INTERVIEW: Suzanne Cope, Author of Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis

Interviewed by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Suzanne Cope’s book, Women at War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis (Dutton; April 2025), gives readers a dramatic account of women in resistance during the Nazi occupation of Italy during World War II. While the title suggests that their efforts were active and and often violent — and certainly much of it was — Suzanne also explores how women gained political educations, created and sustained networks, and produced underground newspapers that kept partisans connected and informed — all while defying gender stereotypes.

The book focuses on four women in particular, who represent many of the ways in which women across Italy participated in resistance: Carla Capponi made bombs in underground bunker and other secret locations across Rome, then carried them to their destinations wearing lipstick and a trenchcoat; Bianca Guidetti Serra rode her bicycle up switchbacks in the Alps, dodging bullets while delivering bags of clandestine newspapers, munitions, and other supplies to the anti-Fascist armies hidden in the mountains; Teresa Mattei, the future author of Italy’s new constitution, carried secret messages, hid bombs in Florence, and survived Nazi torture; and Anita Malavasi rejected a traditional married life to lead hundreds of partisan troops across difficult terrain in the Apennine Mountains.

Drawing from the memoirs of these women and other first-hand accounts of the people who worked alongside them, Suzanne ensures that women’s efforts to liberate Italy are not forgotten or underestimated.

Suzanne Cope’s narrative nonfiction has been published widely, and she is an Associate professor at New York University. I spoke with her from her home in Brooklyn.

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Hillary Moses Mohaupt: First, congratulations on this book. You write in the epilogue about how what counts as resistance is evolving, both when we think about World War II and those occupations, and even now, as we talk about resistance today. I’m excited to talk with you, partly because this is such a timely and important book about the significant contributions of women fighting to protect and defend their communities in Italy.

You focus in this book on four women, and especially towards the end, on two of these women who come to the forefront, which allows the reader to understand their fight at an individual level. How did this book come together, and how did you decide to focus on these women in particular?

Suzanne Cope: About eight years ago, which is not a random time, I was doing a lot of work on food studies. Food and culture was my focus at the time, and I was looking around at the people I knew in the food world, and I remember thinking, “Okay, people are sending pizza to protestors. People were protesting something at JFK airport, and now I’m thinking it probably had something to do with refugees, and other refugees who were here were raising money and awareness by cooking their home foods for people.” And I thought, “This is what resistance looks like in the food world.”

But I had this feeling that there had to be something else that we could learn from history. At the time I had a book proposal with all these stories about food as a tool for social change. I ended up pivoting to write Power Hungry, which was written during the pandemic. For my next book, I knew we were ready to travel again, and I’m Italian American, and so I shifted my focus to the Italian story in that food proposal that didn’t go anywhere. And I realized through the work of Power Hungry that it wasn’t so much about food. Food was really a manifestation of women’s work and feminized labor. Food was powerful in a lot of ways, like what you’re talking about in the epilogue. I realized when you’re looking at war, there’s not a lot of food in war, and that story would be limiting. And these other stories are amazing! So I was researching all the stories, all the women who could be potential protagonists. And I couldn’t believe I’d not heard of them.

Working with my agent I narrowed it down to these four women because they represented four different places and also four different ways that they were fighting and working in the resistance. And also, as a writer, you need to have source material, so four people who either wrote a memoir, or they had a lot of interviews or testimonies available. These things all came together to be able to support the writing of a book. I do think they represent these different aspects of the story, to be able for me to tell the story of women in the resistance more broadly.

HMM: And you are not trained as a historian, correct?

SC: I kind of get a kick when people refer to me as a historian, but you know what, I think I’ve earned it by now.

HMM: It’s partly just the practice of doing history!

SC: My PhD is in an interdisciplinary social science called Adult Learning, and it really taught me social science research methods: what historians use, what journalists use. I’m kind of a self-taught journalist and a self-taught historian, steeped in social science research.

