March 16, 2026 • 53 mins
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to this classic episode on the history of female assassins and spies, both fictional and not. Intrigue! Betrayal! Danger! And don't forget style.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Smantha. I'm not coome to stuff.
I never told you a production of by Heart Radio
and in our continuing bringing back of classics for women's
history months that are very history related, we were talking
(00:26):
about women assassins, secret agents.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
This was fascinating to me too.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Yeah, this was a good one one. This was a
good one.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And you know, I realized we completely blew past International
Women's Day.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah we did, we did. But as we've said, it
feels we talk about it all the time.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's who we are.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
That's who we are. We are upfront about who we are,
unlike women who are assassinate.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Exactly by what a transition.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Thank you, Please endore this classic episode. Hey, this is
Annie and Samantha and holcome to Steffan never told you
protective iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
So Annie, I already know this. What is your favorite
spy character to dress up as?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Spy character to dress up as?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I feel like you already have right.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Oh yeah, well it's a Winter Soldier.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I thought, so, I thought, so I knew you had that.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yes, yes, but I do have Black Widow and I
also have a catwoman, which I'm not sure counts as
a spy.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
She's not going to be in that arena.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
She's a cat burglar. She's a cat excuse me, she's
a cat burglar. That ended up being like trying to
be an assassin later, But she's technically a cat burglar.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I like how you emphasized cat that.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, because it needed to be emphasized. I don't know
if you didn't know who she was, you know she is, yes,
but yeah, she's technically a cat burglar who they try
to wrangle in kill Batman obviously, which she does not
fall for.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
No, because it's catwoman, hel.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
No, because it catwoman. Which by the way, I watched
an interview with Michelle Pfeiffer recently and she brought out
her whip. She actually had it in her closet. It
was one of the most fantastic things. Yes, I've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Yes, that's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, what's my character?
Do you like to dress up as?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You know, I don't dress up as much, so I
really don't have a character that I would dress up as.
But I think my favorites buy something along the lines of, like,
you know, yeah, black Widow probably one of my favorites.
Playing a game right now. The pandemic game is surprisingly enough,
and the season zero goes back to the Cold War,
(03:09):
so having all that, instead of being like just diseases,
they're spies.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I love these pictures of our like terrible disguises we created.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Oh my god, we did this wrong. At one point,
my partner, who plays with us as well, was like,
they're supposed to be the same person. You can't disguise
into different races during the Cold War, And I was like, oh.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah, that makes we really messed up.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, we kind of messed up on that one, but
it made it more interesting. I will say, I feel
like they purposely made our people look goofy because the
forehead is way too high for some of those hairdooes.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, and I put the hat like not on the head,
but on top of that.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So yeah, I think it would be a good assumption
to think that we're not good spies already.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
And actually I was thinking about this because this is
Samantha Sugg and we've both been very excited to talk
about women in the world of assassins and spies for
a while. And I know I've mentioned before on the
show that I actually went to college thinking I would
be working for the CIA or a diplomat.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
I really wanted to be a diplomat.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
But as we talk through this, and as I have
recently for this episode, watched a lot of spy and
assassin thrillers, I would have been terrible. I would have
been absolutely terrible. And actually it kind of freaked me
out because I was like, how can you exist in
this world where you can trust no one right, and
(04:39):
also especially in our modern times, that they can just
be like, oh, at four pm every day she reads
fan fiction and cries for an hour.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Like, I don't want to be a part of this.
I don't.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
I think you have to be birthed in the red room.
Your ceremony is in the red room. You can't exactly
can't exist technically. I guess I could have been the
perfect spy because I did live in an orphanage. My
origins started as an orphanage. Man, I feel like my
life turned radically different than what it could have been.
But yes, if you've been listening to our show in
(05:12):
the last couple of years, you know we love badass women,
and we decided we needed to talk about some of
those badass women who made history in the spy assassin world. Okay,
just to put this cab out here, I went historical,
so more of the spies and assassins I think of
(05:32):
like World War two and before. Yeah, so in that
time period, just to give you that caveat, so we
don't have any like the modern Cold War spies, not
that that's modern, but you know, newer ish because there's
definitely a lot of controversy on that. There's definitely a
lot of like I found women that were hit women,
(05:52):
like it was pretty intriguing, Like it made me sad
because of course when we talk of loss of life,
there's so much to unpack there, because you know, we
want to be sensitive to that, but at the same time,
to live in that world, as you said, it is
so fascinating, like how do you even come to this point?
But yes, of course we had to do it Samantha
Andy style, sam ann if you will, Yeah, yeah, I
(06:16):
gave us a a what are those nickname? A couple names.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Momento.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, so a couple names, a couple names right here,
and we made it like this our style by talking
about both historical figures and fictional figures. So we wanted
to add those two together We even added a couple
of bonuses in here so that we're not going to
go into as deeply as some of the others. So,
of course, there are many many women we can talk about,
(06:45):
and we decided to narrow it down to just five
plus those bonuses for today's episode. Yes, and I even
put that on. Annie told her she could not do
more than five because I knew what was happening. It
would be a ten part episode about all of our
favorite characters and we would push the rules. She sure
(07:05):
did by saying there were quote bonuses or you know,
shout outs. Yeah, but if you want us to dig
into more even have requests for specific women, uh, you know,
we're always now to do a part two. Just let
us know. We just don't want to drag out things
that you're like, h what.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yes, And if any of these women you want us
to dig more into, especially well, I can't speak for Samantha,
but in my fictional women world, I did kind of
do baseline, superficial right facts.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
So if you want us to go more detail, right,
you are happy to.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And yeah, So what we're going to do is un
to take turns Annie and I. So I'm going to
start out with my historical people, which, by the way,
if there were spies and there were actually good spies,
the likeli of them not having a lot of information
is high. Just put that out there, so I may
not have as much information as you do because you
have character development as a where these historical figures do
(08:02):
not want their characters to be known. But of course
there are some that have been celebrated because they were
war heroes, so that is something to be said. And yeah,
and of course just with this, and I think this
also applies to the fictional characters. One of the reasons
may talk about why they're such a fascination with the
female and women spies and assassins is because of the
(08:24):
fact that they are unassumingly out there. People don't assume
that they would be harsh, mean killers and or spy
intellects like any of those things. And so they just
are either the mother, the sister, or the prostitute, which
has been used throughout apparently not only in the fictional
world but in the real world. Yeah, so just have
(08:47):
that pushed out there as well, write any anything else
I've forgetting.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, yeah, just going along with that, especially when we
talk about the fictional characters. If you all remember the
episode we did on What Is and What Should Be,
this is kind of one of the things I had
in mind of we're going to talk about sexpionage and
women being coerced into using that or using that because
that is the world that we live in, and examining
(09:14):
kind of the complexity therein of women having to use
that and therefore perpetuating this kind of seductious stereotype that
that's where women's power is. But there is power there
and that's where it gets really messy. Right, But yeah,
that's going to come up a lot in this story
of all these women.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And as in fact, that's a great segue in our
first historical figure, who was known as Matahari Margharita Gertruda
Zella born in the Netherlands in eighteen seventy six was
a pretty big and well known spy. There's been movies
made of her. Greta Garbo portrayed her later on. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty big. She married pretty young to an abusive
(09:56):
military officer. She was trying to get away from her
home which not so great, so at a young age,
at eighteen, she married this abusive military officer after the
marriage deteriator. One of her children had been poisoned, apparently
for reasons unknown, and then when she and her husband split,
he took the child after giving like gossipy news to
(10:17):
the world to make her look really bad. Yeah, it
was weird. The whole thing was odd. He took the
other child and left, and so she was on her own,
and she moved to Paris to become a mistress to
a French diplomat. So she she you know, made it
however she could. But soon after she became a dancer.
And just so you know, when we talk about her
(10:37):
and when we see descriptives of her, they talk about
how she was dark haired, black blue hair with dark
complexion olive complexion, So even though she was born in
the Netherlands, they attributed exotic features to her, as we
would say. And she became pretty famous for her exotic performances,
which she created by taking from different cultural and religious
(10:58):
practices and symbolism she had learned in the Indies, where
she had lived with her first husband. She became known
as an exotic dancer of the East and was renamed
as Madahara, which meant I of the day and of course,
there's also the story that another man actually put her
on this pathway and told her, you know, this should
be your name. There's a little conflict of who said
(11:19):
what and who started what. Unfortunately, as she became older,
her popularity waned, and she soon supplemented her income by
quote seducing men. Of course I'm saying this nicely in
the government and military. And because she was a Holland citizen,
she was able to travel wherever. She had a neutral citizenship,
she was not involved in the wartime stuff, and she
was able to travel abroad. And here is where we
(11:42):
begin to talk about her entreaty in becoming a spy.
