young of cancer, though it’s impossible to say what role the war or its aftermath played. What is certain is that many of these women carried the weight of criticism after the war. Female partisans were often smeared as “loose” because they had lived alongside men in the resistance. Others, like those involved in the Via Rasella attack in Rome, were blamed for the Nazi reprisals that followed — accusations I see as victim-blaming, but ones that clearly lingered.

So while they were celebrated for their bravery, these women also endured stigma, heartbreak and lasting psychological burdens that never fully left them.

PAK—As a writer primarily of fiction, I am always amazed at the research that goes into a book like Woman of War. Fifty plus pages of notes, bibliography and indexing — it’s almost a book in itself. In a general way, can you quantify the number of secondary books and articles you read and take us through the process of sourcing a book like this?

SC— I never counted exactly, but I’d estimate I consulted close to a hundred books while researching Women of War. Some of those were broad World War II histories I dipped into for background, though I only cited them if I drew directly from them. Others were far more specific, often in Italian, and many of those I found in regional archives during three research trips to Italy — the longest a five-week fellowship at NYU’s Florence campus.

Because much of this history hasn’t been written about in English, I relied heavily on Italian sources. I often couldn’t bring the books home, so I spent hours copying chapters and hauling stacks of paper back in my luggage to reference later. Alongside the published works, I had invaluable conversations with archivists — many of them passionate experts in their region’s resistance history — who pointed me to local sources and helped clarify details, like how partisan camps actually functioned.

The process was reflexive. I immersed myself in the personal stories of these women and then constantly zoomed out to situate their experiences within the larger context of the war. My goal was to balance the granular, human perspective with just enough military and political history to show how these women’s lives fit into the wider struggle.

PAK—In the book you partially describe the goals of the fascist Italian regime: Fascism, understood in part as an ideology in which the state dictates nearly every facet of life, had accomplished its goal: to bring up a generation of young adults — and in particular women — who didn’t understand their own political agency or any alternatives to their political reality. Do you see this as a feature of the current administration in Washington and in other authoritarian/fascist regimes like Turkey and Hungary?

SC—I can’t speak authoritatively about Turkey or Hungary, but in terms of the U.S., I see some parallels and some key differences. One big distinction is America’s embrace of capitalism. Mussolini did allow his cronies in business and landholding to profit, but he also arbitrarily decided which industries the state would control. It wasn’t really a coherent philosophy — he made it up as he went along, and that became the playbook for totalitarianism. In the U.S., we see echoes of that: leaders picking and choosing what to nationalize or politicize, while letting allies control the rest.

Another similarity is the effort to control the press. I’ve written about how underground newspapers in Italy paralleled resistance movements, and while the U.S. doesn’t have a fully compromised press, it’s also not fully independent. There are definitely forces shaping coverage that limit its freedom.

At the same time, there are major differences. Americans have a deeply ingrained resistance to being told what to do — part of our national identity, for better or worse. That individualism means some people will blindly follow a political line, but others, across the spectrum, resist government overreach. Mussolini’s regime had much greater success intimidating and controlling its population, and our laws, institutions and scale make that harder here.

So yes, there are shades of authoritarianism in the U.S., but they exist alongside checks and cultural tendencies that make a direct parallel to Mussolini’s Italy imperfect.

PAK—When British General Harold Alexander announced an Allied pause in engagement due to the expectation of a bad winter in November 1944, the strategy was criticized. The New York Times said the announcement was not met with enthusiasm by the resistance. Was there more to the Allied pullback than just the weather, and what were some of the consequences for the resistance and the partisans as a result of this decision? 

SC—The Allied pause in late 1944 left the partisans in an extremely vulnerable position. The German-occupied area had shrunk to the north, so the enemy was concentrated, angry and looking to retaliate. Without warning, the Allies pulled back — largely to conserve resources and avoid another disastrous winter campaign — without much concern for what that meant for local fighters.

The consequences for the resistance were severe. Many partisans couldn’t simply “go home” without facing certain death, and the Germans launched brutal reprisals. One example, the Battle of Monte Cayo, is almost invisible in English-language accounts because it wasn’t seen as a conventional military battle — it was partisans versus Nazis — but for those fighters, it was devastating.

