Teresa Noce (1900-1980)

After the Livorno Congress (1921), she joined the Communist Party (PCI) of Italy and gave life to the Turin youth section of Porta Palazzo. There she was elected as secretary: this was an unusual position for a woman, but she was quickly capable of subverting gender hierarchies and learning the rudiments of politics such as rallies, the choice of topics to be addressed at meetings and the importance of language that was functional to the struggle^[8]. In  these new roles, she met the young engineering student Luigi Longo, a national leader of the Party, with whom she embarked on a romantic relationship. After a few months she decided to move in with him between Rome and Milan to propagate the ideas of the Party through the editing and distribution of the newspaper “l’Avanguardia”^[9]. This decision caused quite a stir among her comrades, highlighting a rigid morality, not unlike that of a Catholic: “But when I resigned from the Porta Palazzo youth club,” she wrote, “all hell broke loose: to go to Rome with Longo, to follow a student, was I therefore willing to leave everything, to leave Turin? Have you ever heard of such a thing?? The companions, just like many seminarians, were scandalized. Even without marrying legally…”^[10]. While carrying out this new task she found out that she was pregnant. Luigi Longo, not yet 25 years old, was forced to ask his family for permission to marry her, but his mother vetoed it. The two would marry only as adults in September 1925, after suffering prolonged separations due to escapes and arrests^[11].

With the violent rise of fascism, both had to hide quickly to avoid persecution and arrest: in December 1922 the Blackshirts led by the Fascist federal of Turin, Pietro Brandimarte, had attacked dozens of workers, trade unionists, socialist and communist militants causing the death of ten men^[12].

At the age of twenty-three, Teresa thus became a “flamingo” of the Party. Her task was to ensure the connection between the various communist sections by spreading the underground press, a job in which other women also took part and which ensured the survival of the Communist Party during fascism^[13]. Her first mission from Turin to Rome involved a double task: that of helping the editorial staff of the newspaper “l’Avanguardia” and that of acting as a courier of information from one city to another. Within the first raids Luigi Longo was spotted and taken into custody, so Teresa replaced him as editor of the newspaper with the new title of “the Voice of Youth”, to be less detectable by the police^[14].

In the early 1930s, under the pseudonym Estella, she completed a series of missions to Italy to try to coordinate and reactivate the Party’s precarious “networks” which, increasingly, were falling into the meshes of the Fascist police. The most notable one was in winter 1932 in Reggio Emilia, where a strong and widespread Communist organization was located. The solidaristic networks of the cooperative movement persisted in these areas, and Teresa, who was hosted by the militants, changing houses every night, was struck by the enthusiasm with which political activity resumed in those lands: “In vain I recommended that only the four or five comrades summoned should come. There were always a dozen and sometimes even more […]”^[21].

After several peregrinations between France and Italy and a brief experience as the Italian representative of the Profintern (The Communist International of Trade Unions), she settled in Paris to take care of the newspapers of clandestine emigration together with Giuseppe di Vittorio^[22]. In the mid-1930s she was put in charge of organizing the Women’s Front through the Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism, another body controlled by the Comintern. This activity later flowed into the magazine “La Voce delle donne” – the women voice, which was sent to Italy hidden in Parisian fashion covers, inviting women to fundraise for the organization of “Red Christmas” for children^[23].

With the outbreak of the Spanish War (1936) and the neutrality declared by the French government, Teresa Noce committed herself to preparing the aid to be sent to the Iberian peninsula: in just a few months, with makeshift means, she set up a veritable sorting center where volunteers were prepared and provided with the necessary equipment to leave. Even from France, she collaborated with the newspaper “The Cry of the People” with the aim of making the proximity of the Italian exiles felt in Spain^[24].