Although famous, she was not necessarily the best of spies,
and there seems to be a lot of different stories
about whether or not it was her fault or whether
she was completely set up. And because she was willing
to travel from man to man, from area to area,
(12:02):
they thought she was a good candidate to get information
that they needed during that time during the war, and
she tried to work away into the German commands like
she was trying to work for the French and try
to get these conversations and information and try to get
some secrets, but she was soon accused of being a
double agent after some intercepted communications it seemed to state
(12:24):
that Matahari was a spy for Germany as well, but
some say it was a setup by both the Germans
in order to have the French arrest her after they realized, oh,
she's trying to be a spy, but also possibly from
the man who originally helped her become a spy, so
that's a whole different story. And it was later discovered
(12:45):
that she had taken twenty thousand francs from a German
diplomat in exchange for information. However, she stated, because she
did go on child for this, that she never had
any intent to actually spy and give information to the Germans,
but was getting camensation for the items that had been
taken from her by German guards at one point in time,
so she was just trying to you know, take her
(13:06):
money back essentially, right, And no one really seems to
know Madahi's actual role outside of trying to be a spy,
whether or not she was a double agent or just
an unsuccessful one for the French. And like I said,
many say that she had been set up by Captain
George Ladeux who actually again started her on the journey.
He was the one that fed into this idea, Oh
you have access, let's get some information. And when questioned,
(13:29):
he stated he had only hired her to root her
out as a German spy, so he was saying from
the very jump he thought she was a spy, though
there was no indication of this. Later, when different messages
were intercepted that contained the statements to incriminate Madahara, it
was LaDou who translated these messages, at which time the
originals disappeared and the only thing they had for evidence
(13:50):
was that translated version that he had obtained or he
had translated, and that was it. And by the way,
Ledoux was actually accused of being a double agent at himself,
and I believe he was actually incarcerated for it too.
So hello, And after being under harsh interrogations and being
represented by an elderly lawyer who apparently was the lover
of hers at one point in time, who had never
(14:12):
tried a military case, Maata Harra was convicted within like
forty five minutes after the trial and executed a few
days later by firing squad. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't just the
concerns and misleading information that led her to this conviction,
but her lifestyle as well. So they used her because
she had that type of excess through all her relationships,
(14:33):
but that also was part of her downfall, and they
used that morality against her to get her convicted as
a double agent. And the prosecutor stated during her trial
quote without scruples, accustomed to make use of men. She
is a type of woman who was born to be
a spy. And she proclaimed her innocence until the end,
apparently the last two a couple of days she had
a dance party with the nuns, not dance party, but
(14:56):
she had a dance off with the nuns who actually
were watching her. Because she didn't want to be remembered
as someone who is a prisoner and who has been dejected,
but going out in her like joy and dance and
what she was known for originally. And she said during
her trial a courtesan, I met a spy. Never. I
have always lived for love and pleasure. So she was
(15:17):
trying to let them know she never did it. And again,
like I said, there's a lot of conversation of who
was that fault and who did what?
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Hmmmm ah, that kind of stuff annoys me because we'll
never know and I want to know, right, but we.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Can't because of that information. That dude, Oh he was
going after her pretty hard.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
See, this is what I've learned about the spy and
assassin world. No friends.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
So now let's talk about fictional assassins for my first entry.
But here's a brief intro. So typically women and leather
corsets that are very monetoed and flat. That's what been
the representation of these fictional assassins. But a lot new
assassins and pop culture are challenging that or at the
very least occasionally subverting it. And researching these characters, there
(16:06):
are a lot of similar elements.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I found dark.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Past trauma, chameleons, weird, traumatic training, beautiful and willing to
use that beauty as a weapon.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Top notch wardrobe.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
It's very stylish, languages, knowing a lot of languages, often
using people's lowered expectations of them because they're women and girls,
like you said, Samantha, trust issues, oh wow, manipulation, good liars,
good at reading people, smart, cunning, thinking quickly on their feet.
There many times where I'm like, how did you realize this?
In the space of one second. This is impossible, very
(16:43):
much a lot of betrayal, but also realizing who can
still be of use to you. So just because someone
betrays you, you might still work with them. That's just
the world you live in, right. A lot of Russians
on this list, seems like no one wants to actually.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Be an assassin on this list.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Sort of started it in childhood and we're manipulated into it.
So I did choose five popular female assathens and media
with an audible mentioned am bonuses because I'm the worst
and you can't control me, Samantha, But I did. I
did keep them brief. I did, I did, and all
of them could be their own episodes. As we said,
I also try to get a good sampling. And we're
not going to talk about the Bride from Quentin Tarantino,
(17:22):
Uma Thurman's iconic character, because we did talk about her
in our Women in Revenge episode, although she is definitely
like up there when you're talking about women in this
whole squad. Oh yeah, pretty much anybody in that movie,
any woman in that movie. But we're gonna start with
villain L because pretty much every list mentions Villa and
L from the BBC show Killing Eve, which it's really
(17:45):
funny this show. This recording of this episode got delayed
by like a week, and at the time I'd never
seen this show, but listeners, I have now binge watched it.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
I have now seen everybody every movie.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
And show I mentioned for these five women, and I
really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Sandra, Oh my girl, my girl, Oh my Girl's great,
just saying so yes.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Villain L is the code name for a higher assassin Oxana,
played by Jody Comer and Phoebe waller Bridge is one
of the writers. The show is loosely based on four
short novels by Luke Jennings called Code Name Villain.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
L and Villain L is brutal and.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Unpredictable, very fashionable, often called a sociopath psychopathy something going
on there. Of the five plus bonus women that I've chosen,
she's probably the one who most enjoys being assassin. I
guess I should have said spoilers, but spoilers. That does change.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
She wants to move up in the world, so she.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Is hunted by m I five security officer Eve pol
Lastree and they become all obsessed with each other and
it's sort of a romantically sexually charged obsession where they
like kind of this game of chasing and being chased
and also discovering I guess you're dark.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
There's similarities, right.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Similarities and just human nature, dark side of human nature
and villain l really did shake up the female assassin
stereotype in pop culture. She's funny, she's endearing, she's charming,
but she's also deadly dangerous and frankly quite terrifying. Her
backstory is real messed up and no surprise there. She
was a violent orphan who crastrated a man out of
(19:29):
jealousy and then went on to work for the mysterious
organization The twelve. She really doesn't have too many in
the ways of loyalty. There's not too many people if
any guess you can argue that point there.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
She's an excellent marks person.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
She's very creative and how she kills people, and she
speaks multiple languages flawlessly. She's great at reading like your
weaknesses and your wants and needs. Also, because you mentioned
this recently on the show, Samantha, I almost texted you
about this immediately, but I was like, don't do it.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Weird, but my superpower with fonts.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yes, okay, there's an episode where they bring in, like
am I six brings in this guy gives a horrible
presentation on psychopathy and it's meant to be horrible, but
he uses Papyrus font and I laughed.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Aloud because it's like, oh, you know exactly what you're doing.
That's a font that's ridiculed throughout the font world. There's
a whole SNL skate word.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Brian Gosling tries to chase down who used Papyrus for
avatar y, but I laughed aloud.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Anyway, I enjoyed that.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Thank you, thank you for that. Yes, it's your superpower.
I'm very impressed and at the same time, like, I
don't know if I quite believe you. We're have to
have a test one day. Yeah, we should do that
as an Instagram video where I just test you on
your superpower.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
I love that show. I've only sent through the first season,
but it's gut winching and uh Sandra, oh again my girl.
But we're gonna throw it back now to well, I
think she's historical, but let's go ahead and get into it.
We want to talk about the first female Ninja or
Kunoucci assassin spy Matizuki chium. Of course, information on her
(21:14):
life and her work and her history is a bit foggy,
even to the point mini debate if she existed, So
we don't actually know. And again, much like many of
the other spies, you don't want men your information, and
if you know the history of ninja's they should not exist.
You should not actually know who they are. So these
are soldiers who are supposed to be in the background.
