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WORK TITLE: Women of War
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WEBSITE: http://suzannecope.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
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LAST VOLUME: CA 376
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PERSONAL
Born in 1978; married Steve Mayone (musician); children: two.
EDUCATION:State University of New York at Geneseo, B.A., 1998; Lesley University, M.F.A., 2007, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA, and New York, NY, associate marketing manager in the Trade Division, 1998-2005, 2012; freelance writer 2005-12; Boston Architectural College, Boston, adjunct professor and individual writing tutor, 2006-07; Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, adjunct writing professor, 2008-08; Emmanuel College, Boston, adjunct writing and literature professor, 2007-08; Marian Court College, Swampscott, MA, assistant professor, 2008-10; Berklee College of Music, Boston, assistant professor, 2009-13, online assistant professor and course developer, 2012—; Grub Street, Boston, instructor, 2011-13; Manhattan College, Riverdale, NY, visiting assistant professor, 2013—; New York University, associate professor, 2018—.
MEMBER:International Food, Wine & Travel Writers Association.
AWARDS:Cleo Prize for short nonfiction, Green River Writer’s Contest, 2006, for “Medal Winning.”
WRITINGS
Coauthor of lyrics for the song “Hour of the Pearl,” for the film Still Green, Uncovered Production, 2006. Author of the blog Locavore in the City. Contributor to numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic.
SIDELIGHTS
Suzanne Cope began her career in the publishing industry before returning to graduate school and embarking on a career as an educator. Her areas of expertise include nonfiction narrative writing and academic research. A contributor to books, professional journals, and popular periodicals, Cope is also the author of two middle-grade books titled Great Soccer: Team Defense and Great Soccer: Team Offense. In her book Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the Return of Artisanal Foods, Cope examines the resurgence of interest in artisanal food. Although no single definition exists for artisanal food, the term commonly refers to food not produced with industrial methods and handed down through the generations.
Cope remarks in Small Batch that her interest in writing the book grew out of her love of food, “true storytelling,” and her own interest in gardening, cheese making, and home preserving. Cope also writes in Small Batch: “I approached this project with the eye of an academic. My goal was to tell the stories of the artisans who graciously gave their time, and often samples of products, without bias.”
Cope interviewed artisans throughout the United States in an effort to provide a common definition of artisanal food. Cope also provides a look at the small-batch food revolution. In the process, she discusses the histories of the small-batch food industries. As noted by Wandering Educators Web site contributor Jessie Voigts, the book “looks at a number of issues surrounding small batch food production, such as the idea of terroir [environmental conditions such as soil and climate], the power of narrative in the valuation of a product, and how many of these new foods have looked to the past to define themselves, even as these products are created for a decidedly modern consumer.”
Cope begins her book with a history of artisanal foods in the United States and a definition of this type of food production. Cope writes in Small Batch: “Artisinal … describes, in its broadest sense, a product that is made by an artisan, and most properly, something that is handmade, unique, and of high quality—the very opposite of what we mean by mass- produced.” Her history of artisanal foods begins with a look at food from the time of European settlers arriving in America to around the mid-1900s. She points out that the invention of the Mason jar in 1858 led to better results in terms of consistency for home picklers, who could also now preserve smaller portions of foods. Cope then moves on to the artisanal foods in America following World War II. She also examines culture and artisanal foods, including the contributions of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture movement to artisanal foods.
Subsequent chapters focus on specific artisanal products, such as pickles, cheeses, chocolate, and spirits. Cope points out that modern food artisans are generally well educated, young, and live in urban environments. Cope notes that the impetus for their interest in artisan foods comes from a variety of factors and is often related to a family history in artisanal foods. Others, writes Cope, have a personal passion for doing things better for their health or for the environment. Some people have even turned to homemade food production as a career or a way to earn some extra money. “I was surprised at the business acumen of so many of these producers,” Cope told Wandering Educators Web site contributor Voigts. The book includes recipes and information on how to find artisan foods, from local farmers’ markets to local grocery store chains. Small Batch also includes notes and a bibliography. “Cope offers much that is pertinent and thought provoking,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
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Cope’s next book, Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and their Fight to Feed a Movement, told the history of the women of the civil rights movement, particularly those in the Black Panther Party who started serving breakfast in Oakland and other cities in the late 1960s. After that, Cope shifted to Europe during the 1940s, but she kept the focus on women. Although she did not formally train as an historian (Cope’s Ph.D. is in Adult Learning), she has a strong background in social science research, and she has brought her journalist instincts and research skills to bear. As she said in an interview with Hippocampus magazine, “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.”
Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis is about the Italian women who risked their lives to help liberate Italy from the Nazis during World War II. As Cope said in the same interview, “Part of my premise was that there’s so much written about World War II, and almost none of it by or about women. . . . I really wanted their words and their representations of their experiences to be forefronted.” The book focuses on four women: Carla, who made and transported bombs; Bianca, who delivered munitions to partisans hidden in the mountains; Florence, who carried secret messages; and Teresa, who led troops across the mountains. Cope places these women’s stories in the larger context of both the war and the fight for gender equality.
“An inspiring, illuminating group biography” is how a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews described the book. They appreciated how Cope “portrays the defiance of the Italian Resistance through the lives of four intrepid women.” A contributor in Publishers Weekly wrote, “Readers will relish this exhilarating look at how antifascist resistance operated and evolved during WWII.” They called the book a “thrilling saga.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Cope, Suzanne, Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the Return of Artisanal Foods, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MA), 2014.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 1, 2021, Lesley Williams, review of Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and their Fight to Feed a Movement, p. 7.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2025, review of Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis.
People, April 28, 2025, Suzanne Cope, “My Grandmother, the Anti-Fascist,” author blog.
Publishers Weekly, October 6, 2014, review of Small Batch, p. 56; February 10, 2025, review of Women of War, p. 42.
ONLINE
Canvas Rebel, https://canvasrebel.com/ (April 11, 2024), author interview.
Hippocampus, https://hippocampusmagazine.com/ (May 7, 2025), Hillary Moses Mohaupt, author interview
Manhattan College website, https://manhattan.edu/ (May 9, 2015), faculty profile.
Suzanne Cope website, http://suzannecope.com (October 6, 2025).
Wandering Educators, http://www.wanderingeducators.com/ (October 16, 2014), Jessie Voigts, author interview.*
Suzanne Cope, PhD is a narrative journalist and scholar, author of WOMEN OF WAR: The Italian Assassins, Spies and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis (Dutton, 2025) and POWER HUNGRY: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (2021). She has published with The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, among others. She is a professor at New York University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the musician Steve Mayone, and her two children.
My Grandmother, the Anti-Fascist: 'Jails Were Filled With Women Who Had Dared Rebel' (Exclusive)
In researching her new book, 'Women of War,' author Suzanne Cope found a whole new side of her grandmother — and her own history
By Suzanne Cope Published on April 28, 2025 08:30AM EDT
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Suzanne Cope, Women of War
Suzanne Cope and her new book, 'Women of War'.
Credit : Kurt Arnold; Dutton
Sitting in a quiet library researching for my book, Women of War, headphones on, I pressed play on the first of the digital archival collection of oral histories from Italian anti-fascist partisans, as they were called, fighting the Nazis during the German occupation of World War II. The image attached to the recording showed an elderly woman named Lidia, who started by talking about her childhood under the oppressive Fascist regime.
“I’m going … give me the gun,” Lidia said a few minutes into her testimony. I held my breath as she explained that her partisan band had just received intel that the Nazis were going to “mop up,” as Lidia described, an area of fellow partisans and residents with heavy artillery. Someone had to warn them. She grabbed the gun and hopped on her bicycle.
Women of War
'Women of War' by Suzanne Cope.
Dutton
“I met this German patrol. What could I do? They ordered me to stop. I pulled my gun and started to shoot. I shot while I was riding the bicycle; I shot as long as I could carry on until I reached the right place and informed all the others. After that we spread the news quite quickly. I managed to get through all these bullets … I made it. The battle went well, and they survived.”
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I was drawn to this subject in no small part because of my Italian American heritage and the sense of political and social justice ingrained in my upbringing. But it wasn’t until I saw Lidia on the screen that it occurred to me that she and my grandmother were contemporaries, both born in 1920; both living their childhoods under Mussolini. But when they were 23, Lidia was taking up arms against the Nazis — and my nonna was a soldier’s wife in the United States, having escaped Fascist oppression with her family years earlier. Would my nonna have been fighting alongside her if her family hadn’t left their homeland?
