Given the history of loss, displacement and violence, national narratives in the Middle East and North Africa have drawn on themes of loss and violence in intense ways. In the last several years, there has been a substantial amount of scholarship addressing the relationship between violence and memory in nationalist narratives. Despite this emphasis on collective memory, few studies have evaluated the role of women’s memories in state formation in the Middle East, instead focusing on sites of memory that commemorate sacrifice and bravery as part of the larger nationalist project and its claim to universalism. The official version of Libyan nationalism under the government of Muammar el Gaddafi attempted to highlight the valiant struggle of the Libyan people against Italian colonialism, as embodied by figures like the resistance leader Umar al-Mukhtar. Despite the claim of universalism inherent in this official ideology of resistance, its iconic imagery is almost always centered on the masculine figure of a Bedouin fighter. Similarly, colonialism is conventionally understood as a masculine, and at times violent, interaction between male Italian colonists, soldiers and administrators, and colonized men. This paper expands the gendered analysis of violence and memory by exploring the ways in which Libyan women remembered Italian colonial rule between 1911 and 1943. Drawing on oral history narratives collected by the Libyan Studies Center in Tripoli and literature written by Libyan women, it explores the way in which women participated in the contested meanings of Libyan history during the colonial period, under the post-colonial monarchy, and then under the government of Muammar el Gaddafi. It argues that women constructed their own unique, albeit fragmented, understandings of Libyan history and of the colonial period that undercut supposedly universalist narratives of Libyan national liberation and development. Instead of placing women at the margins or excluding them completely, women emerge as central to the history of the region as both actors and preservers of memory. Their voices unsettle traditional masculine nationalist narratives with their emphasis on the courageous nature of the (masculine) founders of the Libyan state.