Lidia Brisca Menapace (pronounced may-nah-PAH-chay) was born in Novara, Italy on April 3, 1924, this day in history. Her father was an avowed antifascist and her mother was an anarchist. Lidia joined the resistance to fascism at age 19, during World War II.
Lidia Menapace’s 2014 memoir about her partisan activities (“I, Partisan: My Resistance”)
As the New York Times reported in her obituary (she died of COVID in December, 2020):
She hid explosives under her clothes. She delivered maps and antifascist propaganda slipped between the pages of works by Cicero. She brought medicine by bicycle to wounded partisans hiding in the mountains.”
After WWII, Lidia became an activist for pacifism and for women’s rights.
In 1964, she became the first woman elected to the provincial council of Bolzano, where she had moved after marrying Nene Menapace, a doctor. But, the New York Times explained, she argued for the legalization of abortion and divorce in Italy, opposing what she called “the life-sentence marriage.” She took a stand against the economic oppression of women and the exploitation of women’s domestic work. In her personal life, she refused to cook for her husband unless he did the grocery shopping.
She also helped found the left-wing newspaper “Il Manifesto,” which became influential in Italian politics and culture.
Lidia Menapace in the 1960s
Menapace was elected to the Italian Senate in 2006 at the age of 82. She used her position to draw attention to the low representation of women in the cabinet. To the end, she urged people to band together to end the pandemic: “What did I learn from the Resistance? To live with fear and overcome it,” she said in an interview last year. “Now we have to get rid of this virus.”
Upon her death, Democratic Party lawmaker Piero Fassino stated, “With Lidia Menapace is gone a free and strong voice, a constant reference in every struggle for women, for the rights of everyone, for peace.”
Legal Legacy 
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