HMM: So let’s talk a little bit about research. Having a wide breadth of research training  gives you the leeway to do the research that needs to be done with an approach that works for the story, the narrative, and the story of these women.

SC: I was looking for first-person experiences, either written or spoken – I had some interviews – and that was what I wanted to foreground, because part of my premise was that there’s so much written about World War II, and almost none of it by or about women. And what little of it is about women is done through a scholarly lens. I really wanted their words and their representations of their experiences to be forefronted. As I said in the introduction of this book, I don’t purport that this is a history of war, and I’m consciously centering the stories of these women. There were times when the fact checker came back and said, “I can’t prove this” or “how do you know?” and my response was, “Because they said so.” If there was something you could prove happened on another date then I would go with the historical record, but that almost never happened. For some of these women I was also looking at memoirs that were written by different people who were with them at different points, so there were times when I could compare if they were both in the same place. But for the most part, other than some dates that I could verify, if it was about how she was feeling or her interpretations of the day, I always went with her story, over the story of the person she was with. I would layer their stories, but I would never supercede her story with someone else’s. I wanted them to lead the narrative.

HMM: You had all these memoirs, other historical documentation, and these testimonies. Where are those testimonies?

SC: Carla wrote a memoir, which was great and very detailed, which is why her story is so vivid. Anita was interviewed – I had hours of her verbal testimonies. I found her testimonies in three different places. One was at an archive in Reggio. Another was at the University of Bologna, and then third was in a diary archive in the middle of nowhere Italy, this tiny town that I forced my family to come with me to and they played in the piazza while I did this research. It was interesting, having heard her basically tell the same story three different times, but each time, she added this detail but not that one, so I was able to layer it so it felt a little more robust. And that was the only time I ever really made up dialogue – she would be telling it indirectly, “And then I told him this,” and I just told it directly. I tried not to include any detail that wasn’t found in any testimony, with that rare exception, and I think I have it in italics the very few times that I created dialogue out of inferred dialogue.

HMM: You’re basically constellating these true stories and you’re making them more true, with more layers.

SC: And that’s what was so fun about this project versus Power Hungry. In this case I had a lot more information and I was able to make it a lot more narrative. This is the kind of book that I like reading personally and I think it is a little more narrative than my last book, more dramatic.

HMM: It’s really dramatic.

SC: It’s ruining me for my next book. I keep thinking, “No one’s shooting Nazis!” My writing group says, “You’re not always going to get to write a book about shooting Nazis.”

HMM: You talked a little bit about the different places that these women were, and how that really shaped the activities they took part in. I had to pull up a map of Italy, because I’m not that familiar with Italy’s geography, and it was neat to familiarize myself with the geography, which was so important to the story, the war itself. Can you talk about the different roles these women had, and the ways that where they were influenced what kinds of resistance activities they took part in?

SC: There was so much that I thought I knew – I’ve been to Italy multiple times and have been researching this for a number of years, and there was so much I didn’t know about the history, which I think is in part because Americans really like American history and there’s not a lot of Americans in this story. And so people are kind of embarrassed to admit they didn’t know these things. I didn’t know them either; I didn’t realize to what extent Italy was under occupation until I was working on this book.

I’ve been to Italy and taken trains between cities, and I didn’t realize to what extent mountains were so much a part of their landscape. You’re in a train, and you go through a tunnel, and you just don’t think about it: you’re in a mountain. So certainly this dramatized all of that for me. I went a year ago March and I drove to some of the same places that Bianca had gone in the Alps and it was so profound to be moving toward them and to see them get bigger and bigger and bigger, and realize how huge they are and to drive my car places where she rode her bicycle. It was so powerful, how challenging that was, and she did it all the time. Not even adding the fear factor – who’s going to stop you, or the possibility of being caught in a firefight. So that was amazing to realize how challenging her work was.

Anita was in Reggio Emilia, which is a small city, but I went and followed the paths that she took when she was in the mountains. They found the old paths and cleared them out and people can take days-long hikes on the same paths.

