March 8th is International Women’s Day each year, a day that gives focus to issues of gender equality and the status of women and girls. We can’t truly understand where we are today on these issues without first looking at the stories of the women who came before us.
A central inspiration for my 14 books of fiction and non-fiction over the past two decades has been to illuminate the stories of women – to write them back in after centuries of being sidelined and written out. Take my protagonist in The War Widow, 1940s private investigator Billie Walker, described as a ‘fast-talking, fast-driving, champagne-swilling Nazi hunter investigator’ (sign me up to that girl gang, am I right?). While professional women private investigators existed at the time, the archetype of the tough guy male detective – Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and the like – not only dominated but took over the stories of the era. As far as I am aware, the only contemporary full-length novels published in the 1940s featuring a professional PI who was a woman, are two little-known books by ‘Gale Gallagher’, the pseudonym of the writing team of Will Oursler and Margaret Scott, about an American female private detective of the same name that they created in 1947. There may be others, but I have not found them, and I have looked hard. This lack of representation is not at all unusual, of course. As a writer of post-war historical fiction, I can’t help but notice that until relatively recently, stories of wartime were almost entirely focused on the male soldiers, generals and political leaders of the time, and while these are important stories to be told, what is left out are the equally important stories of women spies, codebreakers and ordinary people who did truly extraordinary things. Their stories are no less fascinating.
Take my Oma, for example. Here is a woman and mother who found herself in Nazi-occupied Holland with small children, her husband forcibly taken by the Nazis as slave labour in a munitions factory in Berlin. And what did she do? She hatched a plan to smuggle flour and sugar in the hollows of her bicycle, and cycled solo across Holland to Berlin through Nazi check points to bring her husband – a baker by trade – ingredients so he could bake bread in the munitions ovens, to bribe the Nazi foreman and ultimately win a day pass to escape – an example of the ingenuity of everyday people, and the women whose stories have so often remained untold.
This year I will be spending International Women’s Day researching the real lives of the historical women who inspired my character Billie Walker, like fashion model-turned-WW2 photojournalist Lee Miller, war reporter Martha Gellhorn, pioneering spies Virginia Hall and Nancy Wake, and the thousands of women like my Oma, who history may not remember, but who have much to teach us.
Portrait of Lee Miller by George Hoyningen-Huene, 1932, via Another Magazine (left); with Life on the Front Line by Lee Miller, via The Guardian (right) from The Collector
Happy International Women’s Day to all who celebrate and love women and their contributions. May their stories be told.
**Tara Moss is author of The War Widow**