The role of women in the Italian mafias has long been overlooked. Reduced to victim status and relegated to domestic life in a male-dominated society, women serve as the mafia's respectable facade: virtuous and docile. It is hard to picture these immaculate figures married to and raising brutal killers. But, as Milka Kahn and Anne Veron reveal in this absorbing book, women have always been at the heart of Italy's criminal organisations, as the guarantors of mafia culture. While the men are behind bars or on the run, it is left to their wives and mothers to uphold and pass on the 'family values'. Once widowed, they push their sons to vendetta; they are increasingly becoming mafia chiefs in their own right. Yet many also decide to risk their lives and break with 'the Family', collaborating with the authorities and renouncing mafia society in search of a normal life. So who are these women? Are they pure Madonnas, or dangerous Godmothers? Women of Honour paints a complex and fascinating portrait through extremely rare interviews with the women themselves, who have overcome a culture of silence to share their extraordinary lives.

'Kahn and Véron have trawled newspapers and legal documents and interviewed dozens of women to provide vivid stories of tough-minded female bosses, ruling without mercy.' -- Times Literary Supplement
'These fascinating stories of courage, collaboration and criminal mastery offer new insight into the changing role of women in mafia culture.' * Clare Longrigg, author of Mafia Women *
'Engrossing. Kahn and Véron take us into a world in which women play an important role but in which — with few exceptions — their identities, their private lives and sex lives all belong to their menfolk; a world in which rebellion leads inexorably to either life on a witness protection programme, or death.' * John Hooper, author of The Italians *

Milka Kahn is a Franco-Italian jurist specialising in European law. She became familiar with the subject of mafia women through her volunteer work with the anti-mafia organisation Libera Palermo. Anne Veron is a Franco-Italian director and creator of several authoritative documentaries on the Italian mafias.