Those two moments were the most amazing of my research, where I really felt I was stepping in their footsteps. You’re in the mountains, and they’re sleeping there and it’s winter and you can’t even light a fire. That was so powerful.

And then when I was in Rome, I pictured Carla hiding in the shadows. Rome is one of those places where history is layered on top of itself. At the site of the Via Rosella attack there are still the pock marks. There was a conscious decision to not fill those in, to have them be a subtle reminder of the guerilla warfare in Rome.

HMM: My sense is that people tend to romanticize the resistance, in the past and certainly when we talk about “resistance” in the future, like in Star Wars. But one of the things that I appreciated about your book is that there is nothing romantic about their experience of the resistance. These details of climbing through these paths, and sleeping in the cold, and not changing your clothes for two weeks. Not eating. At one point Anita lost so much weight that she got to a checkpoint, and the guard had a picture and said, “Have you seen this woman?” And Anita thought to herself, “It’s a picture of myself from a year ago! And you don’t even recognize me!”

SC: I love Anita so much, I just think she has so much personality. I could see her – she would look so different from her sweet little round face.

I don’t know if you remember the scene where Carla meets someone who wants to be part of the Resistance and saying pretty much everything you just said – you’re sleeping on the cold ground, you’re dead to your mother. That was the very last scene that I wrote in the book because I found it after I’d handed in the manuscript. I just thought it said so much, so I begged them to let me include it somewhere. I thought it was really profound, and also showed how much Carla had changed from the beginning, because she had been kind of a fashion plate. And then she just totally went all in on the resistance.

HMM: There’s some point where Carla kills a Nazi at gunpoint, and you show her having this internal moment of reflection where she wonders “who has the war turned her into, and who would she be afterward should she make it out alive?” I could see that internal reflection in all four of the women. Can you talk more about that, the motivation to take part in resistance to begin with and how that motivation changed over time?

SC: For these four women, and I think this was very typical for almost everyone across Italy, particularly women, they really had very little political education, political knowledge. Teresa was the outlier because her parents were so explicitly anti-Fascist. For the most part, for the other three women, their parents didn’t teach them that in any way because it was so dangerous. All of them, except for Teresa who was already there, had to come to this political education and resistance in their own way. Anita was probably the least sophisticated of them, growing up first in the country and then in a much smaller city, but she still had this very clear sense of right and wrong, and it wasn’t until the this women’s group was created, that she realized that there was this larger philosophy and theory that she was apart of.

I think that’s so important, even today: political education is a part of every resistance movement. Understanding why you’re doing something, understanding the philosophy that you don’t have to invent yourself – you can be a part of something that’s larger. And that was what was so powerful about what was happening in Italy – everyone of this age, in their early twenties, they only knew life under Fascism, and Fascism did what it intended to do, which was only teach an entire generation what it wanted them to know. So they didn’t have a real sense of revolution or history or women’s agency. Mussolini didn’t want them to understand. The tradwife trend now very much has its roots in Fascism. Women are only meant to be babymakers and they should not be politically engaged. And if they do anything outside the norm they’re deviant.

And what’s interesting is that these women were so underestimated because of this misogyny, that that is actually what allowed them to be so active in the war. I don’t want to say it was a good thing, but it was a way that they found their agency. They had to want to learn more on their own, and that’s what made them particularly compelling characters to follow, because certainly there were others who did similar things but who weren’t as politically conscious. I think it was that political consciousness that made them so brave, and that made them into people who were politically conscious for the rest of their lives.

HM: Teresa and Carla were both elected officials later on, and Teresa helped write the new constitution, right?

SC: Yes!

HMM: Talk about putting your resistance values to work.

SC: And she wouldn’t have even been thirty at the time when she was doing that.

HMM: I was struck by the irony – I don’t know if it’s irony – but the way that men kept underestimating these women allowed them to do the work they had been doing and to do the work that men could not do because they would have been caught or murdered.

