The Portrayal of British Women in Wartime Occupations in British Spy Literature During World War I

Laurie-Fletcher, Danny

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03852-6_6

Danny Laurie-Fletcher²

200 Accesses
3 Altmetric

Abstract

This chapter analyses the depiction of women and the implied meanings at the time the British spy stories were written and read. The areas of focus include the depiction of the employment of women during the war but also the issues of class, and of romantic and sexual love within British spy stories of World War I. The type of women that are included are divided between those appearing in the traditional role of the damsel in distress (the most common type) and women in the employed workplace as factory workers, as nurses, or as spies. Each of these employed categories appeared due to the circumstances of World War I. This chapter’s focus is on one of these stereotypes: that of the working women in the British spy stories of World War I. Since the end of the war, historians have argued over the extent of the war’s social impact on women.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 69.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 89.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
‘A Story that Runs like a Motor-Car’, British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress, July 1915, 287.
2.
The inclusion of a female character for its own sake was not universally agreed upon. The Times Literary Supplement commented in its review of The Riddle of the Sands: ‘The Germans … are a practical people, and would not permit a professional traitor to drag a pretty daughter about through his muddy courses.’ ‘Fiction: The Riddle of the Sands’, 242; David Seed, ‘The Adventure of Spying Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands’, ed. Clive Bloom, Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to Le Carré, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1990, 37.
3.
Richard Marsh, Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life, Methuen, London, 1912, 168, 266.
4.
Lloyd S. Kramer, ‘Literature, Criticism and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominik La Capra’, ed. Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1989, 118.
5.
Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester & New York, 1988, 165.
6.
Roberts, The Classic Slum, 162.
7.
Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women between the Wars 1918–1939, Pandora, London & Boston, 1989, 3–4.
8.
Meta Zimmeck, ‘Strategies and Stratagems for the Employment of Women in British Civil Service, 1919–1939’, Historical Journal, vol. 27, no. 4 (1984), 912–913, 924.
9.
F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of the Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900, Fontana Press, London, 1988, 54.
10.
Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston & Henley-on-Thames, 1981, 44.
11.
Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States, Viking, London, 1997, 123; Mrs Wallace Arnold, ‘The Physical Education of Girls’ [1884], Selections from The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880–1907, ed. Terri Doughty, Broadview Press, Plymouth, Peterborough (Ontario) & Orchard Park (New York), 2004, 162–163; Kathleen E. McCrone, ‘Play Up! Play Up! and Play the Game!: Sport at the Late Victorian Girls’ Public School’, The Journal of British Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (Spring 1984), 112–113.
12.
Not all agreed: a Berkshire rector, while not objecting to school girls having physical exercise, complained that cricket and hockey had resulted in the deterioration of his household’s conversation as his daughters had become obsessed with sport. A Berkshire Rector, ‘The Athleticism of Our Girls’, The Times of London, 15 April 1903, 4.
13.
Herbert Spencer, Essays on Education etc. [1861], Dent, London, 1946, 136–137, 150–151.
14.
Michelle J. Smith, Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills & New York, 2011, 13.
15.
Brazil, A Patriotic Schoolgirl, 134–135.
16.
Brazil, A Patriotic Schoolgirl, 133.
17.
Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, A Novel Approach to History: Arnold Bennett, Marie Corelli and the Interior Lives of Single Middle-Class Women, England, 1880–1914, Unpublished PhD thesis, Flinders University, Adelaide, 2003, 18.
18.
Crozier-De Rosa, A Novel Approach to History, 17.
19.
John Ferguson, Stealthy Terror [1917], Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1935, 54.
20.
Smith, Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture, 84–87.
