Womens Work: Gender Roles in the Office of

Strategic Services, 1942-1945

by

Victoria Durand

Senior Thesis

Department of History and Politics

College of Arts and Sciences

Drexel University

3/12/17
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Contents

Abstract 2

Introduction 2

Office of Strategic Services: Background and History 5

Organization and Bureaucratization of the OSS 16

Assessment of Men: The Hiring Practices of the OSS 27

The Women of the OSS: Their Lives and Agency 32

Conclusion 37
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I. Abstract

This research approaches womens liberation in America during the World War II period

through the lens of their employment with the Office of Strategic Services. It seeks to evaluate

employment in the intelligence field as a meaningful catalyst for womens liberation. It will put

this research into an analysis of the broader changes in gender roles taking place at the time. It

will also briefly address the implications these changes this had for American society as a whole

and for the countrys role in 20th century geopolitics.

II. Introduction

American society has been built on a foundation characterized by a strict set of gender

roles. These roles have historically been patriarchal, restricting women from experiencing the

privileges and responsibilities of full involvement in public life. The nuclear family has

traditionally emulated this power structure in microcosm, and enforced female subjugation on a

larger scale. Men were to work, to achieve intellectually and professionally, to enjoy their social

lives while women were to remain confined to the household, caring for children. While these

restrictive norms have endured in certain forms up to the present day (consider, for example,

womens ongoing struggle for equal pay in the workplace), much of American history can be

conceptualized as the story of women straining against these boundaries.

Periods of intense upheaval have often blurred the edges of social norms, and these

gender roles have been no exception. War, in particular can be seen as a chink in the armor of

gender expectations that once seemed ironclad. War has preceded periods of gender

progressivism in American history due to the general societal upheaval it can engender, as well
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as the perception that women must inhabit non traditional roles out of necessity while men are

away in battle. World War II has oft been approached as an example of this phenomenon. The

idea of Rosie the Riveter, has become entrenched in the American consciousness as the

ultimate archetype of the liberated 20th century female. In popular history, it is often repeated

that World War II gave rise to the wave of womens liberation that has brought about the more

open society of today.

However, the true story of Rosie the Riveter often ended with her being pushed out of the

work force at the conclusion of the war. While many women spoke of their working experiences

positively, many found themselves with less than happy endings. Though they had acquired

experience and skills, as well as a taste for the working world during their employment

experiences, many women found themselves confined once again to the home with little change

except for a new sense of bitterness toward their station in life.1 So, while war provoked a

momentary loosening of social norms, and an opportunity for a select few women to escape

them, the quick return to form also represented how resilient these norms could be.

Compared to Rosie the Riveters manufacturing work, employment in the OSS could be a

particularly transgressive position for a woman of the time. These women were involved in a

highly professionalized bureaucracy, experiencing the kind of career trajectory that had

historically been reserved for men. Moreover, the work they were doing at the OSS often

demanded more intellectual engagement than the Fordist factory jobs held by women in the

manufacturing sector. Additionally, women at the OSS were involved in war making, the field

that had been the domain of the masculine above all else. In many respects, the women working

at the OSS were experiencing an extraordinarily quick and complete kind of liberation. A woman

1 Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change (New York:
Plume, 1988), 23.
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could conceivably have gone from wearing an apron and baking cookies to parachuting into

enemy territory with nothing but a hastily scrawled directive and her wits in the span of one year.

Still, gender roles had not been completely eliminated at the OSS. There were many ways

in which women found themselves held to a different standard than their male peers. They could

become victim of their supervisors deeply held biases. Female OSS employees were in a peculiar

and challenging position where they were expected to exhibit the best of both masculinity and

femininity. Often, they were robbed of the fruits of their labor, unfairly stopped from advancing

or forced right back into the home at the conclusion of the war. While war could change gender

roles, it certainly did not eliminate them.

Patriarchy is in the foundation of the United States on its deepest levels, an innate part of

its identity as a state. When the very existence of that state is threatened, it can be forced to make

concessions in its power structure. American women needed to work outside the home when the

labor force became unsustainable. However, patriarchy is so intrinsic to the state that it will not

be eliminated entirely, merely softened as little as possible, for only as long as necessary. The

wartime bureaucracy exemplified in the OSS was crucial to achieving the optimal softening of

power. Bureaucracy can replace the crude bludgeon of power- keeping women in the home

entirely- with a more versatile and flexible kind of control achieved through organizational

philosophy, hiring practices and policies.2 Observation of this moment in history is revealing of

the way that gender roles, the growing national security state and the bureaucratization of the US

government have worked together to create modern power structures.

II. Office of Strategic Services: History and Background

2 David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules (New York City: Melville House Publishing, 2015), 87.
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To effectively address the impact of women in the Office of Strategic Services, it is important to

first understand the organization itself. A basic chronology is necessary to consider the OSS as

not just an episode in history, divorced from all context, but also as the institutional

entrenchment of other trends in intelligence collection and warfare. Its role must be viewed as

part of the long history of espionage in the United States, as a part of the wartime bureaucracy,

within the broader ecosystem of warfare in the 1940s, and finally, as part of the social fabric of

World War II era America. This chronology will help to address the why behind questions about

the structure and functioning of the OSS, and how women came to be involved in the way that

they were.

The history of espionage goes back to the birth of the country itself. Both belligerents in

the American Revolution did not hesitate to use espionage in their warfare. Some of the most

storied episodes of the war were incidents of spying- for instance, the Benedict Arnold affair.

Espionage is central to the American military legacy as the first commander in chief, George

Washington, embraced it wholeheartedly during his days as a general. Washington believed that

effective intelligence collection was a vital part of military strategy. Washington himself oversaw

the inception of the Culper Ring, a New York based group of informants that has the distinction

of being the first instance of organized, state sanctioned spying in the United States.3 The Culper

Ring anything so official as a state run intelligence agency, but but Washingtons involvement

with the group set a precedent for government cooperation with spy rings.

Throughout the next century, espionage in the United States continued to be carried out by

organizations in cooperation with the state, but these organizations were not created or

3 Alexander Rose, Washingtons Spies: The Story of Americas First Spy Network (New York: Bantam,
2007), 76.
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administered by the American government. These were groups of private citizens, providing their

own training, employees and resources, which would simply share some of the information that

they collected with the government. The spy network serving the Confederacy during the Civil

War led by Rose Greenhow is an excellent example of one of these non-state spy rings.

Greenhow was a politically connected socialite who was able to use her social position to collect

strategically valuable information. She invited prominent Union politicians to soirees in her

home, where she would subtly glean information that she would then pass on to the

Confederacy.4 This was the way that espionage was conducted throughout the majority of

American history. Greenhow was employed by any government or trained in the ways of spying

by any well established network, she was simply a private citizen who had access to information

by virtue of her circumstances, and used this privilege to aid those who had gained her personal

political sympathies. By virtue of this, the institution of espionage has never been politically

neutral. Though espionage is now conducted by state actors, the organizations that carry it out

still have their own values and motivations, just as Greenhow did when she aided the

Confederacy. Though the OSS and its descendant organizations reflect the more widespread

values of American patriotism, they are not and have never been apolitical.

In the subsequent decades, when espionage became more formally organized, it was still

conducted primarily by private organizations rather than the state, and often had nothing to do

with the state at all. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which operated throughout the late 19th

and early 20th centuries, was one of the largest and most well known (or notorious) of these

organizations. The Pinkertons were well organized and had a well developed network of

resources at its disposal thanks to its practice of contracting talented detectives from around the

4 Michael Sulik, Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War.
(Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014), 82.
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country.5 Though it enjoyed state approval and often state collusion, The Pinkerton Detective

Agency did not serve the American government in an official capacity. The agency focused

primarily on corporate interests and devoted much of its time to espionage within labor

movements.6 The Pinkerton Labor Spy, published in 1907 was a less than sympathetic narrative

of these activities by former employee Morris Friedman. Friedman is quoted as saying the

Agency meanwhile established and up to the time of the writing of this work has perfected a

system of espionage, calumny and persecution of labor of all crafts and classes which is, if

possible, even more intolerable and pernicious than the universally detested and infamous Secret

Police of Russia.7 The Pinkerton Detective Agency, despite its tacit state approval was seen with

well earned disdain by a large portion of the American public, particularly those involved in the

labor movement, due to their union busting efforts that often culminated in horrific incidents of

violence. Espionage, as practiced by the Pinkerton Agency was becoming more institutional in

character but it still would not have been acceptable for espionage to be practice by an official

state agency.

By the 20th century, various offices within the United States government were beginning

to conduct interstate espionage. However, this practice was still relatively informal way and took

place across multiple agencies which were not organized on any higher level. Various parts of the

national security system would attend to any intelligence collection needs that happened to come

up in the course of their duties. The Department of State was responsible for most of Americas

foreign espionage, with the armed forces frequently participating as well. Still, it was rare that

5 Frank Morn, The Eye that Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency
(Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1982), IX.

6 Sulik, Spying in America, 71.

7 Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy (Chatsworth, CA: Wilshire Book Company, 1907), 2.
 8

these branches would combine their efforts and there was no standardized training or set of

practices. It was not until 1941 that there was an initiative to combine all of these efforts under a

single masthead. It was this year that William J. Donovan, a decorated veteran of the First World

War was named the Coordinator of Information. In this role, Donovan would be officially in

charge of synthesizing the intelligence operations undertaken by this melange of organizations.8

When Donovan was first given this role, he had a clearly defined goal: to formally

combine all American intelligence operations. However, for the first part of his tenure he had no

organization over which to preside or official structure to help him accomplish this assignment.

Without these, Donovan served as COI for a year, overseeing the transition to the new agency

and beginning to combine the intelligence practices of different branches. This work continued

until the Office of Strategic Services was formally established in 1942.9 For the first time, the

United States had a government administered organization in charge of coordinating all interstate

intelligence operations, comparable to organizations like MI5, which had existed in Great Britain

for decades. The new OSS had a central leader, an organized bureaucratic structure, an army of

extensively trained employees, and a governing set of principles. Until now, espionage had been

able to serve a variety of different interests, changing its form based on those interests.

Espionage carried out to serve the Confederacy would not necessarily take the same shape as

Pinkerton espionage focused on taking down labor unions. Now, espionage would be held to the

same standard as any other part of the government.

8 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services: Americas First Intelligence Agency,
Central Intelligence Agency Library, 2007, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/intelligence-
history/oss.

9 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

 9

Due to its position outside of the bureaucratic mainstream, espionage had historically had

a degree of leeway in its adherence to the values reflected in American institutions, including the

ability to offer more flexible roles to female spies. Women like Greenhow often led private spy

networks in part because of their gender, not in spite of it. The roles given to them as women,

like the expectation that wealthy wives play hostess to their husbands important guests helped

put them in contact with loose lipped military men and gave them the opportunity to fish for

intelligence. Assumptions about what it meant to be feminine- meek, dutiful, and utterly removed

from the messy business of warfare- gave them a kind of built in societal camouflage.10 This

camouflage could work twice over for women of color as in the case of Harriet Tubman, whose

work as the leader for a network of spies for the Union often goes unnoted.11 From its inception,

espionage had given women a dichotomous gender role, one that embodied femininity in the

traditional sense, but still gave them tasks far outside its traditional purview. However, when

espionage was legitimized by being included in the bureaucracy of government, it also brought

in a more mainstream set of standards that limited women in new ways.

By World War One, women were participating in the official international operations of

the Department of State. This is where the archetype of the femme fatale female spy began to

take shape as women were assigned to dangerous overseas work. These women, evocatively

referred to as soldiers without uniforms by historian Tammy Proctor, were expected to display

masculine traits like aggression and valor and received militarized intelligence training. They

would undertake tasks such as going undercover to glean information from German officers and

10 Sulik, Spying in America, 82.

11 Theresa McDevitt, African American Women and Espionage During the Civil War, Social
Education 67, no. 5 (2003): 256.
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other equally precarious tasks.12 In this case, the inclusion of women was seen as a matter of

necessity, part of the concept of a total war where every citizen needed to be involved in the

war effort in some capacity.13. The transgressive gender roles that had existed in the espionage

world when it was less formalized were beginning to carry over in some ways to official

government institutions as they began to participate in intelligence collection.

When the OSS was founded, Donovan looked toward other countries that had already

institutionalized their intelligence operations, particularly Great Britain.14 The recently

established MI5 had already begun to grapple with the position that women should occupy

within their organization. It had settled on a system where women were offered roles that they

would not be able to occupy in civilian life, but where they were not without limits. These

countries had female analysts and were already setting a precedent for female field operatives.

However, women that were trained in leadership roles were explicitly meant to take the reins

only if the men trained for those roles were arrested or otherwise incapacitated.15 The structure of

the OSS was influenced by these international agencies, which Donovan would work directly

with in designing his own agency. The gender roles within the OSS were one of the places where

this influence is most apparent.16

Women outside of the intelligence establishment were contributing to the Allied war

effort in a variety of fields, often in capacities that strained existing gender roles. The Second

12Tammy Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage During the First World War (New York:
NYU Press, 2006), 75.

13Proctor, Female Intelligence, 75.

14 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

15 Proctor, Female Intelligence, 77.

16 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

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World War was again a total war where all segments of society were expected to be mobilized.

This resulted in large numbers of women joining the workforce for the first time and many were

trained for more technical jobs than they had ever been offered before. At the time, any

computer based initiative tended to be largely staffed by females. One of the most striking

examples of this phenomenon is the case of Project Colossus, a joint codebreaking effort on the

part of the British and American governments devoted to reading the German Lorenz cipher. The

complicated Colossus computer was designed by a woman, Tammy Flowers, and the decryption

tasks needed to operate the computer were almost entirely undertaken by women in a largely

female working environment.17 While this particular project was not within the purview of the

Office of Strategic Services itself, it exemplified the gender roles found in other national security

operations, which the OSS would intentionally these roles in its own operations in a variety of

ways.

The work of the Office of Strategic Services was a continuation of the espionage efforts

women took part in during earlier wars in some ways, while it differed in others. The most

notable difference was that while much of the earlier American espionage had occurred within

the country, the OSS dealt exclusively in interstate espionage. During the Second World War,

OSS operatives participated in more traditional espionage collection, passing along

information about troop movements and the like, but also participated in elaborate sabotage

schemes against enemy powers. Much of the agencys work occurred within enemy territory, in

occupied countries like France and Spain. OSS operatives also worked extensively in German

and Italian colonial holdings, hoping to destabilize them and force distraction from the main

military campaign. These operations exploited the political instability that already characterized

17 Janet Abbate, Decoding Gender: Womens Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 2012), 20.
 12

these regions. They relied heavily on collusion between OSS officers and already existing

dissident factions operating in enemy territory.18

After the fall of France, the OSS also took on an all out campaign against the Vichyites

within the country and in French North Africa.19 In a campaign called Operation Jedburgh, the

OSS worked with British and Free French operatives to destabilize the Vichy government

through acts of sabotage and guerilla warfare. These groups were dropped behind enemy lines,

where they would coordinate activities including a series of guerilla attacks in the days leading

up to the initiation of Operation Overlord, the name for allied landing on the beachhead in

Normandy. These had been planned by OSS operatives for some time, in part as a way to drive

off German reserves in advance of the allied attack.20 Aside from these guerilla attacks, OSS

operatives in France also participated in more delicate operations, including the surreptitious

executions of Vichyites like Charles Bedeaux, a Nazi collaborator who mysteriously committed

suicide on his way to trial for his crimes in Algiers.21

While the OSS network of field operatives coordinated intelligence gathering operations

around the world, the Research and Analysis branch was tasked with interpreting the massive

amount of information the organization took in. This branch employed eminent scholars

alongside an army of administrative workers.22 It mobilized scholars from a diverse array of

18 Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of Americas First Central Intelligence Agency
(Lanham, MD: Lyons Press, 2005), 59.

19 Smith, OSS, 71.

20 Collin Beavan, Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and Americas First Shadow War (London: Penguin
Books, 2007), 98.

21 Smith, OSS, 73.

22 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

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disciplines, including historians, political scientists, geographers, and anthropologists.2324 Its

employees were charged with collecting the background information that field agents needed to

perform operations in unfamiliar, far away lands, as well as interpreting the mountains of

intelligence that these agents returned with. Meanwhile the vast (mostly female) secretarial staff

served as research assistants to these academics, catalogued information, or simply kept the day

to day functions of the offices running smoothly.25

The Office of Strategic Services also employed operatives from Allied countries as well

as Americans. Several of its more notable field agents were foreigners with intelligence

experience in their own countries who were hired by the OSS, like Aline, an agent born into a

Spanish noble family who worked for the OSS in Madrid.26 These agents were found in different

ways, sometimes seeking out the OSS themselves if they knew the organization had a local

presence, as in occupied France.27 Once selected, these agents would receive the same training as

Americans who were hired out of the domestic civilian population- a round of practice with

intelligence collection techniques, stealth and the like. Agents from all countries would train side

by side at an area known as Area B, the site of most of the OSS higher stakes training.28
23 Trevor J. Barnes, Geographical Intelligence: American geographers and research and analysis in the
Office of Strategic Services 1941-1945, Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006): 150.

24 Despina Lalaki, Soldiers of Science- Agents of Culture: American Archaeologists in the Office of
Strategic Services, Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 82 no. 1
(2003): 179.

25 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

26 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The OSS in Spain During World War II, in The Secret War: The
Office of Strategic Services in World War II ed. George Chalou (Collingdale PA: DIANE Publishing,
1995), 123.

27 Helene Deschamps-Adams, Behind Enemy Lines in France in The Secret War: The Office of
Strategic Services in World War II ed. George Chalou (Collingdale PA: DIANE Publishing, 1995), 140.

28 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The OSS in Spain During World War II, 123.
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The Office of Strategic Services ultimately continued its functions for just three years.

Like many of the other agencies that had been established over the course of the Second World

War, the OSS was, in the minds of officials, just a wartime agency. After the resolution of the

war, these agencies were considered obsolete. So, in the fall of 1945 the federal government

began the process of dismantling the OSS at the behest of an executive order signed by Harry S.

Truman.29

The Truman administration had no intentions of completely ceasing intelligence

collection by the federal government. However, the next two years would mark a period where

the American intelligence apparatus was once again disjointed and lacking cohesion on a federal

level.30 The administration attempted to return to a system much like the one that predated the

OSS, where intelligence collection was was carried out in a patchwork way by other agencies

and parts of the armed forces. The duties of the Research and Analysis branch were passed off to

the Department of State, which was, by and large, confused and not sure quite what to do with its

new found responsibilities.31

The White House made a brief attempt to once again consolidate intelligence collection

on a federal level by chartering the National Intelligence Authority in 1946, a council of the

Secretaries of State, War and Navy under the leadership of William Leahy.32 Voices from within

the administration were quite optimistic about the new agency, and intended it to be a permanent

addition to the American foreign policy arsenal. Diplomat David K. E. Bruce, writing on the new

29 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

30 Smith, OSS, 362.

31 Smith, OSS, 364.

32 Anna Kasten Nelson, President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council, The
Journal of American History 72 no. 2 (1985): 360.
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agency for The Virginia Quarterly Review in 1946 opined that Until very recently, the United

States Government has never possessed even the semblance of a satisfactory strategical

intelligence system, but went on to assure the reader that the National Intelligence Authority

would finally meet this need and usher the country into a new era of well informed foreign

policy. Despite these high hopes, the council would exist for only a year before being replaced

by the Central Intelligence Agency with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947.33

While the OSS existed for just a tiny fraction of the history of American intelligence, it

was the first blueprint for a national intelligence agency. Despite the years of disorganization

immediately following the end of the war, there is also continuity between the structure and

policies of the OSS and the intelligence apparatus of today. As the first example of what Bruce

would later deem a satisfactory strategical intelligence system the OSS would have an

enormous influence on what an intelligence agency is expected to look like in America. It set the

expectations for what operations an agency would undertake, how it would go about them and,

most importantly in terms of this research, what gender roles would look like within the

organization.

III. Organization and the Bureaucratization of the OSS

The establishment of the OSS marks the beginning of bureaucratization within the intelligence

world, the first time that there was an official organizational hierarchy and a standardized set of

practices for how espionage was conducted in the United States. Formalizing the functioning of

the intelligence system meant formalizing the way that gender roles looked within it in myriad

33 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

 16

ways, both intentional and unintentional. Everything from the work that employees were

assigned to the way that their offices were designed had deep implications for what it meant to be

a woman in the intelligence world of the 1940s. In designing its bureaucracy, the OSS drew from

a mix of sources that had their own gender roles. The final product was an amalgamation of

different expectations in different parts of the organization and the occasional outright

oxymoron.

While the OSS was the first instance of bureaucratization within the intelligence system,

the intelligence world was certainly not the first sector to bureaucratize and as such reflected the

conventions of other American industries that had already begun the process.34 These industries

were ones with well established gender roles that were often unforgiving and strictly enforced.

Much of the OSS functioning occurred within relatively traditional office environments, so the

agency could look to corporate America as an example of an office-based culture that had long

been formally bureaucratized. As the Research and Analysis branch employed women in such

great numbers as administrative assistants and research assistants- positions similar to those

filled by women in corporate America- this was extremely influential. It was the corporate

worlds need for secretarial workers and employees to operate calculating machines that first

entrenched the idea that women were particularly suited for this kind of work. These jobs, high

in demand, were considered white collar but were relatively low paying and menial in

comparison to more prestigious white collar positions like management and so the convention

came about that women had an inherent level of aptitude at these tasks.35 This is reflected in the

34 Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
12.

35 Zunz, Making America Corporate, 118.

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OSS employment of women for these roles and the organization of them in largely female office

structures that were reminiscent of the secretarial pools in corporate America.

The Research and Analysis branch was influenced by the practices of academia as well as

the corporate world. The branch did a lot of its hiring directly out of universities, so many of its

higher ups, the eminent scholars and managers in charge of the seas of research assistants, were

already acquainted with the conventions of academia in America.36 By 1940, academia had a

relatively high degree of gender parity in terms of raw enrollment numbers. Coeducational

institutions had existed for some time in the United States. Large numbers of women were

earning bachelors degrees, women were employed within the university system, and women had

been becoming prominent academics in their own right for decades. In 1940 77,000 bachelors

degrees were awarded to women across America.37 Out of the roughly 200,000 bachelors

degrees that were awarded that year in total, nearly 40% went to women.38 That is not to say that

women enjoyed absolute equality in academia. While women were awarded a nearly

proportionate number of bachelors degrees, that did not necessarily translate to equality in the

upper echelons of the academy. Women still lagged behind in terms of tenured positions offered,

salary, or even postsecondary degrees awarded. This is reflected in the structure of the Research

and Analysis office since while women were employed as research assistants, the higher ups

were generally well known male academics like prominent geographer Richard Hartstone who

36 Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-
1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 46.

37 Lisa S. Romero and Margaret A. Nash, Citizenship for the College Girl: Challenges and
Opportunities in Higher Education for Women in the United States in the 1930s, Teachers College
Record 114 no. 2 (2012): 5.

38 Thomas D. Snyder, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, U.S. Department of
Education Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1993, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf.
 18

occupied one of the highest management positions.39 It also did not stop female students and

faculty from facing cultural sexism within academia- the dismissal, disdain or unwanted

advances of their male peers. 40

The OSS combined the influence of these already bureaucratized sectors with a

continuity of expectations of the world of espionage. Throughout the history of espionage in the

United States, women often participated in the great game in transgressive ways. Women in

times with gender roles stricter than the 1940s did things that were far outside the prescribed

demure female behavior. When Rose Greenhow hobnobbed with Confederate politicians and

when Harriet Tubman crept through enemy territory under the cover of darkness they were not

conforming to feminine expectations, but they were accepted and even lionized because they did

not.41 Within the espionage world, the kinds of actions that women could do while still being

women were more varied. Women were allowed to fill roles that would not be acceptable in a

mainstream institution because the world of intelligence operated outside of these institutions. As

a federal organization in 1940s America, the OSS was now a part of society in the most official

and institutional way possible, but it retained the legacy of the transgressive female spies that

came before. The gender roles of the OSS emerged in the intersection of these seemingly

contradicting expectations.

The managerial structure of the OSS remained quite patriarchal, masculine in both gender

breakdown and leadership philosophy. Leadership of the OSS ultimately came down to a single

man, William J. Donovan. Donovan was truly the father of the OSS as the organization came

39 Barnes, Geographical Intelligence, 150.

40 Heather Savigny, Women Know Your Limits: Cultural Sexism in Academia, Gender and Education
26 no. 7 (2014): 796.

41Sulik, Spying in America, 71, 82.

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together and was created entirely under his leadership. After Donovan was named the

Coordinator of Intelligence, he was the one entirely responsible for pulling together the

bureaucracy that would allow the OSS to run as an established intelligence agency.42 As the head

of the OSS, Donovan embodied a role that was coded as extremely masculine with its

implications of fatherhood and his omnipotence within the organization. While women would

be able to exercise a sometimes unusual degree of power elsewhere in the organization, it was

clear that the top of the hierarchy was decidedly male.

William J. Donovan embodied masculinity not only in the role that he filled, but in his

conduct within that role. Donovan was known by his colleagues as an unusually aggressive and

even reckless man. He was so hot headed that he was sometimes considered a liability, with

foreign intelligence experts occasionally expressing hesitation about even working with him.43

Ultimately, rather than being a limitation, this seems to have translated into an image as a rugged

and masculine maverick. Donovan was often referred to by his lifelong nickname Wild Bill

and the most eminent biography of his life bestows the title of The Last Hero upon him.

Through Wild Bill Donovan, the OSS developed an image as an organization that was

aggressive and masculine in its character, something of a renegade in the ecosystem of wartime

agencies. While women embodied feminine roles within the OSS their presence within it was at

odds with the organizations fundamental masculinity.

William J. Donovan was also very much a part of the military establishment. Donovan

first came to prominence due to his feats a soldier, distinguishing himself on the French lines of

42 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

43 Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan: The Biography and Political Experience of
Major General William J. Donovan, Founder of the OSS and father of the CIA, from His Personal and
Secret Papers and the Diary of Ruth Donovan (New York City: Times Books, 1982), 12.
 20

the First World War.44 He remained tied to the military command structure during his tenure as

Coordinator of Intelligence. While he served as head of the OSS he was returned to active duty

military service and his rank as a colonel.45 So, while it was technically distinct from the armed

forces, the OSS was functionally a part of the military command structure. Warfare has

traditionally been the most masculine of all activities in Western society and women have long

been insulated from its practice in the United States. While women did serve in World War II in

various capacities and their contributions are not to be underestimated, they were deliberately

kept from the frontlines and were usually confined to support positions like nursing. At the time,

even employing women as combat nurses was seen as revolutionary, their placement closer to

the frontlines than would have been sanctioned in earlier years.46 In their work at the OSS,

women found a backdoor to military service that would never have been offered through

traditional enlistment, the opportunity to undertake often dangerous missions in enemy territory

or to deal with sensitive intelligence.

Due to its nature as a part of the military bureaucracy patriotism was fundamental to the

values of the OSS. Patriotism played an important role in espionage itself as well as in the

employment of women. In all sectors of the wartime economy, the mobilization of women into

the workforce was portrayed as a great patriotic undertaking.47 This is a powerful example of a

time of crisis forcing change in the meaning of gender roles. Patriotism and patriarchy have been

44 Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services.

45 Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan, 461.

46 Judith A. Bellafaire, The Army Nurse Corps in World War II, The Army Nurse Corps, 2003,
http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM.

47 Eileen Boros, Racialized Bodies on the Homefront, in Major Problems in the History of American
Workers ed. Eileen Boros (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 348.
 21

deeply intertwined in American history. This connection has its roots in the birth of America, as

the revolutionary thought that led to its founding was built upon the idea that the Republic was

an inherently masculine concept, that by creating one, the Founding Fathers (the term itself is

telling) were fulfilling their own manhood.48 Meanwhile, the most patriotic thing a woman could

do was to occupy traditional gender roles. Women were called toward Republican

Motherhood, the expectation that they should devote themselves entirely to homemaking and

child-rearing in the hopes of raising a generation of dutiful young patriots.49 By the 19th century,

this had developed into the so called cult of domesticity, which defined the home as the most

fundamental unit of organization in America. As such, it was vital that women keep the home to

their utmost abilities and could not risk neglecting it in favor of the public sphere.50 However,

during World War Two the spirit of patriotism was leveraged not to keep women in the home, but

to pull them into the workplace, often in roles that were either dangerous or intellectually

rigorous. It is clear that the strength of the crisis that was World War Two was enough to subvert

a patriarchal ideal into something that would bring about a more equitable situation for women.

Gender roles were also reflected in the day to day functioning in the offices of the OSS,

which reflected the prescribed bureaucratic structure to varying degrees. The employees of the

Research and Analysis branch were disproportionately female, perhaps due to the massive influx

of female secretarial workers pulled from civilian companies.51 During their employment in
48 Bret Carroll, American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (New York City: SAGE
Publications, 2003), 393.

49 Linda K. Kerber, "The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment An American
Perspective," in Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 43.

50 Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 35.

51 Office of Strategic Services Staff, OSS Personnel Records, (Washington DC, 1946).
 22

corporate America, these workers had been beholden to strong expectations that female office

workers were to be physically separated from their male coworkers as much as possible.

Extended unnecessary interaction between male and female employees was avoided and offices

were often structured in such a way that accidental contact would be limited (for instance

through thoughtfully constructed separate stairwells).52 While it cannot be expected that

employees of the OSS instantly forgot these expectations, that all preconceived notions of gender

separation were instantly whisked away, there does not seem to be any quite so deliberate efforts

at gender separation between the OSS offices. Separation may have existed to some degree, but it

was more de facto than de jure.

The set of tasks that these female Research and Analysis employees were expected to do

was certainly gendered in a sense. The gender division of work within the OSS reflected that of

wartime manufacturing to a degree. That is, in times of war, womens tasks could be shifted to

meet wartime needs, to offset increased demand or the lack of male labor. However, this did not

mean that the tasks these women were no longer feminized in any way. Gender roles remained

relatively constant, but the idea of what jobs fit into these roles changed out of necessity.53 In

some cases, tasks that had already developed a veneer of femininity due to earlier necessity in

the corporate sphere were adapted to fit the needs of the intelligence system. For example, the

day to day secretarial tasks a woman might perform in a corporate office translated to designing

card catalogues to efficiently organize research.54 New tasks, brought on by advances in

industrial warfare were gendered as well. As computerization marched forward, operating them

52 Zunz, Making America Corporate, 117.

53 Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 54.

54 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men (New York: Rinehardt, 1948), 326.
 23

was largely the purview of women. Working with calculating machines, or even the large and

complex Allied codebreaking computers became a task that was reserved for women.55 However,

this example also illustrated how the redefinition of gendered tasks can go both ways. In the

years after the way, as computing became a more prestigious profession, it was redefined as

mens work.56

These tasks were vital, but feminine work was still valued less than masculine work In

some ways the opening of new roles for women meant not that women were elevated, but that

these tasks were degraded. The associations for womens work remained, even in fields that

were highly technical and skilled, or that seem prestigious to the modern eye. Computing, for

instance, while a respected technical field today, was seen as a relatively menial and frivolous

task and the women operating computers were not seen in the same way that serious career

men were. This is evidenced by the one universal truth of wartime labor: while the labor shortage

was the justification for the mass employment of women in the manufacturing sphere and other

industries in need, women would never be employed in certain roles, no matter how little labor

there supposedly was. The highest levels of management and the most technical roles were still

reserved for men.57 While women could achieve quite a lot professionally in the OSS, the idea of

one being in the one of the top management positions of the intelligence system was still but a

distant dream.

Gender roles were not identical through every branch of the OSS. There were some

notable differences between the relatively more strict gender roles of the Research and Analysis

55 Abbate, Decoding Gender, 18.

56 Abbate, Decoding Gender, 20.

57 Abbate, Decoding Gender, 18.

 24

offices and those at the Field Offices. Field work tended to be more hands on, and just by virtue

of being a field agent a woman was already dramatically deviating from traditional femininity.

By the nature of the work, the experience of a group of field agents operating in perhaps quite

dangerous territory was not completely predictable. Even if there was a strictly prescribed set of

gender roles, it seems doubtful that they could be reliably enforced in the face of enclosing

enemy forces or during high stakes sabotage missions. Overall, it seems that the Field Offices

has the highest degree of gender equity within the OSS. However, even within the group of

employees that were Field agents, there was a degree of nuance and different levels of equity

depending on their exact assignments.

The field agents that were subject to the strictest gender hierarchy were those who

worked in a situation most similar to the standard issue office. Some offices within the Research

and Analysis branch were located overseas, giving them a quasi field office quality. These were

located in far away and often unfamiliar parts of the world, with many of them clustered in

Southeast Asia. Though these offices did the work of the Research and Analysis branch, they

were subject to some of the unpredictability of field work. Despite this, the normal day to day

operations inside of these offices were by and large similar to the Research and Analysis home

offices, with some exceptions.58 In fact, the staff of the home offices were transferred casually to

these offices, as exemplified by the relocation of research assistant Julia Child from an American

office to one located in China without much fanfare.59 There were some locations where

employees were stationed more selectively. Some offices, referred to as cells in the most

58 Katz, Foreign Intelligence,46.

59 Office of Strategic Services Staff, OSS Personnel Records, (Washington DC, 1946).
 25

treacherous territories were staffed almost entirely by male academics, such as the cell located in

Algiers.60

One way that Field agents (those that were not simply Research and Analysis employees

stationed abroad) went about their assignments was to parachute behind enemy lines in a small

group with a rough outline of what they should accomplish. These groups were usually relatively

small, consisting of 8-12 people, and often included both men and women of equal rank. While

they did receive an assignment from higher ups at the OSS, they operated with relative

independence and a degree of discretion as to how best to accomplish their goals.61 Aline,

Countess of Romanones, a Spanish woman working with the OSS described her experience with

one of these missions in Madrid in 1944 and 1945- ostensibly neutral but German occupied and

extremely dangerous territory. She entered the country with a small team of 12 men and 3

women and while there were significantly more men on the trip, she does not note any difference

between the level of responsibility or respect offered to the men and women.62 The group was

placed in Madrid to feed false information to Germans and collect intelligence under the cover of

the American Oil Mission.63 The group had to portray a certain degree of gender separation so

as not to arouse suspicion while masquerading as a corporate envoy, but not to the point that

Aline ever felt the need to mention being treated differently because of her gender. If she did

have to portray a degree of corporate femininity for cover, it did not diminish the worth of

Alines work in the eyes of her OSS superiors. Aline was able to distinguish herself and was

60 Smith, OSS, 70.

61 Smith, OSS, 69.

62 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The OSS in Spain During World War II, in The Secret War: The
Office of Strategic Services in World War II ed. George Chalou, 123.

63 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The OSS in Spain, 123.

 26

selected as the only member of the group selected to stay on after the official end of their mission

as part of a supersecret network, an opportunity that was not afforded to the men that she had

arrived in Madrid with.64

It seems that the degree of independence felt by female field agents often correlated with

the level of desperation in the country that they were dispatched to, again illustrating how the

urgency of a crisis could overwhelm the strength of gender roles. While Aline operated with a

co-ed team, there were agents that operated completely alone, some of them women. Another

female operative, Helene Deschamps-Adams related her experience working independently, with

no support other than one other operative stationed far away in the country, behind enemy lines

in occupied France.65 Deschamps-Adams was an exceptional case. She approached the OSS,

wishing to work with them to expel the Germans from her country after she became disillusioned

with the political divisions within the French resistance. She came to the organization already

experienced with clandestine operations and with her own network of connections. Still, she

expresses that the OSS was somewhat reluctant to accept her help and the man that she originally

asked to facilitate her contact with the OSS initially accused her of fancying the damn

foreigners.66 However, the OSS relented and assigned her to an operation codenamed PETITE-

JEAN.67 In cases like this, the gender of the operative was secondary to the needs of the OSS in a

desperate moment, coping with a volatile situation in a country occupied by enemy forces. It

reflects the theme that guided many of the offices choices- it had not discarded the gender

64 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The OSS in Spain, 123.

65 Helene Deschamps-Adams, Behind Enemy Lines in France in The Secret War: The Office of
Strategic Services in World War II ed. George Chalou, 146.

66 Deschamps-Adams, Behind Enemy Lines in France, 143.

67 Deschamps-Adams, Behind Enemy Lines in France, 141.

 27

expectations of the society it existed within, but often found themselves needing to disregard or

manipulate them to achieve its goals as an intelligence agency.

IV: Assessment of Men: The Hiring Practices of the OSS

On their face, the hiring practices of the OSS maintained gender neutrality. The agency

considered male and female candidates for positions in every part of the organization,

consistently referring to potential employees as he or she. While the language is gender

neutral, the actual hiring practices were far from it. The traits that hiring manuals described are

often masculine, particularly at the time. It also seems that though they considered women, tested

them for the traits they were looking for and often began to train them, the leadership of the OSS

tended to be less able to recognize these traits in women. This exemplifies how, though not

always codified in bureaucratic policy, gender roles were reflected in practice as they were so

ingrained in the minds of the leadership.

To understand the role that the selection of employees played in the gender roles of the

OSS it is important to first ascertain who was doing the selection. In the first days of the

organization hiring practices were yet to be formalized. Employee selection was performed by

whichever higher up member of the OSS staff happened to be on hand at the time. They also

lacked an explicitly articulated set of hiring standards, and the decisions were left up to the

discretion of the managers. In practice, they were largely based on their social impressions of

candidates and gut feelings. Later, several of these managers admitted that they had made hiring

decisions that, in retrospect, they felt were poor.68 Due to the innate nature of gender roles, it is

68 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men (New York: Rinehardt, 1948), 10.
 28

likely that they, consciously and unconsciously influenced perceptions of who seemed like a

good fit.

Quickly, the OSS realized the need for an official set of hiring guidelines. In the 1940s,

the psychological analysis of bureaucratic organizations was coming into its own as an area of

study. In 1940 Robert K. Merton had suggested that bureaucracies should select employees based

not only on practical training, but on temperament and personality.69 The OSS staff realized that

there was an absolute dearth of espionage experience in the hiring population and that the tasks

future employees would be asked to perform were often entirely unprecedented or still unknown.

As such, any set of hiring standards would need to focus on personality and temperament, a

reflection of Mertons theory in action.70 In order to ascertain what these personality traits

should be, the OSS turned to the advice of prominent psychologists of the time, primarily

Harvard based clinician Henry A. Murray.71 Murrays theory of personology was based on the

idea that personality stemmed from a persons needs and that these needs could be ascertained

only through a narrative analysis of the subjects life.72 Personality assessment based on Murrays

theory could theoretically take a more nuanced view of female candidates than the traditional

Freudian psychoanalysis on which it was partially based, which reduced the female personality

69 Robert K. Merton, Bureaucratic Structure and Personality, Social Forces 4 (1940): 563.

70 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 13.

71 Mark F. Lenzenweger, Factors Underlying the Psychological and Behavioral Characteristics of

Office of Strategic Services Candidates: The Assessment of Men Data Revisited, Journal of
Personality Assessment 97 (2015), 101.

72 Henry A. Murray, Explorations in Personality (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1938), 38.
 29

to a series of sexual anxieties.73 However, it should be noted that Murray focused entirely on men

during the study on which his theory was based.74

It was on this foundation that the OSS devised a uniform series of practical tests designed

to reveal the personality traits of potential hires delivered by the Personnel Procurement Branch.

The candidates were taken to Station S where they were subjected to three days of testing

while sleeping on site. These tests included straightforward questionnaires asking candidates to

rate their own personality traits on a scale, sentence completion tests and Rorschach tests.75

Throughout the three days, the assessment staff deliberately cultivated an atmosphere that had

paramilitary like elements and a cloak and dagger atmosphere. Assessment staff was equally

interested in candidates ability to deal with this atmosphere as with the results of the

questionnaires.76

The assessment staff articulated eight major traits that were ideal in candidates both male and

female: Motivation, Energy and Initiative, Effective Intelligence, Emotional Stability, Social

Relations, Leadership, Physical Ability, Observing and Reporting, Security and Propaganda

Skills.77 Though the desired traits were officially the same for both genders, several of these traits

have a tendency to be coded masculine, particularly in a time when women had less chance to

develop skills outside of the home. There are also indications that despite the equitable language

of guidelines, the biases of the assessment staff sometimes resulted in inferior assessments for

73 Jacqueline Voss and Linda Gannon, Sexism in the Theory and Practice of Clinical Psychology,
Professional Psychology 9 (1978), 624.

74 Murray, Explorations in Personality, 2.

75 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 72.

76 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 58.

77 Lenzenweger, Factors Underlying the Psychological and Behavioral Characteristics, 107.

 30

women. In one case, a woman who, based on all of her written tests, was of a reserved character

was unaccountably described as a confused and erratic nervous wreck by a male

interviewers.78 The writers of Assessment of Men seemed to be aware of the problem,

complaining that male assessment staff would rate male candidates too highly based on their

superficial social charms.79 Gender bias also crept into official tests in seemingly unintentional

ways. One sentence completion test read When he heard the news of Pearl Harbor, Paul. The

desired answer was enlisted, which seems like a much less likely conclusion for a woman who

could barely find employment outside the home let alone enlist.80

The ideal female OSS candidate was to embody both the masculine and the feminine. Naturally,

any woman had to compete with male candidates to embody traditionally masculine traits. The

women willing to go through this testing process, as Lenzenweger points out in his Assessment

of Men analysis, had already self selected as embodying these traits- likely to be of a more

adventurous disposition than most.81 However, the female OSS candidate could face backlash

(even beyond that which she would encounter in any other workplace) should she abandon her

femininity too entirely. The ability to feign the trappings of innocent femininity was an

invaluable asset for female agents; it was crucial that she be able to take advantage of her

enemys assumptions that she be ignorant, uninformed and timid.82

78 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 443.

79 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 442.

80 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 72.

81 Lenzenweger, Factors Underlying the Psychological and Behavioral Characteristics, 105.

82 Deirdre Osborne, I do not know about politics or government...I am a housewife: The Female
Secret Agent and the Male War Machine in Occupied France (1942-45), Women: A Cultural Review 1
(2006): 43.
 31

After this round of personality testing, recruits were subjected to a cursory test of skills and then

additional skills training after they were assigned to the most suitable post.83 Again, men and

women went through the same training regimen, but gender bias still loomed. In one example,

recruits were normally subjected to a Bridge Test, where they were asked to create an

improvised bridge to cross a swimming pool. This test was deemed unsuitable for women, who

were instead asked to devise an efficient filing system.84 It is unsurprising then that, though they

had been expected to show uncommon ingenuity and resourcefulness in the hiring process, the

women selected from the Civilian Personnel Branch were often relegated to secretarial roles

within the Research and Analysis branch. The women in secretarial roles at the OSS were

expected to show more grit than a civilian secretary, but it was beyond consideration that male

recruits take this role.85 Tellingly, Donovan once referred to the Research and Analysis

administrative staff as the invisible apron strings of the OSS.86

While a male recruit would never be asked to do the womens work of the Research and

Analysis branch, female recruits would be placed in the field when the situation was cire enough.

Many of the cadres including female agents were placed in occupied France or Spain, which

OSS agent Aline notes was one of the most dangerous missions she could have been given.87

There was an almost humorous irony in the situation: a lady could not risk getting wet in a

swimming pool, but could be parachuted behind enemy lines to risk her life for her country.

83 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 13.

84 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 60.

85 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men, 61.

86 Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 11.

87 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The OSS in Spain During World War II, 122.
 32

When they were placed on this dangerous assignments, women were trained in the same areas as

their male colleagues, taught morse code, memory tricks, and surveillance skills.88 There was

certainly no assumption that the women would remain safe on these missions, as they were also

trained in Guerilla techniques and combat.89 It is apparent that women were not considered

incapable of the work their male colleagues as they were trusted with some of the most difficult

and high stakes jobs that the OSS had to give. When they were limited it is because the

expectations of what kind of work women did were so ingrained that they would not be

questioned except when circumstances had become dire.

V. The Women of the OSS: Their Lives and Agency

Of course, true measure of liberation is not the practices of the organization, but the experiences

and opinions of the women who experienced them. The women of the OSS were often aware that

they were occupying a role that would not have been attainable in different circumstances and

seem to be largely overjoyed by the opportunity. Many found their positions rewarding due to the

excitement of the work, the self actualization of having a career and the feeling of importance

that came from serving their countries. Still, they also seemed acutely aware of the ways that

their gender still limited them. Gender roles could sometimes be felt more sharply when they

were in the process of change.

Employment at the OSS represented a major advance for women in the workforce in that

it was a career rather than a job. Work at the OSS was unusually lucrative for women. A woman

88 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The OSS in Spain During World War II, 122.

89 Beavan, Operation Jedburgh, 72.

 33

employed in Research and Analysis could usually expect to receive as a salary of about $2,50090

which was, according to the US Census Bureau, about 4 times the pre war median income for

women. The nature of the work also had an upward mobility that would be expected of a modern

career but was unusual for jobs that would be offered to a woman at the time. It was possible to

advance within ones job, in terms of both pay and prestige. This is reflected in the career

trajectory of famed OSS employee Julia Child, as illustrated in her personnel file. When she

joined the OSS, her only prior employment had been a job at a department store with little

opportunity for advancement, but at the OSS she was able to begin as a temporary clerk, attain

permanent employee status then progress to be a research assistant and, ultimately, an

administrative assistant. 91 Doris Bohrer had a similar experience, starting her career as a typist

and progressing to an assignment where she analyzed aerial photographs and maps.92

Those within the OSS acknowledged the atypical roles of the women in the organization.

Female agents were aware that their work transcended traditional boundaries. They often spoke

positively of having found a less feminine part of themselves, a capacity for aggression they

hadnt known existed.93 Women received a degree of respect from those within the OSS that

suited the difficulty of their work and an acknowledgement their skill in carrying it out. One

woman in particular, Lucy Mcguire, was regarded as largely responsible for holding the OSS

together.94 However, while they were afforded greater respect than they may have in another

90 OSS Personnel Files

91 OSS Personnel Files

92 Ian Shapira, Decades after duty in the OSS and CIA, spy girls find each other in retirement,
Washington Post, June 26th 2011, accessed February 7th, 2017.

93 Deborah van Seters, Hardly Hollywoods Ideal: Female Autobiographies of Secret Service Work,
1914-45, Intelligence and National Security 7 (2009): 404.

94 McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 15.

 34

situation, the women of the OSS would also denigrated or at least dismissed in a way that men

in their position never would be. The Research and Analysis women were widely referred to

dismissively as glamour girls. Their work was subject to the contradiction that has long

plagued women- they were regarded as indispensable but still inferior. This also played out in

the organizations official power structure. While women were sometimes able to advance to lead

their own branches, an equal number found themselves working under younger or objectively

less qualified men.95 These examples of sexism were not malicious, but reflected a deeply held

culture wide idea that the work women did was less serious simply because women did it.

The combination of respect and devaluation they were treated with can be explained by the

encounter between the masculine and feminine in the role of the OSS woman. It is not a case of

the masculine mitigating the feminine, the former bringing a woman respect while the latter

limits it. Rather, the masculine exacerbates the feminine. In the Research and Analysis employee

the masculine coded traits of leadership and resourcefulness transform the submissive role of the

secretary, which exists to make the boss life easier, into one more like that of the mother. This

role is viewed with appreciation, even deference, but it does not command the same professional

respect as a purely masculine role. The masculine-feminine woman is not without power, but her

role is firmly below the role of the masculine professional in the quasi militaristic hierarchy of

the OSS.

In the female field agent the masculine-feminine dialectic produces the archetype of the

femme fatale. Her maleness is overt, embodying the aggression, participation in war, even the

physical violence of masculinity. A 1944 photograph shows a group of female OSS operatives

95 McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 34.

 35

shipping out from Camp Patrick Henry. The women in this photograph reflect the transcendent

gender role that they occupied in their dress. Though they are posing in the familiar styles of

male soldiers departing for war, and they wear the accessories of the soldier, a helmet and rugged

pack, they also wear distinctly feminine clothing. The shoes are flat and their hair pulled back

under their helmets, but their dresses would not be out of place in a housewifes kitchen.96 It is

clear that though they participate in masculine activities, they have not relinquished their

femininity. This contradiction is a crucial component of their identity.