SC: Finding power in the very ways that you’re oppressed.

HMM: Exactly. In thinking about the lives that these women lived after the war, what do you think their legacy was? What can we learn from them and their work?

SC: We would call them feminists today. I don’t know if all four would have used that exact term, but they all really fought for women’s rights. I believe this was a direct result of their agency during the war and the political education they received, which taught them that women can organize, women can have a political voice, women should have all of these rights. I believe that that is a direct result of the war. The war amplified and sped things up. The war really taught a whole generation of organizers and this political agency was so profound in such a relatively short amount of time. They went from feeling almost no political agency to less than two years later imagining this future where they can be leaders in this realm. I think we can all learn from that: this is the power of organizing, this is the power of finding your own agency. When they understood what they were capable of, the difference between women’s lives, and everyone’s lives, under Mussolini, and life a couple years later, was really vast.

What they were doing in Italy was different than in other places, because they were fighting on two fronts – one historian says three fronts. They were fighting a class war, and Facism vs. democracy, and of course World War II. And what they were doing was imagining what they wanted their future to be. They were doing it through the press but they were also doing it through these political learning circles. What’s so amazing is that in these moments of crisis people are not fighting to go back to the status quo, we can fight for something better and different. They used that agency, that new connection with a group of people who wanted something better, to really imagine a different future.

HMM: We’re not talking about going back to the past, we’re talking about building a better future.

SC: Yes!

HMM: When you get to a point that you have something that can be read by someone else, who’s your first reader?

SC: Two great folks – Maria Luisa Tucker who has pivoted to working on really great podcasts lately, which is so great because it adds another layer of understanding narrative. In podcasts you have to describe in words what you’re seeing, and I think that really helps me do the same thing on paper. And Sarah DiGregorio, who would call herself a medical journalist. Both women tell these lesser-known stories of unsung heroes, and we share a political understanding, and a shared desire to amplify stories of people whose stories are not often told in the dominant narrative. They’re my first readers. And my husband. If I have a particularly sticky shorter piece, then I will ask him to read something and will ask, “What do you want to know?” He’s a musician so he does think about storytelling as well, and this is the kind of stuff he likes to read.

HMM: Is there anything else you want to share that I haven’t asked you about?

SC: I was thinking about what resonates with today. There was a period not too long ago, in the last two months, where I was feeling the same dread that so many people have been echoing. What do we do, I don’t know what to do. I had to remind myself, “Cope, you wrote two books about this! You know what to do.” What did these people do in situations even more dire, even more horrific? I reminded myself to look back at what these women did, what the women in Power Hungry did. They didn’t walk into a movement fully formed, they formed the movement step by step.

My instinct was to keep connecting to the past, but I needed to connect with my community. And I’m blessed to have so many communities: my community garden, my neighbor, my colleagues. And I just connected with some people and said, “Hey, does anyone want to hop on a Zoom call and share your information?” We’re sharing information and feeling less alone and we’ve joined other things.

I’ve learned so much from these women, and I’ve learned that I can connect with my community, I can learn. And I was reminded that you don’t have to do everything and respond to everything. What is it that you’re good at? Who do you know? You can just stick with your one thing. I kept wanting to look at the big picture – Fascism – but, no, look at the little picture, look at the personal connections. I hope that people see how they can connect and grow something one by one.

HMM: And I think that connects back with what you were saying in the epilogue, too, about what we consider to be the resistance. Yes, shooting Nazis, but also working on a community garden, or feeding someone who is on the front lines. It’s all interconnected, and doing the one thing where you are is really powerful.

SC: There’s a statistic that says you need multiple people supporting those on the front line. Therefore, those multiple people are just as important as those on the front line. No one should feel that they’re not doing enough, if they’re supporting others who can be on the front line for whatever reason, and I think people should use their relative privilege, if that’s something they can do, to be on the front line. Anything that’s pushing the movement forward, supporting the movement, is worth it. That’s what these women have taught us.