21.
Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I, I. B. Tauris Publishers, London & New York, 1998, 37.
22.
George Robb, British Culture and the First World War, Palgrave, Houndmills & New York, 2001, 40; Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 1994, 18.
23.
Arthur Marwick, Women at Work 1914–1918, Croom Helm, London, 1977, 74.
24.
Quoted in Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War [1981], 2nd edition, Routledge, London & New York, 1989, 48.
25.
L. K. Yates, The Woman’s Part: A Record of Munitions Works, George A. Doran Company, New York, n.d., 9.
26.
Quoted in Claire A. Culleton, Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2000, 152.
27.
Quoted in Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London, 1999, 113.
28.
Quoted in Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 111.
29.
Quoted in Culleton, Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921, 161.
30.
Brenda Girvin, Munition Mary, Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, London, 1918, 74, 182, 214.
31.
Cockburn, Bestseller, 15.
32.
Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Woman, 85.
33.
Girvin, Munition Mary, 49.
34.
Quoted in Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War, 162–163.
35.
Girvin, Munition Mary, 52.
36.
Quoted in Thompson, The Edwardians, 159.
37.
Playwright R. C. Sheriff’s first application to be a temporary officer was rejected on the grounds he was from a grammar school. The reason was partially because of snobbery but also because public school boys had received training in arms to prepare them for a life as a military officer. R. C. Sheriff, ‘The English Public Schools in the War’, ed. George A. Panichas, Promise of Greatness: The War of 1914–1918, John Day Company, New York, 1968, 136–137.
38.
Girvin, Munition Mary, 44.
39.
Girvin, Munition Mary, 46.
40.
Girvin, Munition Mary, 214.
41.
Quoted in Gareth Griffiths, Women’s Factory Work in World War I, Alan Sutton, Phoenix Mill (England) & Wolfeboro Falls (New Hampshire), 1991, 24.
42.
Girvin, Munition Mary, 241.
43.
Girvin, Munition Mary, 241.
44.
Quoted in Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854–1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London & New York, 1988, 246.
45.
Approximately a third of the membership was men.
46.
This consisted partly of £20 allowances paid in the first seven months of a VAD’s service and then at increments of £2.10s 1910 for every six months they agreed to continue, which was lower than wages of munitions workers, who received between £50 and £250 per annum, or domestic workers. George Robb, British Culture and the First World War, Palgrave, Houndmills & New York, 2001, 40; Ruth Adam, A Woman’s Place 1910–1975, Chatto & Windus, London, 1975, 23.
47.
Quoted in Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Woman, 28.
48.
Bessie Marchant, A V.A.D. in Salonika, Blackie & Son, London, 1917, 27.
49.
Marwick, Women at War, 84.
50.
Lucy Moorhead (ed.), Freya Stark Letters: The Furnace and the Cup 1914–30, vol. 1, Compton Russell, 1974, 27–28.
51.
Mary Borden, ‘The Forbidden Zone’ [1929], ed. Margaret R. Higonnet, Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 2001, 154.
52.
Brittain, Testament of Youth, 166.
53.
A spy leading a British battalion into ambush may be inspired by reports of spies doing this in the war. J. F. Maconchie, ‘Spy Betrays London Scottish: Identified by Gurkhas: The Traitor’s Fate’, The Daily Chronicle, 7 November 1914, 7.
54.
Marchant, A V.A.D. in Salonika, 176.
55.
Marchant, A V.A.D. in Salonika, 180.
56.
Martha Trent, Alice Blyth: Somewhere in England, Goldsmith, Cleveland (Ohio), 1918, 29.
57.
To be part of FANY was expensive, not only because of the membership fee but due to the cost of first-aid training, the uniform, and horse care as they were expected to be able to drive horse-drawn ambulances (these were replaced by motorised ambulances in 1915) and the training included cavalry drills, signalling, and horse driving. Janet Lee, ‘“I Wish My Mother Could See Me Now”: The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and Negotiation of Gender and Class Relations, 1907–1918’, NWSA Journal, vol. 19, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 141–143.
58.
Quoted in Julia Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage, Collins & Brown Limited, London, 1992, 6.
59.
Thomson, Queer People, 181.
60.
Susan Goodman, Gertrude Bell, Leamington Spa (England), Dover (New Hampshire) & Heidelberg (West Germany), 1985, 72–73.
61.