(21:36):
So there's a debate. Was she real or was she
just kind of a legend? But here is some historical
ideas about her, and some of the other theories include
that maybe it wasn't just one woman, maybe it was
several women who used this name, or that James Bond yeah,
or that she did exist but the stories and legends
(21:58):
were overly exaggerated to make them legends. Who knows. But
what is said about Mochizuki's chiyum. According to some chiyum
was a noble woman married to a samurai in the
Saku district of Shinnano in the sixteenth century and was
a descendant of the ninja Machuzuki Iszumu no Kami, so
she has a lineage and after the death of her
(22:19):
husband during a battle, she was approached by Takita Shingen
of the Takita clan to become a ninja and to
find other women to build a secret group of female ninjas,
which she did and train these women to collect information,
seduce men, and even kill if needed. The women were
trained to act as they were needed, whether it was
to be a priestess, a maid, or even a prostitute.
(22:39):
Disguises in lying to fit apart or major part of
their training, so not only did they get all these
ninja skills, but to become whatever woman they needed to be.
And from the outside world, this coalition seemed to be
just a shelter for young women who were in need
of help, whether trying to survive or were orphaned, and
many thought chiyum was a motherly figure trying to shelter
(23:00):
these women and give them what they need and care
for them, when in actuality, she created this fierce organization
of women ninjas, which some say grew up to be
over three hundred women in the organization, they were forced
to be raken with and the Takeda clan became very powerful.
Of course, the story goes on to talk about how
Takeda Shingen was actually killed, and they don't know who
(23:23):
killed him. There's different stories whether it was actually Chium
herself or whether he was assassined by the more powerful
clans or opposing clans. She eventually disappears in history, and
again there's a lot of rumors to what happened to
her and her organizations, including maybe she was violently assassinated.
So there's again more theories, but of course there are
(23:43):
no records to show of them or how it came
to an end. So this is a big mystery. And
it also has been movies and she's actually shown up
as characters in different video games, Assassin video games, so
it was very interesting to see. But she was the
reason I wanted to do this episode talk because I'm like,
oh my god, it's a female ninja and we need
(24:04):
to talk about her. Again. I don't have a lot
of information, and there's different people saying different things, and
a lot of it are just blog posts and or hopes,
especially for those who are fascinated by the Japanese culture
and the ninja culture, which is fascinating, let's be real, honest,
which is why we have so many ninja karate movies throughout,
but yeah, have her as possibly a historical figure who
(24:28):
ran an all women's ninja organization.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, terrifying. I'm telling you, that's what I've learned through
watching these movies and shows. They're like, this is the
scariest please. So we did want to talk about the
next fictional intrigue, but first we're gonna pause for a
quick break for words from our sponsors, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Thank you sponsored.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
So before we go into the next person on my
fictional female assassins, the spies list, I did want to
say there is some debate over the definition of spies
and assassin, right right, especially assassin in this case, I
would say, but and there are some in the Shout
Out Slash Bonus list that I actually would not say
(25:23):
are assassins, but people included them on their lists a lot,
so at least in some people's size.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah, I think I told you it was interesting to
go through my list because they confused assassin with just killers.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Serial killers.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, serial killers. So I was like, that's not what
I would consider assassin because you know that has sometimes
political leaning typically so and again, a lot of spies
and we don't talk about too many of them. Well, actually,
I guess when we talk about chiom they were taught
to kill if necessary. They did poison men and or
do what they needed to do. It wasn't a primary focus.
(25:57):
But some spies have killed so.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Right, yes.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So for our next fictional assassin slash by, we're talking
about Arius Stark from Game of Thrones. So spoilers brief
spoilers in here if you haven't caught up. So these
are this show's based HBO show based on the gr
R Martin books, and Mazie Williams plays Arius Stark, who
was this Tom Bloy turned young assassin. After she is
(26:26):
pretty much everything, Aria has to adapt to survive, and
she becomes obsessed with getting revenge on those who have
wronged her, and she recites the names of those she
plans to kill each night and throughout the day. Sometimes,
although her revenge does not always involve killing, worth pointing out,
she ends up training in combat, espionas and assassination. Since
(26:48):
she's a young girl, most don't view her as a threat.
She's stubborn and patient, dedicated, independent, resistant to gender roles,
but as she ages and trained, she becomes lethal and
her impatience wanes. While she is in many ways unforgiving
and vengeful, she is more empathetic than many in this
very rough game of thrones the world and has more
(27:11):
of a sense of justice. When much of her trauma happened,
she was a child, so when it's fresh, she is
quick to promise murder to any slight, any slight against
her family. The first man she kills mocked her recently
slaughtered older brother, which she has is more than a slight,
but she stabs him to death as a knife. But
(27:32):
with time, this impulsive vengeful violence lessons, making way for
a colder, planned revenge. I think that's one thing that
separates her from I think everyone else on this list.
She was a kid, and I would argue that she
was like traumatized, so she kind of went through this.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Assassin face and then like left it right.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
But yeah, because this is set a fantasy world, she
learns how to have no face, meaning she can assume
the face of just about anyone. And this is after
taking on harsh training under the House of and White,
and it takes her a minute to let go of
her identity of Arius Stark is something important to her
and she never really fully does. She still uses the name.
(28:10):
She hides her beloved sword needle when she was supposed
to destroy it. She has to learn how to lie,
which is kind of a long lesson for her. She
admits she is not ready to be No. One, but
she is ready to become someone else. She's also different
than the others on the little list because she wants
to kill who she wants to kill and is less
interested in taking on assignments from a higher power, which
(28:32):
gets her into trouble a lot through her training. Her
assassin identity or non identity consumes her for a while,
but when she deems her training as complete, she reclaims
her name and returns home. If you were on her
kill list, you were out of luck. You were out
of luck. She would kill you after you ate a
pie of your own sons. It was just brutal. She
(28:53):
did end up killing the show's big bad, the Night King. However, Yeah,
she gives up on a question revengeance in the end,
moves out of this assassin phase and decides instead to
try to protect and becomes an explorer.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
However, I still would not mess with her no way.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, she definitely had the big moments in Game of Throne,
I think.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Yeah, And then all the dudes were like, no way
she could do it, she could watch she did, or
about that she did, or about that well, I am
going to talk about one of the first assassins instead
of just the spy here.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Charlotte Corday, who was also known as the Angel of
Assassination and Charlotte Corday was a noble woman in Normandy
who during the French Revolution was part of the Geordan
Conservative Party and worked her way into the presence of
Jean pal Morat, who was a radical Montagnard. So he
was pretty big during this time, and he was the
(29:46):
editor of the Lami du Poupla, which is translated the
Friend of the People, and it was a newspaper during
that time, and was also the author of a Front
de la patri or Offering to our Country, So obviously
he was a big part of the movement and changing
in the Radical party. She, however, under the pretense that
she was trying to come and give him some information,
(30:07):
was able to see Morale and while he was taking
one of his medicinal baths apparently he had a condition
which he needed to be bathed often, she proceeded to
stab him to death, which by the way, is depicted
in a really famous Jacques Louis Davis painting, The Deaths
of Morac. I think if you saw this painting you
would be like, oh, yeah, I definitely know this one.
It is the dude that's hanging out the baptub with
the newspaper in his hand. Really gorgeous painting. Of course,
(30:30):
four days after he really is four days after the assassination.
Corday was executed for our crime. But she became famous
because she was unexpected. It's kind of one of those
exactly what you sit there that Wow she did that
where she came in and felt like her country was
being threatened by this man and apparently he was known
(30:53):
to be cruel during that point in time, and so
she went after him. And because no one assumed this
frail young woman could do anything, she got to him
and was able. She was the Ariya who ended up
dying to be fair and not trained per se, but
was able to pull off something but no one else
could at that point in time.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, Well, now for our next fictional entry. And I
love the idea that someone kind of dozed off in
the beginning and they wake up and they're like, wait,
what is happening.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
We're gonna talk about Black Widow. There we go.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yes, so disclaimers always with these cog book characters, there
are so many multiverses and if for you those keeping
up with current Marvel stuff, you know what I'm talking about,
it can get real messy. So we're gonna be focusing
primarily on the films here. So Natasha Romanov aka Black
Widow played by Scarlett Johansson, I mean she like holds
(31:49):
her own with the Avengers, goes against quote gods and
monsters without powers.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
So yeah, she was a founding member.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
After she was recruited by Clint Barton aka Hawkeye.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
She said, I have a very specific skill set.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
I didn't care who I used it for or on
I got on Shields Radar in a bad way. She
was trained from a very young age as a KGB assassin.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Also was one time a dancer. That's a recurring theme
on this list.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, and even after she joined Shield and the Avengers,
she still utilized her spy, stealth and infiltration skills as
well as her combat and weapons training.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
You can go.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Look, because of course someone's compiled all the training she has,
and it's pages and pages long. She also uses her weapon,
widows Bite, which is that glowing blue electroshock thingy around
her wrist.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
It's a grappling hook, a taser, disc shooter, a charger
for expandable batons.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I was gonna say, those things like that are why
I could not be a spy, because I would have
gotten myself, like I just you know, like the menute.
