Synopses & Reviews
When the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaerts home was burned and her family separated. After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation, Cnockaert embarked on a career as a spy, providing information and engaging in sabotage before her capture and imprisonment in 1916. After the war, she was paid and decorated by a grateful British government for her service.
Cnockaerts is only one of the surprising and gripping stories that comprise Female Intelligence. This is the first history of the female spies who served Britain during World War I, focusing on both the powerful cultural images of these women and the realities, challenges, and contradictions of intelligence service. Between the founding of modern British intelligence organizations in 1909 and the demobilization of 1919, more than 6,000 women served the British government in either civil or military occupations as members of the intelligence community. These women performed a variety of services, and they represented an astonishing diversity of nationality, age, and class. From Aphra Behn, who spied for the British government in the seventeenth century, to the most well known example, Mata Hari, female spies have a long history, existing in juxtaposition to the folkloric notion of women as chatty, gossipy, and indiscreet.
Using personal accounts, letters, official documents and newspaper reports, Female Intelligence interrogates different, and apparently contradictory, constructions of gender in the competing spheres of espionage activity.
Review
“How did women's work contribute to the propagation of war, and impact their own changing relation to the nation-state? How did women themselves, their contemporaries and popular culture represent their war work in gendered terms? Tammy Proctor addresses these significant questions in her intriguing study of women spies. As Proctor shows, women's substantial work for the developing British intelligence service belied the figure of the treacherous and seductive woman spy.”
-Angela Woollacott,author of On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War
Review
“This engaging and intelligent study of women in espionage adds to our understanding of the experience of women during the First World War and of the legacy of their work, both mythic and real. Proctor carefully explores why the image of the female “spy seductress”—notably the iconic Mata Hari—has endured and uncovers the largely unknown history of this pivotal generation of women intelligence workers.”
-Susan R. Grayzel,author of Womens Identities At War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War
Review
“Retells forgotten stories and unearths new evidence of intrepid female field agents. . . . Proctors archival discoveries hint at countless small acts of audacity and defiance. . . . Thanks to books like this one, the history of female espionage—from Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Van Lew to Lotus Blossum to Stella Rimington—is slowly being filled out.”
-London Review of Books,
Review
“In Female Intelligence, Tammy Proctor attempts to rescue female spies from cliches that classed them as either sexual predators or martyred virgins, manipulators or dupes, heartless vamps or emotional basket cases.”
-New Yorker,
Review
“A useful and engaging history of women in the British intelligence service during World War I. The book is an important contribution to the history of British intelligence and sheds light on the unglamorous reality of a highly romanticized aspect of women's work.”
-American Historical Review,
Review
“Arab America is a vital intervention in the growing field of Arab-American studies. At once an historical overview and an ethnographic study, it portrays a complex picture of activism as it negotiates Arabness in America. Organized around the tensions entailed in living on the hyphen of ‘Arab-American identity, the text insightfully highlights the dilemmas of a diaspora in an empire deeply embedded in the Middle East. Naber perceptively engages the feminist call for intersectionality in ways that are productive, dynamic and fresh.”-Ella Shohat,author of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
Review
“Arab America is a vital intervention in the growing field of Arab-American studies. At once an historical overview and an ethnographic study, it portrays a complex picture of activism as it negotiates Arabness in America. Organized around the tensions entailed in living on the hyphen of ‘Arab-American identity, the text insightfully highlights the dilemmas of a diaspora in an empire deeply embedded in the Middle East. Naber perceptively engages the feminist call for intersectionality in ways that are productive, dynamic and fresh.”-Ella Shohat,author of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
Review
"In Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, Nadine Naber traces the historical, political, and community-building experiences of Arab Americans living in the San Francisco Bay area with impressive attention to the cultural, religious, and generational heterogeneity of her interlocutors...[This book] should be required reading not only in Middle Eastern Studies courses, but also for scholars in Ethnic Studies, Urban Studies, and other interdisciplinary fields that deal with questions of community building, racialization practices, and anti-imperialist struggle."-Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies,
Review
"Researched over twelve years, Naber's ethnography Arab America...provides an intimate history of Arab American identity formation and social justice organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Naber's chapters guide the reader through a politically contextualized progression of Arab American history while situating her work in relation to diaspora studies and women of color feminisms."-Umayyah Cable,New Wave Arab American Studies
Review
"Numerous Arab-Americans have covered themselves in glory in recent years. But that is not the overriding theme of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics and Activism. The author, Nadine Naber, associate professor in the Programme in American Culture and the Department of Womans Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, is interested in the cultural aspects of political activism in the Bay Area, and she is particularly preoccupied with how counter-narratives, embracing sexuality and gender, transcend what she describes as the restrictions and limitations of orientalist and conventional nationalist articulations of self and ground concepts of religion. Naber tackles these themes by scrutinising sympathetically the lives of young Arab-American political activists in the Bay Area of California in and around San Francisco. By doing so, she enunciates the dilemmas of the Diaspora. The author details the personal and political repercussions of these dilemmas in an engaging manner, highlighting the intimate correlation between means and ends."-Gamal Nkruman,Al-Ahram Weekly
Review
"Through an ethnographic study of life in the San Francisco Bay Area for members of the Arab diaspora, Nadine Naber's Arab America provides a unique and powerful contribution to studies of Arab Americans." -Karen Culcasi,Antipode
Synopsis
Arab Americans are one of the most misunderstood segments of the U.S. population, especially after the events of 9/11. In Arab America, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement. Writing from a transnational feminist perspective, Naber reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle. As this struggle continues, these young adults reject Orientalist thought, producing counter-narratives that open up new possibilities for transcending the limitations of Orientalist, imperialist, and conventional nationalist articulations of self, possibilities that ground concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality in some of the most urgent issues of our times: immigration politics, racial justice struggles, and U.S. militarism and war.
About the Author
Nadine Naber is Associate Professor in the Program in American Culture and the Department of Womens Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is co-editor of Race and Arab Americans (2007) and Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2011).
Table of Contents
Introduction: Articulating Arabness1. From Model Minority to Problem Minority2. The Politics of Cultural Authenticity3. Muslim First, Arab Second 4. Dirty Laundry5. Diasporic Feminist Anti-Imperialism Conclusion: Toward a Diasporic Feminist Critique