WORLD WAR I (1914-1918)

From Aphra Behn, who spied for the Bristish government in the 17th century, to the most well-known example, Mata Hari, female spies have a long history, existing in juxtaposition to the folkloric notion of women as chatty, gossipy and indiscreet. Between the founding of the modern British intelligence organizations in 1909 and the demobilization of 1919, more than 6,000 women served in the British government in either civil or military occupation as members of the intelligence community. These women performed a variety of services, and they represented an astonishing diversity of nationality, age and class.

Modern espionage was in it’s infancy in WW1 and Britain and France both lagged behind Germany’s well-developed network of spies. England and its allies scrambled to catch up and ended up employing huge numbers of women in various positions including censorship, decoding and propaganda. Young Girl Guides ran errands from office to office and soon women were actually working in the field.

Most ironic is the conflict between the popular male notion that women were of inferior intelligence and therefore couldn’t be an adequate spy and the cultural image of the wily female seductress who uses every weapon at her disposal to trick unwary men into revealing state secrets. These images were also at odds with brave female martyrs like Gabrielle Petit, a Belgium woman who at age twenty-three was shot by the Germans for espionage.

She reportedly refused to wear a blindfold before the firing squad and said, “Vive, la Belgique!” moments before her execution. If men were confused by a woman’s ability to spy, women were not, and they joined war department in various intelligence positions by the thousands.