I looked at it kind of like the main with
Luke looking into his lightsaber. That would be that moment
of me is like tasing myself because I'm a cool
you know.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
It's so funny you mentioned that, because a Google does
me so well, but it's embarrassing this morning.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
They are like Mark Cable. So that's what me makes
some cringe. And I was like, I know which one.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
It is, light say, and it.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Was which is not in the movie, but all right, Yeah,
this thing also has like strangling wires.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
It's very multifunctional.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
She was trained in the Red Room, as you said,
where the graduation ceremony involved sterilization quote one last thing
to worry about makes everything easier, even killing. She was
top of her class though she struggled after she was
forced to kill an innocent man. She is definitely sexualized
and often weaponizes her femininity and the fact that people
think she is a woman who can't possibly be that strong.
(33:37):
She weaponizes that too. She's pretty manipulative. She's good at
lying and reading people. She is interrogating people who believe
they are interrogating her. When we first see her in
The Avengers, she tricks Loki to find out his motive
in that movie too. She's intelligent, good with technology, good
at playing roles, pretty sarcastic. She first appeared in the
movies in Iron Man two when she goes under cover
(33:57):
to spy on Tony Stark, which I thought was very convoluted.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Plotline, but whatever.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
She later helped recruit Tony Stark and Bruce Banner to
join the Avengers in the first Avengers movie, partly motivated
by her determination to save Hawkeye from Loki's control, which
she eventually does, and she's the one that figures out
how to close the portal to stop the Aliens that
are attacking from New York. I love explaining to lots
of these movies because they sound so weird when.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
They're like out of context and many ways.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
She does become the heart of the Avengers. She calls
them her family. She helps train the second generation of members.
She leaves the Avengers post snap and sacrifices herself so
that their mission has a chance of succeeding. She is
empathetic and understanding. She doesn't keep up on people. She's
sort of a reformed assassin. That's what I'm trying to say.
I think, yeah, because when I was reading through this,
(34:46):
I'm like, she at one time was, but when we
see her that's sort of a past life and she
still uses those skills, but not really her thing.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Right. Oh, I'm excited about the Black Widow movie.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Which I does. I realize it's still not come out.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Oh geez yeah, uh Sminty watch party.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
She's trying to make amends for her past, and that's
why the discovery that Shield has been infiltrated by Hydra
the Winter Soldier hits her so hard because she realized
she didn't know whose fly she was telling.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Also common theme in these spy stories.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
She blows all of her covers at the end and
then goes off the grid, and then you see her
working through this during Civil War first sighting with Tony
Stark over the Socovia Chords, but then helping her friend
Captain America, forcing her to once again go off the
grid and go on the run with Captain America post
snap or the blip, she's the term to keep fighting
to make things better, and I do want to put
asterix here.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
I feel like maybe fictional women around the world.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
I will return to this because a lot of you
are probably being like, well, there's a lot of feminist
issues you could unpack here about like the serialization thing,
the sexualization thing, the fact that she's the one that
sacrifices it's like not many women to go around.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
But yes, we're gonna put a pin in that for
now and.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Move on, right. I will say I do love her
relationship with Captain America Steve Rogers. That is platonic. I
do see it remains that way. I'm like, yeah, finally,
oh my god, me too. Although they at the beginning
it did seem like they were trying to.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, well, I think they were pretty much with anybody
with her at that point.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Maybe this will work, Maybe this will work.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Well, we're going to go and take it back to
the civil war. Oh yeah, I did that.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
So we have a Canadian woman, Sarah Emma Edmunds, who
escaped an abusive home an actually an arranged marriage, left
and changed her name from Edmunds to Edmund's son, and
she eventually made her way into the United States around
eighteen fifty eight, when she decided to disguise herself as
a man so she could travel across the country and
secure a job. She called herself Franklin Thomas and soon
(36:46):
worked as a very successful traveling Bible salesman.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
As the Civil War began in the States, she decided
to enlist as Franklin Thomas to assist in the war
on the Union side. By the way, she nursed wounded
soldiers in the hospital and worked as an attendant for
them for a while, but was moved to becoming a
mail carrier during that time for the Union, so she
would actually travel in these really dangerous conditions to carry milha.
(37:12):
She eventually was asked to be a spy and was
sent to get information behind enemy lines the Confederacy. She
often disguised herself as a woman, so she was a
woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.
Which I thought was awesome, or sometimes as an Irish peddler.
Of course, not much of this information was found on record,
since she was supposed to be a spy, but was
(37:35):
part of her own retelling in her memoir Nurse and
Spy in the Union Army. She kept seeing some battle
time and even getting injured while trying to carry mel
but eventually left after being denied furlough when she contracted malaria,
and she was afraid of being discovered as a woman
if she sought medical attention, and so Franklin Thomas left
and was charged with desertion. So she released her memoirs
(37:57):
in eighteen sixty four and gave it pretty much a
tell all, with some fictional takes on some of the events,
so I guess she was kind of embellished, but she
gave all the profits she made to different soldiers aid groups,
so it wasn't about her. And she actually went to
her infantry reunion in eighteen seventy six and was received
with open arms and was eventually recognized by the military
(38:20):
and cleared of desertion charges as well as given a pension,
So she had the backing of her soldiers, which I
believe was the second Michigan Battalion that she was able
to get her pension, which by the way, apparently literally
took an Act of Congress in eighteen eighty four for
her to receive. But after her death, she was buried
with military honors at Washington Cemetery in Houston, and a
(38:42):
year before her death, she was admitted to the Grand
Army of the Republic, which made her the one and
only female member, which I thought was super cool. So
we've talked about different other soldiers and she was another one.
To be fair, she was a Canadian woman, so there's
a little difference in her story, but she was able
to get pension and was able to get recognition for
her work.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah, yeah, well, hard pivot from the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
I know.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Our next fictional character is Hannah, which I just watched
last night. And I've been meaning to watch this for
a while because people kept saying this is a movie
you'd really like, and I'm like, I'm not sure, but
I did like it. So this is a film by
Joe Wright where Shorsha Ronan plays sixteen year old Hannah Heller,
who was raised from a young age to be an
(39:30):
assassin trained in the finished Wilderness by her father, who
was a former Black Ops officer. The CIA enhanced her
DNA to give her exceptional strength as part of a
program to create super soldiers. Her father ran away with
her and now they're kind of both on this list
of you know, must.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Kill and she is very deadly.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
She has weapons training, she can speak multiple languages. Her
father's very precise in the training of her, like never
lets her sleep without attacking her and always questioning her
to answer in these different languages. So while on a
mission across Europe handed to her by her father, she
is hunted by Marissa Weigler who's played by Kate Blanchette,
(40:11):
and she's an intelligent officer that actually Hannah thought she'd killed.
That was her mission was to kill her, but it
was a ploy, so she killed the wrong woman. She
killed a woman dressed like her. And there is an
Amazon Prime show based on the movie with Esma creed
Mile as Hannah. Because of how Hannah was raised so isolated,
she is quite curious about the outside world, like she's
(40:32):
never heard music, she doesn't know what dancing is, those
kinds of things. But also she's very very paranoid, which
makes sense it's an assassin coming of age story.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Okay, so I do know. I didn't. I haven't watched it,
but I've seen the previews for the Hannah Amazon Prime
show and I was like, hey, I know this. I didn't.