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Born Asunta Maria, my nonna arrived with her mother and siblings — three sisters and a brother — passing through Ellis Island after more than a week in a cramped steerage compartment. Like so many, the dream of America was reason enough to leave behind everything that they knew. But I had long assumed it was only my great grandfather’s well-paying job that drew them to America. When I realized they arrived in the United States only after stricter American immigration laws were in place, doing whatever they could to leave an increasingly oppressive fascist regime who believed in the inherent inequality of people, I began to understand the nonna I knew in a new way.
Suzanne Cope
A baby Suzanne and her grandmother.
Courtesy of Suzanne Cope
Under Mussolini, as I learned through my research, women had civil liberties taken from them. First there were higher tuition fees and admittance caps on the number of women who could pursue secondary schooling. Then, the Fascist bureaucracy placed limits on the number of women certain companies could hire (even at a much lower salary for the same work).
Women were told to wear long sleeves and skirts, and motherhood was emphasized as a woman’s life goal under fascism. Birth “a million bayonets” for Mussolini’s army, in their fevered militarism to help “Bring Back the Roman Empire!” as the rally cry went. Families were given monetary incentives to have more babies and they were expected to send their children to the Fascist youth clubs where further political and gender-based indoctrination continued.
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Before long, jails were filled with women who had dared rebel against these strictures. In addition to many more obvious imprisonable offenses, like defacing an image of Il Duce, a woman could be jailed for obtaining an abortion, or helping other women do the same. More women were locked in asylums for “female deviancy” for working while also raising children or not submitting to the will — sexual or otherwise — of their husbands.
Further research taught me more about the realities of life under Mussolini’s rule: how he took control of the press, remade school curriculum to omit stories of revolution or political systems that might be counter to Fascism, arrested detractors, sometimes beating them or forcing them to drink castor oil, and fired vocal anti-Fascists from their jobs, making their financial future dependent on their fealty to the Fascist regime.
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I felt shame as I learned this history and the more I learned about Il Duce’s treachery, I realized that while I had long believed my ancestors had immigrated because they were running toward the golden streets of America, it seemed likely they were also running from something: Fascist oppression in their homeland.
Susan, as her mother renamed my nonna in America, was known as deeply empathetic, always willing to help her neighbors. Her perfect penmanship and knowledge of both Sicilian dialect and standard Italian made her the go-to in the neighborhood to read or translate letters and documents — which also gave her continued lessons on the horrors her family had left behind. But she was also known for her fiery temper, often in the face of injustice. She would stand up to the bullies who teased her for speaking Italian, or smelling like the sauce her mother always made them for lunch. I couldn’t imagine that she would not have done the same when the stakes were higher.
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She would graduate from high school and marry an Italian American iron worker who had taught fighter pilots during World War II. He would tell his young wife about the splatters of blood and bullet holes still in the cockpits of the planes that cycled through his airbase for maintenance, knowing the damage coming from Nazi anti-aircraft fire or dogfights over Italy.
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The horrors of World War II galvanized my grandmother. While her peers, like Lidia — and the other intrepid women I met in my research — were taking up arms, writing underground newspapers and sewing secret messages into their dress hems, my nonna was learning how her local government worked and reading voraciously, wondering what she could do to help in the war. Every weekend, she anxiously awaited calls from Italy, wringing her hands over the hope of news of their extended family’s struggles from afar.
In the decades after the war, when they moved to western New York, my nonna used what tools she had to fight for women’s rights and political justice, acutely aware of how women were viewed in a patriarchal world. She became engaged in local politics, wanting to take advantage of the freedoms she knew her Italian family and friends had risked their lives for. Once her daughter — my mother — was born, she repeated these lessons of political education and agency, which seemed radical in the 1950s.
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As the most bookish of her grandchildren, I was the one to whom she gave signed photos of her favorite political candidates, which I dutifully hung on my mirror next to my My Little Pony stickers. I was the one who dressed up like the “first woman president” on career day, wearing a too-big suit and carrying a briefcase. Although I would become a writer and professor instead of a politician or lawyer, I see now how the focus of my research has long been in service of those who had no voice, as my nonna encouraged.
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My nonna died before I graduated high school, before I could ask her about her childhood under the specter of fascism. It didn’t occur to me until that moment listening to Lidia’s story that my nonna could have been her. And that the woman I had become was a direct result of her rejection of her childhood under Mussolini’s oppression.
