Arms and the Woman
LONG BEFORE THE #METOO MOVEMENT began to spread across the world, women had started playing increasingly prominent roles in armies around the globe, from the United States to Iraqi Kurdistan. It’s no surprise, then, that the literature of war is finally catching up, expanding past macho tales into more nuanced investigations of women’s experiences.
Against this backdrop comes D-Day Girls by the journalist Sarah Rose and Code Name: by Larry Loftis, who previously wrote about the World War II double agent Dusko Popov. Both books tell the stories of female British spies who worked to shore up the French Resistance in preparation for the Allied D-Day landings. It’s hardly an unknown slice of the war—numerous previous World War II narratives have focused on women and their work—but Rose and Loftis delve unusually deeply into the personal lives of their heroines, as well as their work.