I haven't watched either one of those. Yeah, but I
do think it's interesting, like the fact that Amazon primetick
doesn't made it a series. They did the same thing,
not necessarily with a black widow, but chilled and made
it a spy show on its own. So I do
(41:02):
find that interesting too, because it is it's a very
big story that you could take in big rabbit holes
like you like think jumps that you don't realize is
going to happen.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yes, absolutely you can. And we probably have more twist
and turns in this episode. But first we have one
more quick break for words from our sponsor, Aeric Fact.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Thank you sponsor.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Twisting turns. Yes, because I am now going to take
it back to World War Two. Okay, so we're coming
because Hannah was kind of like today, what if she's
a spy? Yes, And I'm going to talk about nor
any Yacht Khan, who was born to an American mother
an Indian father in Moscow in nineteen fourteen, and she
was a direct descendant of the eighteenth century Muslim ruler
(41:55):
of my Sore Tippoo Sultan. Her father was a musician
and a Sufi teacher, and moved the family to London
and individually to Paris, where Khan was able to get
her education and eventually become a children's writer. After the
fall of Paris in nineteen forty, she actually escaped to
London where she joined the WAAF or Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
(42:17):
It was said her father had instilled in her the
desire for nonviolence and the unity of all religions, which
is what Sufie was, and that she had learned from
an early age to stand up for those who were
oppressed and was willing to sacrifice to do so.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
So.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Though she was not a British citizen, she wanted to
work and help in this fight. Soon after she joined
the WAAF, Con was recruited to join the Special Operations
Executive or SOE, which was a secret British organization that
since spies in occupied areas of Europe. So with CON's
education and her ability to speak French fluently, this was
(42:50):
perfect for her, so she against She knew different languages
was able to fit in. She became the first woman
a wireless operator sent by the UK and she actually
went into France and worked with Prosper, which was a
French resistance network. But when she first arrived, all of
her high ranking agents were captured as well as their
equipment by the Nazis, leaving Khan as the only operator
(43:13):
for the next few months. Unfortunately, she was eventually arrested
by the Gestapo or the Nazi secret police, after one
of her colleagues portrayed her. So you have all of
these like twists and turns, and there is a movie
out by the way that was released last year, I believe,
and she was tortured and placed in isolation by the
Nazis for information, but she never gave any information and
(43:36):
was eventually executed. And as in fact, one of the
people who questioned her talked about how impressed he was
of her because she was so brave and so steady,
So I thought that was really really interesting. In August
of twenty twenty, nor became the first South Asian woman
to be given the Blue Plaque, and there's possible talks
of her being on a British coin as well, which
(43:57):
would be super cool. She was also awarded the Georgie
Cross and the French Digia after her death, and a
statue was also enveled in twenty twelve in London honoring
what she did for the war. So she is a
big figure. And also there's this big conversation of the
fact that at that time she was a follower of
Mahatma Gandhi and even said, you know, after the war,
she would have to side with India over Britain, even
(44:20):
though she had fought for and it was, you know,
in service of Britain, but because where her heart lies.
And again she was about representing for those who were oppressed,
and she saw this community as being oppressed and she
was absolutely right. But it was really interesting the fact
that she's finally being recognized and giving all the accolades
that she should be given, and just being and seeing
(44:40):
what she had done and that she had died in
service for a country that wasn't technically hers.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
Well, that's an interesting segue until my next fictional pick,
which is Red Sparrow. And I chose this one very
specifically because it does include the heavy element of sexpionage,
which I think we'd come back and do a whole
episode on because the school that they mentioned in this
book slash movie that Red Sparrow goes to may.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Or may not be real.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
It might actually be a thing that people went to
and learned to basically have sex and have no attachments.
So it's a book by Jason Matthews that's set in
modern day Russia, which had a movie that came out
recently in which the titular character was played by Jennifer Lawrence.
I also watched this again last night, and I will
tell you it is tough. That was a tough watch.
(45:29):
I enjoyed it, but all right. So, after famous ballerino
Dominica Agarova suffers an injury that ends her dancing career,
which was gruesome and on purpose, she is coerced into
joining Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SBR, in order to
support her ailing mother. She is trained as a sparrow,
which is yes, someone who uses their body in seduction
(45:49):
as a weapon, also called sexpionage and given the code
name Diva. The world she operates in is brutal. There's
torture and there's rape, and there's no room for failure.
And even if you don't fail, they'll probably torture you.
And there's so much backstabbing you really can't trust anybody.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
And the training for.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
These pars involves stripping naked and performing sex acts on
strangers in front of other strangers, detaching from their bodies.
These lessons that are taught by the Unforgiving Matron, and
Dominica's main weapon is, as quote, anonymous sex object, even
though this obviously limits her and her capabilities, which some
have interpreted as a direct criticism of the depiction of
(46:32):
women in this genre, Like the movie and book were
directly criticizing those things, but in the end she is
the one who gets revenge. It's pretty satisfming playing those
that thought they were playing her. When I was watching this, though,
it's another one of those things, was like, damn, she's smart.
I would have just been like, ugh, I'm screwed. She
(46:54):
figures these things out on the fly, and she was
really good at reading people. That was kind of her
whole thing, that she could immediately figure out that a
piece of wants and needs that people had and fit
into it. From David Simms at The Atlantic, this is
a secret agent story in which the secret agent angrily
complains that she got sent to horror school by her government,
one that tries to flesh out the undercurrent of misogynistic
(47:14):
coercion inherent in so many of these narratives.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Yeah, kind of reminds me of the storyline with the Americans.
And I only watched a couple of episodes which has
Carrie Russell and her now husband, but they are Russian
spies that are sent into the US. But they have
a small scene where she is being trained and she
gets brutally raped by a teacher. But that's being taught.
This is what you have to deal with. This is
(47:38):
what you're going to have to learn, So you need
to learn here. So it's kind of like, oh, what's happening.
But yeah, I think, and it was so funny as
I was researching it. Red Sparrow did come up, and
a lot of different lists of people came into this.
And when we talk about the more modern spies, you
see that a little more mentioned now not necessarily that
it wasn't done because when we talk about the female ninjas,
(47:59):
and one of the things they talked about was being
gacious and prostitutes and being sent out as well as
priestess to be prostitutes, and you know in their presence
to get that information, however, you know you need to
and they don't expect a prostitute to be a spy necessarily,
which we know is a plot line for a lot
of the movies because partially it is true, and a
lot of the old school spies, whether we're talking about
(48:19):
the KGB because I saw KGB references, which again you're
not supposed to know much about, but a lot of
details of being dancers or hookers or all of these
things that you see, it happened a lot more than
we know and or that's the part we know about
them because that was the public persona. So there's that. Yeah,
(48:40):
So that is kind of a conclusion. I do have
a little bit of bonus and just got some mentions
just to name a few more historical spies that we
could dig into later. Christine Grantville, who was Britain's first
female special agent, Belle Boyd aka Labill, yes, a spy
for the Confederacy during the Civil War the US. And
(49:01):
then Jessephine Baker, which I know people know that name,
who was an American born French dancer entertainer, was also
a French resistant spy.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Yeah, there's plenty.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, there were so many that I was like, Okay,
who am I going to focus on?
Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, it was hard to choose, which is why I
also have a bonus mension.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
And then some shout outs of.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Course, no, you had to, you had to.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
I know you had to, and you know I had
to include the Star Wars one, which is mar Jade.
And actually, I bet she's going to show up in
cannon suit, like official Disney cannon.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
So it's giving you a little heads up.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
So in the Star Wars Extended Universe slash Legends, which
is no longer canon, but before Disney came along, this
is what was up. She was a secret assassin, raised
and trained by the Emperor himself. She became so deadly
that she earned the title the Emperor's Hand, and she
hears this prophecy in her head that she will kill
Luke Skywalker, So of course she hunts him down and
(50:00):
then she finds him and catches him and they fall
in love and she's like, oh no, I can't kill him,
but I must.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
But Twist, the evil.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Wizard, who is now in power, has used Luke's cut
off hand to clone Luke and make an evil Luke
for two of you Skywalker. So she kills Luke and
marries Luke and becomes a Jedi. And this w plot
twist is one of my very favorite things ever.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yes, I laugh, laugh and laugh. Yes, I love it
and I am definitely laughing.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
And then bonus, just to I know that they exist.
There's Missus Smith the Bride, which we said pretty much
anyone in Kill Bill Alias may Day Interview to kill
Salts Nikita, Hey, I'm flex Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans, Yep,
Samantha Kine played by Geena Davis Tremble long Kiss good Night,
which I forgot about. It was a good throwback. Teashi
p Henson's Mary Goodwin and Proud Mary. Sure least they're
(50:52):
on in Atomic Bond and a bunch of other things.
She's an assassin a lot, She's.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
Assassin a lot.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Yes, she is Angelau she could.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Do it well and Angelia Jolie. I feel like they
actually could do it famous now but like being badasses
in general.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Yes. And then there's desk Strike Elektra.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
I say that with a little because I think I
would argue whether or not she's assassin depending on which
piece of fiction you're reading. But anyway, Lucy Anna Ava
and then Genesis, which I just wanted to throw in
there is the favorite character I've ever written. And she
is weirdly an assassin slush by, but I love her
and she's a hot mess and terrifying.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
I feel like all of them are kind of hot messages. Yeah,
so kind of just like, why are these lives so fascinating? Well,
We've looked at the many movies and characters that represent
the world, and is obvious we can't get enough. They
keep coming. I'm eatterly waiting full of Black Widow, Like,
I'm so excited for it. And the one thing we
saw throughout our research was that many believe because women
(51:54):
are seen as mild mannered and often either sexually or motherly,
therefore there couldn't be any possible threat from them. Right,
They're not real threats, which makes them even more effective.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
That was one of my favorite slash most annoying things.
