The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

The female spies of World War I are largely forgotten today. As much as their contributions during the war were appreciated, there was a certain unease with how to treat them afterward. Women who entered the active zone of combat were generally viewed by the public in one of two ways: as females who shed all womanliness and became hardened and mannish thanks to the dangers of war, or as gallant little women forced by duty to take up dangerous burdens, but still fragile flowers at heart. Louise de Bettignies was admired, praised, and heaped with medals, but her contemporaries focused far less on her toughness and bravery than on her tiny stature, her femininity, her patriotism. “Louise was the most womanly woman one could imagine . . . There was nothing of the Amazon about her.” Matters were no different after World War II, when Charlie St. Clair would have been seeing the calls for Rosie the Riveter to put down the burdens of war and return to hearth and home where she belonged. Clearly, women in active fighting zones unsettled their contemporaries, but they still left a legacy behind. Girls of the ’30s and ’40s joined the SOE to train as spies against the Nazis because they had been inspired by books and stories about women like Louise de Bettignies—and they weren’t inspired by her feminine graces. They were inspired by her courage, her toughness, and her unflinching drive, just as I imagined Charlie being inspired by Eve’s. Such women were fleurs du mal indeed—with steel...