The Popular Front, which envisaged collaboration among all democratic forces, had shown its fragility from the first months: this imposed a direct mobilization of the communists, who organized the International Brigades, real units designed on the example of the Red Army to flank the Republicans^[25]. Teresa thus left for Spain at first with the task of editing a newspaper directly from the battlefield, but soon assumed an operational role alongside her husband Luigi Longo (Gallo), political commissar of the XII Brigade^[26]. She was asked to edit the “Volunteer of Freedom”, a newspaper edited in Valencia in the Italian language that served to advertise the work of all combatants^[27]. She then collaborated with “Il Garibaldino”, an underground sheet circulating in several languages, and edited “Garibaldini in Spagna 1936-1937”, a clandestine book intended to popularize the experience of Italian anti-Francoists^[28].

After the war she immediately resumed political activity for the PCI. One of the first initiatives she was involved in was what will remain known as the “trains of happiness” (1945-1947). Thanks to contacts cultivated with the federations of Modena and Reggio Emilia, she convinced her Emilian party comrades to house poor children from Milan with peasant families, to enable them to face the winter with sufficient food and lodging^[37].

At the end of the PCI’s Fifth Congress (December 1945), she was elected into the Central Committee, into the Executive and designated as a member of the Agitation and Propaganda Commission^[38].  Her most prestigious political assignment was her appointment to the National Consultation, a body that was to give opinions on legislative measures, such as the first electoral law in democratic Italy^[39].

In the elections for the Constituent Assembly (1946), she accepted candidacy on the condition that she could choose her own constituency: the region Emilia, achieving great success that led her to become a “constituent mother”^[40]. She then insisted on being included in the Commission of 75, which had the task of drafting the Constitutional Charter, where she focused mainly on the provision of family assistance that she discussed with Christian Democrat Maria Federici and Socialist Lina Merlin^[41].

With her usual energy, she engaged in the first electoral campaign (1948) – which was characterized by an opposition between the DC and PCI – and helped in making the alliance between the PCI and PSI win in her constituencies (Emilia and the province of Brescia), despite a defeat at the national level^[42].  After a long debate and a laborious agreement with the DC  as a parliamentarian, she got the Maternity Protection Act (1950) passed, which aimed to provide tools to safeguard jobs and wages for working mothers^[43]. At the beginning of 1946, Noce was called to take charge of the textile union (FIOT), thanks to her previous experience as a tailor. It was in this role that she was chosen into the Italian delegation invited to the USSR to visit metallurgical and textile factories^[44]. She later became president of the Warsaw-based International Union of Textile and Clothing Workers and attended several conferences in Europe. These were years of trade union turmoil that led to the signing of the first national contract concerning the physical and economic protection of women textile workers and mothers. During the Scelba government (1954-1955), she faced the crisis in textiles at the head of the union, which led her to deal with the great downsizing of the workforce in the sector^[45].

They were issues that also guided her work during her second term as an MP (1953-1958), during which she dealt mainly with wages and salaries, proposing to set a minimum wage for all workers^[46].

In these same years her marriage came to an end: already at the end of the 1940s Longo had informed the Party that he was in another relationship: following the suggestion of other Communist leaders, who had gone down the same road, he then decided to turn to the Court of San Marino in order to obtain the annulment of the bond and thus be able to marry again. The affair took on a political and media character since Noce, unaware of her husband’s decision, learned of the ruling only from the newspapers after the fact and decided to retort from the columns of the “Corriere della Sera”, demanding a denial and accusing Longo of double standards. What was most politically relevant was the reaction of the PCI, which stigmatized her behavior and accused her of disregarding Party discipline and turning a personal matter into politics. After that they initiated disciplinary proceedings against her and ousted her from the Directorate in 1954^[47].

Following these events, Teresa asked to be relieved of her position at the FIOT: her last trade union-political position was at the CNEL in 1959^[48].

When her political career ended, she devoted herself to writing, experimenting with various literary genres. Her autobiography “Professional Revolutionary”, published for the militant publisher La Pietra in 1974, was a literary success and is her most successful book^[49].  She died in Bologna in a nursing home on January 22, 1980. Her funeral was held on the premises of the Bologna federation of the PCI^[50].