Until the moment I saw Lidia on the screen — one of the first of many oral histories I would hear in my research for my book Women of War — I had assumed that my grandmother’s feminist tendencies had been a product of her assimilation into American culture and her ambitions for her family. But hearing the stories of my nonna’s Italian peers, and learning about the political and gender-based oppression my family escaped from and my nonna always sought to redress, made me understand her and the legacy she left me in a new way.
I would give anything to talk to my nonna again, ask her about her childhood, what she knew about the intrepid women from her homeland, and what she learned about bravery in America. My heritage, my legacy, lies with these women who refused to let those in power define them, who were willing to die for their liberty. I realize that I am fulfilling my legacy to help tell these stories and to continue the fight on the side of justice.
Women of War by Suzanne Cope comes out April 29 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
INTERVIEW: Suzanne Cope, Author of Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis
May 7, 2025
Interviewed by Hillary Moses Mohaupt
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cover of women of war by suzanne cope - historic photo of two women in military garbSuzanne 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.
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.
suzanne cope
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.
Meet Suzanne Cope
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Stories & Insights
April 11, 2024
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Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Suzanne Cope. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Suzanne, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
Right now I am in Italy, finishing research for my next book Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Couriers, and Spies Who Helped Defeat the Nazis (Dutton, April, 2025). I was drawn to these stories, of course, because of the fight against oppression and the inspiration that these women can provide for us to fight for a cause bigger than themselves. But I was also drawn to this story because my grandmother lived in Italy when she was young, and was the same age as the women about whom I am writing. In a different reality – the family was separated and detained for a few hours at Ellis Island, for they were immigrating after the laws were becoming more onerous – my grandmother might have been one of them. She died when I was in high school, and there was so much I never knew to ask her about her family back in Italy, about her experiences growing up. I am thinking about her a lot as I finish this book.
Suzanne, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My primary profession is as a professor at NYU in the Expository Writing Program. I am lucky because of my wonderful colleagues who are doing all sorts of creating things – writing plays and poems and novels, doing academic research – and of course teaching. What is great about this role is that the department supports creative and academic work between semesters, in that there isn’t just one path they expect their professors to be following with their research and writing. I still do some scholarly work, but am happy that in the last 5 and a half years that I have been at NYU I have been able to focus on writing books, as well as some articles and essays on related topics. My last book was POWER HUNGRY: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Chicago Review Press, 2021) and I am still asked to take part in events to talk about these issues. I love digging into a project like these two books – getting to spend time in the archives or interview people or seeing where history took place – to help it come alive for my readers and also amplify the voices and actions of these unsung leaders. While I sometime wish I had more time to write, at the same time I love that I have an academic community and framework to do this research, as well as wonderful colleagues and students.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I really do believe that writing is all about grit and that if you really keep at it – while refining your craft – you will find some success. Before I went back to grad school for my MFA and PhD, I worked in book publishing – so I even knew the reality and had some connections there. But I wasn’t serious about writing until after I left. I would send an essay out to dozens of places – and this was before submittable, back when half the time I had to send in snail mail! Eventually many of these were published in increasingly competitive places. I had a book project that I sent to dozens of agents – all no – and then almost got it published by a small press, but things fell apart. I was still undaunted and came up with another book proposal and then another. I finally found my current agent with a book proposal that didn’t sell, that turned into a book proposal that ALMOST sold – both of these for reasons that had much to do with the interests of the market at the time in late 2016 and early 2017 – that turned into POWER HUNGRY. I really do believe that each of these rejections led to the bigger and better project. In fact both POWER HUNRGY and WOMEN OF WAR were born from research from my last rejected proposal, which had come from the previous rejected proposal. And who knows – maybe I will go back to some of these ideas in the future!
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I have found my goals evolving as my work evolves. I went from being inspired by personal stories as a creative nonfiction writer, to bringing in research to turning my focus on unsung female leaders during times of political and social unrest. POWER HUNGRY came from my research and interest in food as a tool for social and political change, but that research helped me realize that food, during World War II in this case, was but one of the ways that women could show their leadership during the resistance. By expanding beyond the role of food, I was able to tell a much broader and more interesting story. So my research interests and goals have been evolving – and I have learned to let them evolve, just as I evolve as a writer and scholar. But, ultimately, what I don’t believe will change is my intention to give voice to women who have nearly been lost to history.
Contact Info:
Website: suzannecope.com
Instagram: @suzannecope_phd
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannecope/
Other: threads? same as instagram
Cope, Suzanne WOMEN OF WAR Dutton (NonFiction None) $32.00 4, 29 ISBN: 9780593476000
Risking their lives for their country.