Watching Red Sparrow last night, it was how many times
they were like, oh, you're a Sparrow, you can do
like these really sexual things, right, but you're only doing
it for your spy thing, right, And then she does
it and they like fall for it.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
I'm like, but you just said you know what she is,
that she did it.
Speaker 2 (52:24):
And you're the dumb ones to volve for it.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
So okay, yes, yes, please listeners, let us know if
we miss anybody, if you want us to go into
more detail on any of these characters or historical or fiction.
Speaker 3 (52:37):
Either way, we would love to hear from you. All right.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Email is Stephania mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. You
can find us on Instagram at stuff I'm Never Told You.
We're on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. Thanks as always
to our super producer Christina.
Speaker 2 (52:50):
Thank you Christina, and.
Speaker 1 (52:51):
Thanks to you for listening Stuff I've Never Told You.
Prospection of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, it's dieheart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or reve you listen to your
favorite shows the
Hey, this is Annie and Smantha. I'm not coome to stuff.
I never told you a production of by Heart Radio
and in our continuing bringing back of classics for women's
history months that are very history related, we were talking
(00:26):
about women assassins, secret agents.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
This was fascinating to me too.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Yeah, this was a good one one. This was a
good one.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And you know, I realized we completely blew past International
Women's Day.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah we did, we did. But as we've said, it
feels we talk about it all the time.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's who we are.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
That's who we are. We are upfront about who we are,
unlike women who are assassinate.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Exactly by what a transition.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Thank you, Please endore this classic episode. Hey, this is
Annie and Samantha and holcome to Steffan never told you
protective iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
So Annie, I already know this. What is your favorite
spy character to dress up as?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Spy character to dress up as?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I feel like you already have right.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Oh yeah, well it's a Winter Soldier.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I thought, so, I thought, so I knew you had that.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yes, yes, but I do have Black Widow and I
also have a catwoman, which I'm not sure counts as
a spy.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
She's not going to be in that arena.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
She's a cat burglar. She's a cat excuse me, she's
a cat burglar. That ended up being like trying to
be an assassin later, But she's technically a cat burglar.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I like how you emphasized cat that.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, because it needed to be emphasized. I don't know
if you didn't know who she was, you know she is, yes,
but yeah, she's technically a cat burglar who they try
to wrangle in kill Batman obviously, which she does not
fall for.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
No, because it's catwoman, hel.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
No, because it catwoman. Which by the way, I watched
an interview with Michelle Pfeiffer recently and she brought out
her whip. She actually had it in her closet. It
was one of the most fantastic things. Yes, I've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Yes, that's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, what's my character?
Do you like to dress up as?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You know, I don't dress up as much, so I
really don't have a character that I would dress up as.
But I think my favorites buy something along the lines of, like,
you know, yeah, black Widow probably one of my favorites.
Playing a game right now. The pandemic game is surprisingly enough,
and the season zero goes back to the Cold War,
(03:09):
so having all that, instead of being like just diseases,
they're spies.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I love these pictures of our like terrible disguises we created.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Oh my god, we did this wrong. At one point,
my partner, who plays with us as well, was like,
they're supposed to be the same person. You can't disguise
into different races during the Cold War, And I was like, oh.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah, that makes we really messed up.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, we kind of messed up on that one, but
it made it more interesting. I will say, I feel
like they purposely made our people look goofy because the
forehead is way too high for some of those hairdooes.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, and I put the hat like not on the head,
but on top of that.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So yeah, I think it would be a good assumption
to think that we're not good spies already.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
And actually I was thinking about this because this is
Samantha Sugg and we've both been very excited to talk
about women in the world of assassins and spies for
a while. And I know I've mentioned before on the
show that I actually went to college thinking I would
be working for the CIA or a diplomat.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
I really wanted to be a diplomat.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
But as we talk through this, and as I have
recently for this episode, watched a lot of spy and
assassin thrillers, I would have been terrible. I would have
been absolutely terrible. And actually it kind of freaked me
out because I was like, how can you exist in
this world where you can trust no one right, and
(04:39):
also especially in our modern times, that they can just
be like, oh, at four pm every day she reads
fan fiction and cries for an hour.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Like, I don't want to be a part of this.
I don't.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
I think you have to be birthed in the red room.
Your ceremony is in the red room. You can't exactly
can't exist technically. I guess I could have been the
perfect spy because I did live in an orphanage. My
origins started as an orphanage. Man, I feel like my
life turned radically different than what it could have been.
But yes, if you've been listening to our show in
(05:12):
the last couple of years, you know we love badass women,
and we decided we needed to talk about some of
those badass women who made history in the spy assassin world. Okay,
just to put this cab out here, I went historical,
so more of the spies and assassins I think of
(05:32):
like World War two and before. Yeah, so in that
time period, just to give you that caveat, so we
don't have any like the modern Cold War spies, not
that that's modern, but you know, newer ish because there's
definitely a lot of controversy on that. There's definitely a
lot of like I found women that were hit women,
(05:52):
like it was pretty intriguing, Like it made me sad
because of course when we talk of loss of life,
there's so much to unpack there, because you know, we
want to be sensitive to that, but at the same time,
to live in that world, as you said, it is
so fascinating, like how do you even come to this point?
But yes, of course we had to do it Samantha
Andy style, sam ann if you will, Yeah, yeah, I
(06:16):
gave us a a what are those nickname? A couple names.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Momento.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, so a couple names, a couple names right here,
and we made it like this our style by talking
about both historical figures and fictional figures. So we wanted
to add those two together We even added a couple
of bonuses in here so that we're not going to
go into as deeply as some of the others. So,
of course, there are many many women we can talk about,
(06:45):
and we decided to narrow it down to just five
plus those bonuses for today's episode. Yes, and I even
put that on. Annie told her she could not do
more than five because I knew what was happening. It
would be a ten part episode about all of our
favorite characters and we would push the rules. She sure
(07:05):
did by saying there were quote bonuses or you know,
shout outs. Yeah, but if you want us to dig
into more even have requests for specific women, uh, you know,
we're always now to do a part two. Just let
us know. We just don't want to drag out things
that you're like, h what.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yes, And if any of these women you want us
to dig more into, especially well, I can't speak for Samantha,
but in my fictional women world, I did kind of
do baseline, superficial right facts.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
So if you want us to go more detail, right,
you are happy to.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And yeah, So what we're going to do is un
to take turns Annie and I. So I'm going to
start out with my historical people, which, by the way,
if there were spies and there were actually good spies,
the likeli of them not having a lot of information
is high. Just put that out there, so I may
not have as much information as you do because you
have character development as a where these historical figures do
(08:02):
not want their characters to be known. But of course
there are some that have been celebrated because they were
war heroes, so that is something to be said. And yeah,
and of course just with this, and I think this
also applies to the fictional characters. One of the reasons
may talk about why they're such a fascination with the
female and women spies and assassins is because of the
(08:24):
fact that they are unassumingly out there. People don't assume
that they would be harsh, mean killers and or spy
intellects like any of those things. And so they just
are either the mother, the sister, or the prostitute, which
has been used throughout apparently not only in the fictional
world but in the real world. Yeah, so just have
(08:47):
that pushed out there as well, write any anything else
I've forgetting.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, yeah, just going along with that, especially when we
talk about the fictional characters. If you all remember the
episode we did on What Is and What Should Be,
this is kind of one of the things I had
in mind of we're going to talk about sexpionage and
women being coerced into using that or using that because
that is the world that we live in, and examining
(09:14):
kind of the complexity therein of women having to use
that and therefore perpetuating this kind of seductious stereotype that
that's where women's power is. But there is power there
and that's where it gets really messy. Right, But yeah,
that's going to come up a lot in this story
of all these women.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And as in fact, that's a great segue in our
first historical figure, who was known as Matahari Margharita Gertruda
Zella born in the Netherlands in eighteen seventy six was
a pretty big and well known spy. There's been movies
made of her. Greta Garbo portrayed her later on. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty big. She married pretty young to an abusive
(09:56):
military officer. She was trying to get away from her
home which not so great, so at a young age,
at eighteen, she married this abusive military officer after the
marriage deteriator. One of her children had been poisoned, apparently
for reasons unknown, and then when she and her husband split,
he took the child after giving like gossipy news to
(10:17):
the world to make her look really bad. Yeah, it
was weird. The whole thing was odd. He took the
other child and left, and so she was on her own,
and she moved to Paris to become a mistress to
a French diplomat. So she she you know, made it
however she could. But soon after she became a dancer.
