"I Was Feminine But Fighting": Agent Peggy Carter and the Shift of Societal Attitudes Toward Women Combatants
Skills at a Glance:
Research
Writing
Critical Thinking
Public Speaking
Project Management
Photograph of Captain Nancy Wake from her S.O.E. personnel file at the UK National Archives in London, England
About the Project:
As an undergraduate in History Honors at The University of Texas at Austin, I was required to conduct an independent research project and produce a thesis between January 2016 and April 2017.
For my thesis, I analyzed archival materials, including personnel files, of women secret agents sent behind enemy lines in World War II Nazi-occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.), ultimately comparing their experiences with the transformation of the Marvel comic-book character Agent Peggy Carter.
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The S.O.E. was unlike other branches of the British military in that the institution recruited and trained women alongside men in close-combat scenarios, preparing them for their dangerous clandestine
Plaque in recognition of my History Honors distinction
roles in Nazi-occupied countries. Out of over 400 S.O.E. agents sent to France, 39 were women; thirteen of these women never returned home because of their capture and subsequent deaths in concentration camps. Those who did return to Britain felt that their war efforts were undervalued as the government categorized their work as "civil" rather than "military," primarily because British laws technically forbade women from actively participating in combatant roles (laws that were only overturned in 2016).
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After the war ended, the public was made aware of the S.O.E.'s existence, as well as the organization's deployment of women as secret agents in dangerous territories. In turn, controversies arose during the Nazi war-crime trials as it was revealed that several of these women died in concentration camps. The public's fascination with these women secret agents prompted countless popular culture portrayals of their lives, with most representations romanticizing and hyperbolizing the women's wartime activities.
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Stan lee and Jack Kirby first introduced the character of Agent Peggy Carter as an unnamed, American romantic interest for Captain America in the March 1966 issue of Tales of Suspense #75. However, in the 2010s the character was reimagined as a British figure and her history was rewritten to reflect the real women of the S.O.E. My thesis acts as a history-of-sorts of the character Agent Peggy Carter, demonstrating how her evolving revives the history of the S.O.E. and the women who served as combatants during World War II. To do this, I reconstructed the wartime experiences of two of these real women, Pearl Witherington and Nancy Wake, to illustrate Marvel's historical accuracy as well as the inclination toward romanticizing these women and presenting an oftentimes unrealistic and hyper-sexualized incarnation of their activities.