Much of the armed resistance to fascism, before and during World War II, can be chalked up to women and official accounts have little or nothing to say about them. Through years of intrepid research and numerous interviews with the participants themselves, this book excavates the history of the women who shouldered guns, planned assassinations, planted bombs, and were among the era's most active antifascist fighters. Weaving moving personal narratives into the broader history of the European resistance, Partisanas is both a detailed historical account and an investigation into what compelled women to reject their traditional roles to take up arms in a fight for a better world.