Sep 24, 2026 · 5 min · 5 segments
On September 24, 1942, Lise de Baissac parachuted into Nazi-occupied France. She was a spy, sent by Great Britain, to cause disruption behind enemy lines. I am currently on research break preparing…
If you sign up, you will get an email every Monday telling you what happened on this day in women's history.
If you were to sign up for such a newsletter, it might say something like this: On July 22nd, 1940, Winston Churchill signed the Special Operations Executive, bringing the SOE into existence.
He called it his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
It would be secretive and duplicitous.
It would not challenge the Germans openly, but sneak its way in and blow things up behind their backs.
Literally blow things up, I mean.
Churchill's word-for-word instructions were to "set Europe ablaze." The captain in charge of hiring the people to do the blazing was Selwyn Jepson, and he had a problem.
Britain had run out of men.
Actually, the whole world had that problem.
One in every three humans on the planet was serving in the most global conflict in history.
Women were the obvious solution, but it was one thing to employ them in an office or a factory.
Sending them behind enemy lines as saboteurs was entirely different.
Unthinkable, ungentlemanlike in the extreme.
For goodness' sake, the whole point of the war was to protect our women and children, wasn't it? Selwyn Jepson argued for women as spies anyway, and he won.
After all, Britain didn't have anyone else to send.
She looked right.
She sounded right.
And after intensive training in spy school, she knew a lot of other things, too, such as parachute jumping.
If you sign up, you will get an email every Monday telling you what happened on this day in women's history.
If you were to sign up for such a newsletter, it might say something like this: On July 22nd, 1940, Winston Churchill signed the Special Operations Executive, bringing the SOE into existence.
He called it his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
It would be secretive and duplicitous.
It would not challenge the Germans openly, but sneak its way in and blow things up behind their backs.
Literally blow things up, I mean.
Churchill's word-for-word instructions were to "set Europe ablaze." The captain in charge of hiring the people to do the blazing was Selwyn Jepson, and he had a problem.
Britain had run out of men.
Actually, the whole world had that problem.
One in every three humans on the planet was serving in the most global conflict in history.
Women were the obvious solution, but it was one thing to employ them in an office or a factory.
Sending them behind enemy lines as saboteurs was entirely different.
Unthinkable, ungentlemanlike in the extreme.
For goodness' sake, the whole point of the war was to protect our women and children, wasn't it? Selwyn Jepson argued for women as spies anyway, and he won.
After all, Britain didn't have anyone else to send.
She looked right.
She sounded right.
And after intensive training in spy school, she knew a lot of other things, too, such as parachute jumping.
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