Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War

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View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface."Retells forgotten stories and unearths new evidence of intrepid female field agents. . . . Proctor's archival discoveries hint at countless small acts of audacity and defiance. . . . Thanks to books like this one, the history of female espionage—from Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Van Lew to Lotus Blossum to Stella Rimington—is slowly being filled out."
—London Review of Books"In Female Intelligence, Tammy Proctor attempts to rescue female spies from cliches that classed them as either sexual predators or martyred virgins, manipulators or dupes, heartless vamps or emotional basket cases."
—New Yorker"A useful and engaging history of women in the British intelligence service during World War I.

The book is an important contribution to the history of British intelligence and sheds light on the unglamorous reality of a highly romanticized aspect of women's work."
—American Historical Review"Female Intelligence is enjoyable and interesting because of its broad scope in bringing together previously separate historical subjects, its making visible women's part in espionage, and its feminist rereading of World War I images of women spies.

It shows how far the history of women and war has come."
—Journal of British Studies"Proctor's argument is strong, as is her evidence and her prose. Her work is excellent for people in both military and social history—it incorporates issues of interest to both groups and is a pleasure to read."
—Military History"Proctor has identified an excellent field for research, one where there is real detective work to be done."—International History Review"Proctor's work is carefully thought out and elegantly argued.

Her deployment of her material is done with a deft hand, and a strong sense for the telling quote, anecdote, or statistic. Proctor thus points the way forward for further scholarship on women in intelligence work."
—Alvernia"A rare study of how women were used and, more importantly . . . remembered or forgotten by British intelligence during the war at home and in Belgium.

Recommended."
—Choice"This engaging and intelligent study of women in espionage adds to our understanding of the experience of women during the First World War and of the legacy of their work, both mythic and real. Proctor carefully explores why the image of the female 'spy seductress'—notably the iconic Mata Hari—has endured and uncovers the largely unknown history of this pivotal generation of women intelligence workers."
—Susan R.

Grayzel, author of Women's Identities At War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War"How did women's work contribute to the propagation of war, and impact their own changing relation to the nation-state? How did women themselves, their contemporaries and popular culture represent their war work in gendered terms?

Tammy Proctor addresses these significant questions in her intriguing study of women spies. As Proctor shows, women's substantial work for the developing British intelligence service belied the figure of the treacherous and seductive woman spy."
—Angela Woollacott, author of On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great WarWhen the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaert's home was burned and her family separated.

After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation, Cnockaert embarked on a career as a spy, providing information and engaging in sabotage before her capture and imprisonment in 1916.

After the war, she was paid and decorated by a grateful British government for her service.Cnockaert's is only