And just so you know, when we talk about her
(10:37):
and when we see descriptives of her, they talk about
how she was dark haired, black blue hair with dark
complexion olive complexion, So even though she was born in
the Netherlands, they attributed exotic features to her, as we
would say. And she became pretty famous for her exotic performances,
which she created by taking from different cultural and religious
(10:58):
practices and symbolism she had learned in the Indies, where
she had lived with her first husband. She became known
as an exotic dancer of the East and was renamed
as Madahara, which meant I of the day and of course,
there's also the story that another man actually put her
on this pathway and told her, you know, this should
be your name. There's a little conflict of who said
(11:19):
what and who started what. Unfortunately, as she became older,
her popularity waned, and she soon supplemented her income by
quote seducing men. Of course I'm saying this nicely in
the government and military. And because she was a Holland citizen,
she was able to travel wherever. She had a neutral citizenship,
she was not involved in the wartime stuff, and she
was able to travel abroad. And here is where we
(11:42):
begin to talk about her entreaty in becoming a spy.
Although famous, she was not necessarily the best of spies,
and there seems to be a lot of different stories
about whether or not it was her fault or whether
she was completely set up. And because she was willing
to travel from man to man, from area to area,
(12:02):
they thought she was a good candidate to get information
that they needed during that time during the war, and
she tried to work away into the German commands like
she was trying to work for the French and try
to get these conversations and information and try to get
some secrets, but she was soon accused of being a
double agent after some intercepted communications it seemed to state
(12:24):
that Matahari was a spy for Germany as well, but
some say it was a setup by both the Germans
in order to have the French arrest her after they realized, oh,
she's trying to be a spy, but also possibly from
the man who originally helped her become a spy, so
that's a whole different story. And it was later discovered
(12:45):
that she had taken twenty thousand francs from a German
diplomat in exchange for information. However, she stated, because she
did go on child for this, that she never had
any intent to actually spy and give information to the Germans,
but was getting camensation for the items that had been
taken from her by German guards at one point in time,
so she was just trying to you know, take her
(13:06):
money back essentially, right, And no one really seems to
know Madahi's actual role outside of trying to be a spy,
whether or not she was a double agent or just
an unsuccessful one for the French. And like I said,
many say that she had been set up by Captain
George Ladeux who actually again started her on the journey.
He was the one that fed into this idea, Oh
you have access, let's get some information. And when questioned,
(13:29):
he stated he had only hired her to root her
out as a German spy, so he was saying from
the very jump he thought she was a spy, though
there was no indication of this. Later, when different messages
were intercepted that contained the statements to incriminate Madahara, it
was LaDou who translated these messages, at which time the
originals disappeared and the only thing they had for evidence
(13:50):
was that translated version that he had obtained or he
had translated, and that was it. And by the way,
Ledoux was actually accused of being a double agent at himself,
and I believe he was actually incarcerated for it too.
So hello, And after being under harsh interrogations and being
represented by an elderly lawyer who apparently was the lover
of hers at one point in time, who had never
(14:12):
tried a military case, Maata Harra was convicted within like
forty five minutes after the trial and executed a few
days later by firing squad. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't just the
concerns and misleading information that led her to this conviction,
but her lifestyle as well. So they used her because
she had that type of excess through all her relationships,
(14:33):
but that also was part of her downfall, and they
used that morality against her to get her convicted as
a double agent. And the prosecutor stated during her trial
quote without scruples, accustomed to make use of men. She
is a type of woman who was born to be
a spy. And she proclaimed her innocence until the end,
apparently the last two a couple of days she had
a dance party with the nuns, not dance party, but
(14:56):
she had a dance off with the nuns who actually
were watching her. Because she didn't want to be remembered
as someone who is a prisoner and who has been dejected,
but going out in her like joy and dance and
what she was known for originally. And she said during
her trial a courtesan, I met a spy. Never. I
have always lived for love and pleasure. So she was
(15:17):
trying to let them know she never did it. And again,
like I said, there's a lot of conversation of who
was that fault and who did what?
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Hmmmm ah, that kind of stuff annoys me because we'll
never know and I want to know, right, but we.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Can't because of that information. That dude, Oh he was
going after her pretty hard.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
See, this is what I've learned about the spy and
assassin world. No friends.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
So now let's talk about fictional assassins for my first entry.
But here's a brief intro. So typically women and leather
corsets that are very monetoed and flat. That's what been
the representation of these fictional assassins. But a lot new
assassins and pop culture are challenging that or at the
very least occasionally subverting it. And researching these characters, there
(16:06):
are a lot of similar elements.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I found dark.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Past trauma, chameleons, weird, traumatic training, beautiful and willing to
use that beauty as a weapon.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Top notch wardrobe.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
It's very stylish, languages, knowing a lot of languages, often
using people's lowered expectations of them because they're women and girls,
like you said, Samantha, trust issues, oh wow, manipulation, good liars,
good at reading people, smart, cunning, thinking quickly on their feet.
There many times where I'm like, how did you realize this?
In the space of one second. This is impossible, very
(16:43):
much a lot of betrayal, but also realizing who can
still be of use to you. So just because someone
betrays you, you might still work with them. That's just
the world you live in, right. A lot of Russians
on this list, seems like no one wants to actually.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Be an assassin on this list.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Sort of started it in childhood and we're manipulated into it.
So I did choose five popular female assathens and media
with an audible mentioned am bonuses because I'm the worst
and you can't control me, Samantha, But I did. I
did keep them brief. I did, I did, and all
of them could be their own episodes. As we said,
I also try to get a good sampling. And we're
not going to talk about the Bride from Quentin Tarantino,
(17:22):
Uma Thurman's iconic character, because we did talk about her
in our Women in Revenge episode, although she is definitely
like up there when you're talking about women in this
whole squad. Oh yeah, pretty much anybody in that movie,
any woman in that movie. But we're gonna start with
villain L because pretty much every list mentions Villa and
L from the BBC show Killing Eve, which it's really
(17:45):
funny this show. This recording of this episode got delayed
by like a week, and at the time I'd never
seen this show, but listeners, I have now binge watched it.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
I have now seen everybody every movie.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
And show I mentioned for these five women, and I
really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Sandra, Oh my girl, my girl, Oh my Girl's great,
just saying so yes.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Villain L is the code name for a higher assassin Oxana,
played by Jody Comer and Phoebe waller Bridge is one
of the writers. The show is loosely based on four
short novels by Luke Jennings called Code Name Villain.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
L and Villain L is brutal and.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Unpredictable, very fashionable, often called a sociopath psychopathy something going
on there. Of the five plus bonus women that I've chosen,
she's probably the one who most enjoys being assassin. I
guess I should have said spoilers, but spoilers. That does change.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
She wants to move up in the world, so she.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Is hunted by m I five security officer Eve pol
Lastree and they become all obsessed with each other and
it's sort of a romantically sexually charged obsession where they
like kind of this game of chasing and being chased
and also discovering I guess you're dark.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
There's similarities, right.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Similarities and just human nature, dark side of human nature
and villain l really did shake up the female assassin
stereotype in pop culture. She's funny, she's endearing, she's charming,
but she's also deadly dangerous and frankly quite terrifying. Her
backstory is real messed up and no surprise there. She
was a violent orphan who crastrated a man out of
(19:29):
jealousy and then went on to work for the mysterious
organization The twelve. She really doesn't have too many in
the ways of loyalty. There's not too many people if
any guess you can argue that point there.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
She's an excellent marks person.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
She's very creative and how she kills people, and she
speaks multiple languages flawlessly. She's great at reading like your
weaknesses and your wants and needs. Also, because you mentioned
this recently on the show, Samantha, I almost texted you
about this immediately, but I was like, don't do it.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Weird, but my superpower with fonts.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yes, okay, there's an episode where they bring in, like
am I six brings in this guy gives a horrible
presentation on psychopathy and it's meant to be horrible, but
he uses Papyrus font and I laughed.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Aloud because it's like, oh, you know exactly what you're doing.
That's a font that's ridiculed throughout the font world. There's
a whole SNL skate word.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Brian Gosling tries to chase down who used Papyrus for
avatar y, but I laughed aloud.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Anyway, I enjoyed that.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Thank you, thank you for that. Yes, it's your superpower.
I'm very impressed and at the same time, like, I
don't know if I quite believe you. We're have to
have a test one day. Yeah, we should do that
as an Instagram video where I just test you on
your superpower.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
I love that show. I've only sent through the first season,
but it's gut winching and uh Sandra, oh again my girl.
