Women of the PKK have been at the centre and forefront of the fight against the Islamic State and other (non-) state actors in the Middle East; both in the armed resistance and the political and activist spheres. The women’s fight for space can be observed not only in Rojava (Northern Syria), where the party has made tremendous gains, but everywhere where the PKK and its sister parties hold power; in Bakur (Eastern Turkey) prior to the ongoing state backlash, Ba?ur (Iraqi Kurdistan) and to a lesser extent in Rojhelat (Western Iran). The centring of gender-based equality and justice is also an important feature of the PKK’s revolutionary ideology; the slogan ‘if women are not free, society cannot be free’, is often repeated by activists of the movement. This paper examines how women got to play such central roles in the PKK and zooms into the process of ‘becoming’ a female freedom fighter and asks how the party’s liberation ideology is taught, learned and implemented. Based on ethnographic data collected in training camps of the female fighters in Iraq, Syria and Turkey (2015-2016), this paper explores how the women of the movement learn 'irade' (the will to resist), what kind of agency this provides them with, but also how this concept helps the movement to control its subjects. It introduces ‘militant femininity’; a conceptual lens to critically analyse the ways in which women learn to become steadfast fighters that are willing to sacrifice themselves in life and death to the leader Öcalan, the PKK and its vision of a free Kurdistan. I argue that the case of the Kurdish Women’s Movement allows us to complicate ongoing discussions on gender and war, as well as feminism, nationalism and militarism because the women really do hold immense power within the different party structures. However, the project of 'Democratic Confederalism', the political project currently being implanted in Rojava by the PKK, remains deeply gendered with the ‘free women’ being an important but strictly policed and essentialised marker of the aspired ‘non-state nation’.