Journalist and New York University writing professor Cope, a granddaughter of Italian immigrants, portrays the defiance of the Italian Resistance through the lives of four intrepid women. Each in her 20s when Fascism took hold in Italy, Carla Capponi, Teresa Mattei, Anita Malavasi, and Bianca Guidetti Serra were among tens of thousands of women who took part in armed resistance and hundreds of thousands of other women who provided material support. Drawing on memoirs, interviews, and personal testimonies along with historical and archival sources, Cope focuses on two crucial years, beginning in the spring of 1943, during which Italy surrendered to the Allies, Germany occupied the country, and the Resistance became increasingly militant. In concise chapters, she recounts the events of the war month by month: in Rome, where Carla's residence served as a safe house, welcoming those who knew the password; in Florence, where Teresa, the daughter of longtime anti-Fascists, lived with her family; in Turin, where Bianca had grown up in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood; and in the small northern city of Reggio Emilia, surrounded by farmland, where Anita lived. As Resistance fighters amassed in the hills and mountains around central and northern Italy, the women brought them clothing, food, and arms. They wrote, printed, and disseminated manifestos and calls for strikes. They carried bombs. The risks were great: arrest, torture, rape, execution. They put not only their own lives, but those of their families, in danger. But they felt they had no choice. Like the others, Carla realized "there was no turning back to her previous life where she would stare out the window, waiting for the war to end. Instead, she would be on the front lines, fighting for her beloved city and a different, free future."
An inspiring, illuminating group biography.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Cope, Suzanne: WOMEN OF WAR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827100979/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=982d5683. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis
Suzanne Cope. Dutton, $32 (480p)
ISBN 978-0-593-47600-0
JOURNALIST COPE (Power Hungry) spins a thrilling saga of four young women of the Italian resistance. In interweaving vignettes, she traces how each woman came to join antifascist efforts--some under Mussolini's regime, others not until the 1943 Nazi occupation, but all because they grew to feel that "to do nothing was to side with the enemy." Among those profiled are a bicycle courier who delivered messages to partisan camps outside Florence, a newspaper publisher who organized a mass strike to disrupt Nazi industrial production in Turin, and a smuggler who guided young men out of the city of Reggio Emilia to help them avoid conscription. Cope's narrative rivets as she tracks how the young women escalated their efforts; one woman, who at her first resistance meeting was asked to play Chopin to cover the partisans' voices, ends up a key member of a hit squad. (Her role was to stand at countryside crossroads and offer German soldiers inaccurate directions--straight into an ambush.) By focusing closely on these women's experiences, Cope is able to reflect on how their understanding of events informed their decisions, like how one woman's decision to identify for resistance assassins her former philosophy professor, Giovanni Gentile--"widely considered the architect of the Fascist ideology in Italy"--no doubt took into consideration how Gentile's "reforms" had codified gender inequality in higher education. Readers will relish this exhilarating look at how antifascist resistance operated and evolved during WWII. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 6, 10 Feb. 2025, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300571/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f033b1e0. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
* Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement. By Suzanne Cope. Nov. 2021. 304p. Chicago Review, $27.99 (9781641604529). 323.092.
In 1964, Aylene ("Mama") Quin's restaurant, South of the Border, became a hub for voter-rights organizing and education in McComb, Mississippi. In California in 1969, Cleo Silvers of the Black Panthers sought to inspire social revolution via free-breakfast programs for poor Black children. In both cases, the simple act of feeding people was a multilayered retort to white supremacy. Quin's restaurant gave her the financial freedom to support SNCC's voting rights activists. The Panther breakfasts spawned a series of "survival" mutual aid programs and gave Black city dwellers the radical idea that they deserved better. The outrageous violence and intimidation both women endured is a testament to their effectiveness: Mama Quin's home was bombed several times (the perpetrators were set free because they had been "unduly provoked" by civil rights workers), while the FBI and local law enforcement officers smeared Black Panther reputations and vandalized their food supplies. In Chicago police even broke into a church and urinated on Black Panther supplies. Cope connects the dots between 1960s food activism and the role of community gardens and Native foodways in fighting environmental racism today and notes that the Panther breakfasts evolved into federally funded SNAP and WIC programs. In all, an overlooked and inspiring story of female heroism on the civil-rights front.--Lesley Williams
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Williams, Lesley. "Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2021, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A695506984/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3306de9d. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.