“Women are the real architects of society.”

From ordinary women who took action to warnings about how harmful ideology permeates and destroys society, here are 5 books to inspire your own fight against fascism.

Partisan Diary by Ada Gobetti
This is the firsthand diary of a mother and teacher who became a leader in the Italian partisan movement against Mussolini. It offers a rare look at how ordinary citizens organized resistance networks right under the noses of the regime.

“From the despondent weariness I felt around me, from the emptiness where I seemed to have found myself, initiatives and hopes were born. The desire for resistance was taking shape.”
– Ada Gobetti

Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright
Written in 2018, the former Secretary of State provides a sharp analysis of modern authoritarian tactics by Putin, Erdoğan, Kim Jong-un and others. From her own experience fleeing Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a child to witnessing the destructive rise of the MAGA movement in the US, Albright warns of the specific methods that may be used to dismantle democracy from within and what we can do to stop it.

“Fascist attitudes take hold when there are no social anchors and when the perception grows that everybody lies, steals, and cares only about him- or herself.”
– Madeleine Albright

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
A dense but essential philosophical masterpiece. Arendt dissects how Nazism and Stalinism rose to power not just through force, but through the use of terror, propaganda, and the systematic destruction of objective truth.
Arendt traces the line from manufactured refugee crises to systemic isolation and loneliness largely fed by racism and xenophobia. While Arendt doesn’t offer any solutions, recognizing these patterns is the first step to resistance.

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
– Hannah Arendt

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
In this 1938 essay, Woolf argues that the roots of fascism lie in the patriarchal control of the home and society. She connects the oppression of women domestically to the rise of tyrants abroad, making a case that feminism is anti-fascism.

“Listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out divisions as if they were chalk marks only.”
– Virginia Woolf

Shackled by Rebecca Sharpless
A forensic look at the industrial deportation complex, Shackled tells the true story of 2 of the 92 African refugees confined for two days in deplorable conditions while the US government tried to deport them and the subsequent cover-up.

“This book is a story that had to be told. Writing it didn’t feel like a choice…If I didn’t write it, no one would.”
– Rebecca Sharpless