Part of the complexity was the Allies’ uneasy relationship with the partisans. At first, they distrusted them, not only because Italians had so recently been enemies but also because many of the resistance groups were socialist or communist. The U.S. in particular had a long-standing suspicion of communism, even while fighting alongside Stalin. Still, the Allies recognized the value of the partisans’ local knowledge and intelligence, and partnerships did develop through airdrops and coordination. But when it came to strategic decisions, the Allies prioritized their own needs over those of the resistance.

It’s also important to remember that, at the time, many Italians — including the partisans — saw communism not as the oppressive system we later came to understand, but as an appealing alternative to deprivation: housing, food, jobs, dignity. That idealism was powerful fuel for the resistance, even if the later realities of the Soviet Union painted a different picture.

So, the pause wasn’t only about weather — it reflected Allied calculation and ambivalence toward the partisans. The result was catastrophic losses for a movement that had been critical to the fight against Fascism.

PAK—Among the 300,000 resistance/partisan fighters nearly 35,000 were women. A testament to their contributions can be seen when Anita Malavasi is stopped by Fascists officers in Emilia–Romagna in April of 1945 and is shown a picture of herself from prior to joining the resistance nine-months earlier. So malnourished, with bleeding gums and a head full of lice, she is unrecognizable to the officers. Was she, and other women of the resistance, given credit for their sacrifices and their contribution to the defeat of the Nazi-Fascist regime?  

SC— At the time, many women partisans were not fully recognized for their sacrifices. As I mention in the epilogue, some were even excluded from victory parades. At first, I was angry on their behalf — but then I learned that in some cases, this exclusion was framed as “protection.” Inside the camps, many women described being treated as equals by their male comrades. But once they came down from the mountains, public gossip painted them as “loose women” simply because they had lived and fought alongside men. Some men may have thought they were shielding the women from that stigma by keeping them out of public celebrations—though of course, this was deeply unfair.

Recognition of their contributions came in waves. Immediately after the war, there was interest in resistance stories more broadly, with some women, like Carla Capponi and Teresa Mattei, publishing accounts or remaining in the public eye. Later, as these women aged, scholars and archivists realized their testimonies needed to be preserved before it was too late, which led to renewed efforts in the 1990s and 2000s. Still, information about women was often buried unless an archivist or researcher was particularly committed to highlighting it.

In recent years, however, we’ve seen more momentum. For instance, when I first visited the Resistance Archive in Florence, archivists proudly told me that the Tuscan regional government had just produced its first document dedicated solely to honoring female partisans. And more recently, books like Benedetta Tobagi’s popular work on women in the resistance have helped bring these stories to a wider audience.

So while recognition was inconsistent and often delayed, there has been a growing acknowledgment—sometimes decades later—of just how central women were to the resistance.

PAK—After the war, what kind of lives did Carla, Teresa, Bianca, and Anita go on to lead?

SC— After the war, all four women remained committed to justice and public service. Bianca became a well-known lawyer, advocating for women, children and other marginalized groups — work clearly shaped by her wartime convictions. Carla and Teresa both entered politics; in fact, Teresa was the youngest member of the assembly that wrote Italy’s new constitution, and one of very few women to hold that role.

Anita’s work was more regional but no less important. In Reggio, she became a community organizer focused on working women, children and social programs. While she wasn’t as nationally prominent, her strong personality kept her in the public eye through interviews and documentaries.

Together, they carried the ideals that had driven them during the resistance into the rest of their lives, channeling that same determination into building a more just society.

PAK—What are you currently working on, and when will we see it?

SC—Recently I finished a middle-grade novel based on the life of Anita. It’s my first time writing fiction, and I adapted her story for younger readers — it was a fun challenge. I’m now exploring publication for that book.

For my next adult project, I’m developing a book on the 1930s Popular Front in the U.S., focusing on women leaders who fought fascism and organized across immigrant, Black, working-class and other marginalized communities. It was a moment when so many groups nearly unified, even as FDR’s New Deal reshaped government. Many of today’s debates — about the size of government, the role of women, the meaning of “American” and the power of art — have roots in that era. The project is still in proposal form, but it’s coming together.