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Partisanas: Women in the Armed Resistance to Fascism and German Occupation (1936-1945) 305 pages, 6x9", paperback (14 oz) $21.95 $16.50

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.

 
The issues raised by the book—the ways women, in struggling together with others for broader freedoms, were effectively required to challenge traditional roles, and the ways those challenges were resisted, accepted and or incorporated—take on ever more resonance in the contemporary world. For, of course, women have been active in armed resistance, not only in Europe, but also in Algeria, Kuwait, Iraq, Palestine, Nicaragua, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico. The list goes on, but attention to the ways women's participation shapes broader movements and changes the lives of those women is still relatively uncommon. If this book highlights those questions again, and leads others to explore further the multiple dimensions of resistance and its multilayered impacts on participants, it will make a further, and continuing, contribution both to scholarship and to political struggle. Martha Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain
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