The role of African American Women in Secret Intelligence

As time has continued oregardregardregard regard, women within the intelligence community have slowly shifted their tactics of espionage depending on how societal and gendered pressures and expectations are presented to men and women around the world. In this essay, the evolution of women in espionage will be discussed; specifically, this discussion will focus on how evolution came about alongside the changing societal and gendered norms of women around the world. The majority of the paper will be evaluating this topic in regard to the cultural and linguistic fields of anthropology.

The time frame that will be reviewed during this essay is from the American Revolution to the Cold War, and women of the West will be the main focus. The analysis of female spies and their covert operations during the American Revolution helps explain women dressing in disguise and methods of sending secret messages. From here, the intersectionality of race and gender within the American Civil War will be discussed with its relation to female intelligence agents and their tactics.

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The role of African American women in secret intelligence is vital to the topic of espionage between the Union and Confederacy. After that, I will move ahead to the main focus of the essay by discussing World War II and the women that worked undercover on behalf of their countries. women in espionage used socio-cultural expectations of their gender to undermine enemies.

The goal of this essay is to point out several prominent women in espionage from major conflicts throughout history, and discuss how their settings and cultural expectations shaped their methods of spying.

The most advantageous aspect of being a woman in espionage is the general underestimation of women’s participation in the public sphere. This underestimation stems from an ideology known as “othering,” which was introduced by French philosopher, Simone De Beauvoir (1949) during the 1940s. Othering is a way of creating outcasts from those who do not align with one’s own beliefs and values. This is apparent in the linguistics of gender and anthropological discussions. Women are often labeled as caring, harmless, and naive, whereas men are identified by adjectives such as powerful, strong, and clever. These descriptors enable women in espionage to use the general miscalculation of female participation in covert operations by a large population as an advantage to obtain sensitive intel.

The first conflict I will discuss is the American Revolregardingution. Female spies were used by both the British and the Colonists, during the Revolutionists’ fight for independence. Information regarding the movement of troops, possible ambushes, and other warfare strategies could have very easily been discussed by soldiers, wh, and politicians in the presence of their female relatives, maids, nurses, nannies, cooks, and other women, with little thought of who was listening. This brings about the concept of women as invisible in social settings. This idea supports the claim that the general removal of women from political and economic decision-making too processes, causes others to undervalue the capabilities of women in other roles, such as spying for example.

It was an expectation during the American Revolution for men to participate in combat, while women acted more as medics and cooks. Because of this, many of the first women in combat were forced to disguise themselves as men to enlist (Doley, 2016). Deborah Sampson was one such woman that partook in this concealment of identity to participate in the American Revolution. Common tactics used by women, including Sampson herself, to visually blend in with men, include binding their chests, cutting the hair on their headheads, and attempting to grow facial hair. While Sampson was notably teased for her inability to grow a beard, it was a combat wound exposing the bindings on her chest that ultimately blew her cover (Doley, 2016). The result of her actions was an honorable discharge from the military, as women were still prohibited from participating in combat.

Lydia Darragh is another example of a woman of the American Revolution that partook in undercover operations. Working as a correspondent for George Washington, Darragh is famously known for her acts of eavesdropping on British officers while they discussed plans in a neighboring room of her home. According to Bex (1895), Darragh would take notes during these meetings andhead heads, and head then her husband would rewrite the notes on smaller pieces of parchment. After that, Darragh would use her sewing skills to hide the pieces of paper between bits of cloth and the buttons on her son’s coat (Darrach, 1899). From there, her son would visit her other child, an officer for the Continental Army, whom would then extract the notes and send them to higher-rankingintopositions officers. It should be noted that during Darragh’s career as a spy, she discovered and prevented head heads making too plan by British troops to ambush a group of Revolutionary fighters, which included George Washington himself (Darrach, 1899).

A historically feminine craft, sewing has allowed secret information to be transported in a new format that may have taken longer to discover, had it not been for women. I would make the argument that women have a unique insight into onintodiscrete clever war strategies. I back this statement by pointing out that women have experienced conflict from a different discrete within their cultures and hierarchical standings. The idea of sewing information into the buttons of a coat would more likely come about via a woman who spends a great deal of her time in the private sphere, partaking in household chores like repairing clothes for her children, as compared to a man that spends a lot of his time in the public sphere working on farms or in factories. This “thinking outside the box” by women enables espionage activities to be carried out in more diverse and discret forms.