The name comes from a legend of a white lady appearing to mark the end of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
62.
Madame Defarge is a French revolutionary spy that knits coded messages of conversations held by people in her Parisian shop so later she can accuse them as being traitors to the revolution. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities [1850], Guild Publishing, London, 1980, 171, 173–174.
63.
Tammy M. Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War, New York University Press, New York & London, 2003, 56; Alan Judd, The Quest for C: Sir Mansfield Cumming and The Founding of the British Secret Service, HarperCollins Publishers, Hammersmith (London), 1999, 155.
64.
TNA WO 32/10776 Major General W. Thwaites (DMI), ‘Historical Sketch of the direction of military Intelligence during the Great War, 1914–1919’, 1920, 20.
65.
TNA KV1/50, ‘Report of the Work of the Women of M.I.5.’, 1921, 11–12.
66.
TNA WO 32/10776 Thwaites, ‘Historical Sketch of the direction of military Intelligence’, 20.
67.
NA KV1/50, ‘Report of the Work of the Women of M.I.5.’, 8.
68.
TNA WO 32/10776 Thwaites, ‘Historical Sketch of the direction of military Intelligence’, 20.
69.
Patrick Beesley, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–1918, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1982, 175; Proctor, Female Intelligence, 68.
70.
NA KV1/50, ‘Report of the Work of the Women of M.I.5.’, 4.
71.
IWM 92/22/1 Mrs. D. B. G. Line (nee Dimmock), ‘Reminiscences of World War I’, TS, n.d.
72.
IWM 92/22/1, ‘Reminiscences of World War I’.
73.
NA KV1/50, ‘Report of the Work of the Women of M.I.5.’, 26.
74.
IWM 92/22/1, ‘Reminiscences of World War I’.
75.
Rose Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides, Girl Guides Association, 2nd ed., London, 1932, 126.
76.
NA KV1/50, ‘Report of the Work of the Women of M.I.5.’, 16.
77.
NA KV1/50, ‘Report of the Work of the Women of M.I.5.’, 16.
78.
IWM 92/22/1, H. G. G., The Big Push: Where Are All to Go? or, The Invasion of the New Office [1916], D. B. G. Line (nee Dimmock), ‘Reminiscences of World War I’, TS, n.d.
79.
IWM 92/22/1, H. D. S., The Electric Bells Having Broke, the G.G.’s (not Grenadier Guards) sit outside Maj. D.’s door in case he wants [1918?], D. B. G. Line (nee Dimmock), ‘Reminiscences of World War I’, TS, n.d.
80.
IWM 96/32/1 Papers of Mrs. B. de Quidt, M. S. Aslin ‘An Essay on the Girl Guides’, Nameless Magazine (March 1920), 6.
81.
Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides, 143–144.
82.
NA KV1/50, ‘Report of the Work of the Women of M.I.5.’, 15, 17; Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides, 143.
83.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 22, 72, 106, 202, 238, 272, 302, 355–356, 370, 404.
84.
Childers, The Riddle of the Sands, 157, 257.
85.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 36.
86.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 272.
87.
Hannay’s trait of being scared is shared with Fred M. White’s spy Newton Moore. Fred M. White, ‘The Romance of the Secret Service Fund: By Woman’s Wit’, Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 10, no. 7 (1903), 101; Fred M. White, ‘The Romance of the Secret Service Fund: The Almedi Concession’, Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 10, no. 25 (1903), 385–386.
88.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 202.
89.
Cadogan & Craig, Women and Children First, 79.
90.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 37.
91.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 370.
92.
J. Storer Clouston, ‘The Spy in Black’ [1915], Storer Clouston’s Omnibus, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh & London, 1937, 304–305.
93.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 31.
94.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 201.
95.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 31.
96.
Quoted in Proctor, On My Honour, 25.
97.
John Buchan, The Three Hostages [1924], Nelson, London, 1936, 207.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Danny Laurie-Fletcher

Authors

Danny Laurie-Fletcher
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Laurie-Fletcher, D. (2019). The Portrayal of British Women in Wartime Occupations in British Spy Literature During World War I. In: British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03852-6_6

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03852-6_6
Published: 01 March 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03851-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03852-6
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics