Julie Wheelwright
speaker
526 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 19 Jun
Julie Wheelwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And in Germany, I don't know whether it was propaganda department or war department or whoever it was, but they produced this, what was called a magic wallet.
And it was given out to women sort of, you know, to put their money in.
And on one side was a photograph of Mata Hari and on the other side was a photograph of Ida Cavell.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
So, they were very much compared to each other.
And so, what happens with Matari's story is that she becomes this kind of iconic figure for the woman who betrays men by sleeping with them and stealing information from them.
And this is like an ancient idea.
I mean, we can go back to Samson and Delilah.
But it takes on this new currency during the war because there's all this fear and anxiety that
about espionage anyway, which is a sort of relatively new thing.
There's this popular figure in French culture and also in British culture of what, you know, there's a French historian, Margaret Darrow, who's described this as in France, the woman with the hat.
This sort of mysterious figure.
And Mata Hari is someone who's already living on the kind of edges, partly because of her career in the state, but also she's divorced and she's quite open about being a courtesan.
So all of that sort of coheres around this idea of, you know, this is what women do.
Women are betrayers of men.
And there's so much anxiety about women's sexuality, but also about women as this sort of unstable, untrustworthy figures during the war.
And in fact, during the First World War, that's when we have the beginning of, really the beginning of women's involvement in espionage.
in a sort of administrative capacity, in an intelligence capacity, but also we have these figures who are, and it's often quite murky, are they sleeping with men for money?
I think a lot of that is wildly exaggerated.
Showing 41–60 of 526 · page 3 of 27
← Previous
Next →