Description
Book SynopsisThis biography of writer, translator, teacher, and feminist Ada Gobetti, the first in English or Italian, frames her activism in the Resistenza as a chapter in a lifetime of resistance. By the time Turin was liberated in April 1945, writer, translator, teacher, and women's rights activist Ada Gobetti had been fighting fascism for almost twenty-five years. This biography frames her wartime activism in the Resistenza as a chapter in a lifetime of resistance. Gobetti participated in the underground Giustizia e Libertà movement, and helped to found the Partito d'Azione, a political party whose members asked her to represent them as vice mayor of Turin after the war. For Gobetti, the Resistenza also brought an awareness of the specific talents, needs, and rights of Italian women. This led her to organize other Italian women against German occupiers and Fascist oppressors, found an underground women's newspaper, and solidify her views regarding women as a political force. After 1945, resistance meant espousing a set of ideals exemplified by the best that came out of the Resistenza, ideals of grassroots democracy, women's rights, and democratic education for which Gobetti would fight for the rest of her life. Jomarie Alano is a visiting scholar at Cornell University's Institute for European Studies. She is the translator and editor of Ada Gobetti's Diario partigiano, published by Oxford University Press in 2014 as Partisan Diary: A Woman's Life in the Italian Resistance.
Trade ReviewA meticulously detailed and engaging account. * ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW *
Alano writes with clarity and enthusiasm that makes this biography engaging and an enjoyable read. * JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY *
This thorough book about one woman's struggle against a brutal regime keeps the memory alive. CANADIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY Ada Gobetti entered politics in 1918 by joining the staff of Piero Gobetti's radical journal, Energie Nove, and her life was lived within words and ideas. By 1943, she had joined the armed resistance, but her role remained that of an intellectual, not a soldier. Her concerns, from the very beginning, had been not so much about herself but about Italy's and Europe's democratic future. * AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Early Years (1902-1918) New Life (1918-1920) The Path of Resistance (1920-1926) Resisting Alone (1926-1939) Antifascism for Children (1939-1940) War (1940-1943) The Resistenza (1943-1945) Postwar Politics (1945-1947) Women's Rights, Human Rights (1947-1961) Educating Resisters (1947-1968) Conclusion: The Legacy of Resistance Glossary Notes Bibliography Index