The female field operative needed to maintain her femininity as she was called upon to use it in

her assignments. The idea that women have an innate intuitive understanding of men that no man

could ever achieve has deep roots in Western Patriarchy.97 The OSS seemed to believe this

intuition could be used to devious ends to subtly influence men and undermine the war effort.

Morale Operations focused on disseminating propaganda were commonly carried out by

women. Some of these were political in nature, such as one campaign in Germany called

Operation Sauerkraut that accused Hitler of sacrificing Germany for his own political power.98

However, they often relied on leveraging the femininity of the women who carried them out.

Inducing sexual insecurities in enemy troops was a popular goal of these campaigns, as in one

carried out by Elizabeth Mcintosh in Japan.99 Here, the masculine features of these women

undercut with a fundamental femininity gave them a sexual power.

96 War Department, [War correspondents and personnel of the Office of Strategic Services leaving from
the railhead, Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, enroute overseas.] Photograph. 1945. From National
Archives at College Park: Series: Photographic Albums of Prints of Hampton Roads Ports of
Embarkation, 9/1942-12/1945, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/542171.

97 Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 66.

98 McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 64.

99 Shapira, Decades after duty

 36

After the conclusion of the war and the dissolution of the OSS, some women were able to

maintain these newly formed identities. Though the OSS had been disbanded, the intelligence

community emerged as a sector where it was possible, if not common for women to advance

professionally. Women who chose to (or were able to) remain in the field after the war did have

professional experience that was not afforded to them in civilian life. In some cases, they used

this to go on to employment with the CIA, as in the case of the legendary limping lady Virginia

Hall.100 Hall had been the archetypal female spy, renowned for valor and resourcefulness as much

as for her refined aristocratic sensibilities. After the war, Hall was so embedded in the spy

lifestyle that she found herself incapable of pursuing any other kind of life. She was able to use

her OSS experience to build a very successful intelligence career.101 However, Hall had the

advantages of already coming from an elite Strata of society and of having a particularly

distinguished OSS career that had entrenched her in popular culture and not every woman would

be so lucky.

Women had often been offered prestigious positions with the expectation that they would be

leaving when the war was over. Though women were good enough to fill these positions for now,

there was still a professional hierarchy, common across the sectors of the wartime economy, that

ranked them below men.102 Many former OSS women found themselves alienated after they

returned to their lives as housewives or in less prestigious jobs. They struggled to come to terms

with a lack of recognition that they felt could be attributed to their gender. They felt that their

100 Cate Lineberry, Wanted: The Limping Lady. The Smithsonian Institute, 1 February 2007, accessed
3 March 2017.

101 Lineberry, Wanted: The Limping Lady.

102 Abbate, Decoding Gender, 19.

 37

deep commitment to their cause had gone unnoticed, and many were emotionally affected,

expressing deep disappointment.103

VI. Conclusion

The question of whether the Office of Strategic Services helped to make women more

liberated is difficult to answer, perhaps because it is not quite the right question to ask. The rich

variety in the experience of the women of the OSS illustrates the fundamental truth of the

feminine experience- liberation is not linear or easy to quantify. Change comes in fits and starts,

with one institution reflecting both the best and worst of society. Rather than formulating the

OSS purely as a tool of women's liberation, it is more accurate to think of it as one of the places

where the work of redefining womanhood for the 20th century was being done. The organization

often allowed women to do things that would have been unacceptable in other situations, giving

them access to the war making sphere of society they had once been locked out of. Its female

employees achieved feats both intellectual and heroic that were far outside the role of the

average house wife. However, these women were still viewed as women by society and did have

limits imposed upon them. Gender roles were not dissipating, but the idea of what could fit

within their were changing.

Espionage has historically been an outlier by allowing its female participants to operate

outside of the strict gender roles enforced in the rest of society. The OSS showed continuity here

by allowing women to run its offices and participate in dangerous field operations, but it also

began imposing stricter gender roles upon the espionage community. Women could achieve at

103 Shapira, Decades after duty

 38

the OSS, but they were still girls. While their femininity was thought to be vital to their work,

it also marked them as the inferior of their male coworkers in many ways. The OSS was not

exempt from patriarchal power structures and the work women did was still women's work.

The definition of womens work had simply changed to incorporate tasks outside the confines of

the household. The traits associated with masculinity or femininity were not substantially

different here, but the tasks that a woman could do while remaining feminine were expanded to

suit the needs of the organization.

Employment at the OSS could offer some vital material advantages to women. Even the

secretarial positions that were similar to the work that women could find in the civilian world

tended to pay better. Women could also expect to find opportunity for professional advancement

if they wished. It was possible to join the OSS in a basic administrative position and then

advance to a leadership role. However, the highest echelons of leadership were still reserved for

men. Additionally, while the OSS offered professional gains for women during their employment

with the organization, these gains tended to dissipate after it was dissolved. The cases in which a

woman was able to use their OSS experience to pursue a successful intelligence career in the

subsequent decades were more the exception than the rule. More often, women found themselves

not far off from how they had been before the war.

While it may have had mixed results in the lives of individual women, the intelligence

sector that emerged from the OSS had a vital role in reformulating patriarchy for the 20th century

world. Patriarchy has long been central to the American conception of itself as a nation. During

World War II and in the years afterward, American patriarchy revealed itself as something

flexible and versatile. At the OSS women were allowed to do things that they had not been

before, but the mere fact that there was anyone to allow them to do anything is revealing. It is a
 39

powerful illustration of how by introducing nominal equality a system of oppression can sure

up its domination.

The small acquiescence to liberation were vital not only to maintaining patriarchy, but as

a building block of a new American ideology. The role of women was reformulated to better suit

the challenges of the modernizing world. The rise of globalized industrial capitalism demanded a

shift in the economic expectations of women. A society where more than half of the population

was confined to the domestic sphere could no longer suit the needs of the United States,

particularly as the Soviet Union became an increasingly formidable ideological adversary. The

country's venture into the global sphere also birthed the concept of national security eventually

elevating it to a matter of highest concern for a country that had once been reluctant to engage

with the world outside of its borders. These redefinition of gender roles enlisted women in the

project of building a national security state. It also established the tendency for the United States

to socially liberalize in the face of military threats, which can then be used as a form of leverage

against enemies who can now be portrayed as backward and fundamentally immoral.104

The role of women had always been a building block in the sense of American national identity.

The newly redefined gender roles that were in part built by institutions like the OSS allowed

women to participate more actively in the project of American identity. To say that gender roles

were liberalized due to necessity and desperation in war time is not quite accurate. Wartime was

a catalyst in an active process, which women participated in, to build a slightly shifted set of

gender roles. Though the outcomes for women were mixed and often negative, the OSS is a

microcosm of the changes in American hierarchy and ideology that brought the country into its

20th century conception of self.

104 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007), 5.
40
 41

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