‘I do not know about politics or governments...I am a housewife’: the female secret agent and the male war machine in Occupied France (1942-1945)

Women: a Cultural Review Special Issue Women and War, Vol.17, no.1 Spring, 2006. 42-64

In assuming war roles that led to participation in combat, torture or death, women secret agents in World War II exemplify the permeable nature of the barrier that separates femininity and masculinity in the ideology and practice of waging war. The straightforwardness of a male-exclusive sovereignty over war (with the military as ultimate protector of vulnerable femininity) became unsettled by the drafting and uniforming of women and the systematic German bombing of the British Home Front.

There were fifty-five women agents who passed through the Beaulieu Finishing School for Secret Agents in Britain (1941-45) In terms of suspense and tragedy genres, their war service experiences provide the ingredients for gripping drama. The lives of two women in particular have been captured in male-generated narratives, written and filmed. These accounts of Odette (nee Brailly then Sansom) Churchill and Violette (nee Bushell) Szabo serve as demonstrations of how texts participate in the standardising of the past to produce a specific disenfranchising of women from the representation of war unless it occurs within very prescriptive and traditionally conservative criteria. As post-war representations, the outcome of the story is already known and one in which the re-establishing of strict gender differences (blurred during wartime imperatives) was underway. Whatever acts of sabotage and violence these women agents (who were also mothers of daughters) undertook during wartime, a seamless reinstatement to domestic contentment as hostilities ceased was socially assumed. Filtered through male-authoring creativity, the longevity of the effectiveness of their war role is implicitly undermined to acutely reveal the investment of male-authoring cultural representation in perpetuating the male mythopoeia of war.