But we're gonna throw it back now to well, I
think she's historical, but let's go ahead and get into it.
We want to talk about the first female Ninja or
Kunoucci assassin spy Matizuki chium. Of course, information on her
(21:14):
life and her work and her history is a bit foggy,
even to the point mini debate if she existed, So
we don't actually know. And again, much like many of
the other spies, you don't want men your information, and
if you know the history of ninja's they should not exist.
You should not actually know who they are. So these
are soldiers who are supposed to be in the background.
(21:36):
So there's a debate. Was she real or was she
just kind of a legend? But here is some historical
ideas about her, and some of the other theories include
that maybe it wasn't just one woman, maybe it was
several women who used this name, or that James Bond yeah,
or that she did exist but the stories and legends
(21:58):
were overly exaggerated to make them legends. Who knows. But
what is said about Mochizuki's chiyum. According to some chiyum
was a noble woman married to a samurai in the
Saku district of Shinnano in the sixteenth century and was
a descendant of the ninja Machuzuki Iszumu no Kami, so
she has a lineage and after the death of her
(22:19):
husband during a battle, she was approached by Takita Shingen
of the Takita clan to become a ninja and to
find other women to build a secret group of female ninjas,
which she did and train these women to collect information,
seduce men, and even kill if needed. The women were
trained to act as they were needed, whether it was
to be a priestess, a maid, or even a prostitute.
(22:39):
Disguises in lying to fit apart or major part of
their training, so not only did they get all these
ninja skills, but to become whatever woman they needed to be.
And from the outside world, this coalition seemed to be
just a shelter for young women who were in need
of help, whether trying to survive or were orphaned, and
many thought chiyum was a motherly figure trying to shelter
(23:00):
these women and give them what they need and care
for them, when in actuality, she created this fierce organization
of women ninjas, which some say grew up to be
over three hundred women in the organization, they were forced
to be raken with and the Takeda clan became very powerful.
Of course, the story goes on to talk about how
Takeda Shingen was actually killed, and they don't know who
(23:23):
killed him. There's different stories whether it was actually Chium
herself or whether he was assassined by the more powerful
clans or opposing clans. She eventually disappears in history, and
again there's a lot of rumors to what happened to
her and her organizations, including maybe she was violently assassinated.
So there's again more theories, but of course there are
(23:43):
no records to show of them or how it came
to an end. So this is a big mystery. And
it also has been movies and she's actually shown up
as characters in different video games, Assassin video games, so
it was very interesting to see. But she was the
reason I wanted to do this episode talk because I'm like,
oh my god, it's a female ninja and we need
(24:04):
to talk about her. Again. I don't have a lot
of information, and there's different people saying different things, and
a lot of it are just blog posts and or hopes,
especially for those who are fascinated by the Japanese culture
and the ninja culture, which is fascinating, let's be real, honest,
which is why we have so many ninja karate movies throughout,
but yeah, have her as possibly a historical figure who
(24:28):
ran an all women's ninja organization.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, terrifying. I'm telling you, that's what I've learned through
watching these movies and shows. They're like, this is the
scariest please. So we did want to talk about the
next fictional intrigue, but first we're gonna pause for a
quick break for words from our sponsors, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Thank you sponsored.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
So before we go into the next person on my
fictional female assassins, the spies list, I did want to
say there is some debate over the definition of spies
and assassin, right right, especially assassin in this case, I
would say, but and there are some in the Shout
Out Slash Bonus list that I actually would not say
(25:23):
are assassins, but people included them on their lists a lot,
so at least in some people's size.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah, I think I told you it was interesting to
go through my list because they confused assassin with just killers.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Serial killers.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, serial killers. So I was like, that's not what
I would consider assassin because you know that has sometimes
political leaning typically so and again, a lot of spies
and we don't talk about too many of them. Well, actually,
I guess when we talk about chiom they were taught
to kill if necessary. They did poison men and or
do what they needed to do. It wasn't a primary focus.
(25:57):
But some spies have killed so.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Right, yes.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So for our next fictional assassin slash by, we're talking
about Arius Stark from Game of Thrones. So spoilers brief
spoilers in here if you haven't caught up. So these
are this show's based HBO show based on the gr
R Martin books, and Mazie Williams plays Arius Stark, who
was this Tom Bloy turned young assassin. After she is
(26:26):
pretty much everything, Aria has to adapt to survive, and
she becomes obsessed with getting revenge on those who have
wronged her, and she recites the names of those she
plans to kill each night and throughout the day. Sometimes,
although her revenge does not always involve killing, worth pointing out,
she ends up training in combat, espionas and assassination. Since
(26:48):
she's a young girl, most don't view her as a threat.
She's stubborn and patient, dedicated, independent, resistant to gender roles,
but as she ages and trained, she becomes lethal and
her impatience wanes. While she is in many ways unforgiving
and vengeful, she is more empathetic than many in this
very rough game of thrones the world and has more
(27:11):
of a sense of justice. When much of her trauma happened,
she was a child, so when it's fresh, she is
quick to promise murder to any slight, any slight against
her family. The first man she kills mocked her recently
slaughtered older brother, which she has is more than a slight,
but she stabs him to death as a knife. But
(27:32):
with time, this impulsive vengeful violence lessons, making way for
a colder, planned revenge. I think that's one thing that
separates her from I think everyone else on this list.
She was a kid, and I would argue that she
was like traumatized, so she kind of went through this.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Assassin face and then like left it right.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
But yeah, because this is set a fantasy world, she
learns how to have no face, meaning she can assume
the face of just about anyone. And this is after
taking on harsh training under the House of and White,
and it takes her a minute to let go of
her identity of Arius Stark is something important to her
and she never really fully does. She still uses the name.
(28:10):
She hides her beloved sword needle when she was supposed
to destroy it. She has to learn how to lie,
which is kind of a long lesson for her. She
admits she is not ready to be No. One, but
she is ready to become someone else. She's also different
than the others on the little list because she wants
to kill who she wants to kill and is less
interested in taking on assignments from a higher power, which
(28:32):
gets her into trouble a lot through her training. Her
assassin identity or non identity consumes her for a while,
but when she deems her training as complete, she reclaims
her name and returns home. If you were on her
kill list, you were out of luck. You were out
of luck. She would kill you after you ate a
pie of your own sons. It was just brutal. She
(28:53):
did end up killing the show's big bad, the Night King. However, Yeah,
she gives up on a question revengeance in the end,
moves out of this assassin phase and decides instead to
try to protect and becomes an explorer.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
However, I still would not mess with her no way.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, she definitely had the big moments in Game of Throne,
I think.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Yeah, And then all the dudes were like, no way
she could do it, she could watch she did, or
about that she did, or about that well, I am
going to talk about one of the first assassins instead
of just the spy here.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Charlotte Corday, who was also known as the Angel of
Assassination and Charlotte Corday was a noble woman in Normandy
who during the French Revolution was part of the Geordan
Conservative Party and worked her way into the presence of
Jean pal Morat, who was a radical Montagnard. So he
was pretty big during this time, and he was the
(29:46):
editor of the Lami du Poupla, which is translated the
Friend of the People, and it was a newspaper during
that time, and was also the author of a Front
de la patri or Offering to our Country, So obviously
he was a big part of the movement and changing
in the Radical party. She, however, under the pretense that
she was trying to come and give him some information,
(30:07):
was able to see Morale and while he was taking
one of his medicinal baths apparently he had a condition
which he needed to be bathed often, she proceeded to
stab him to death, which by the way, is depicted
in a really famous Jacques Louis Davis painting, The Deaths
of Morac. I think if you saw this painting you
would be like, oh, yeah, I definitely know this one.
It is the dude that's hanging out the baptub with
the newspaper in his hand. Really gorgeous painting. Of course,
(30:30):
four days after he really is four days after the assassination.
Corday was executed for our crime. But she became famous
because she was unexpected. It's kind of one of those
exactly what you sit there that Wow she did that
where she came in and felt like her country was
being threatened by this man and apparently he was known
(30:53):
to be cruel during that point in time, and so
she went after him. And because no one assumed this
frail young woman could do anything, she got to him
and was able. She was the Ariya who ended up
dying to be fair and not trained per se, but
was able to pull off something but no one else
could at that point in time.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, Well, now for our next fictional entry. And I
love the idea that someone kind of dozed off in
the beginning and they wake up and they're like, wait,
what is happening.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
We're gonna talk about Black Widow. There we go.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yes, so disclaimers always with these cog book characters, there
are so many multiverses and if for you those keeping
up with current Marvel stuff, you know what I'm talking about,
it can get real messy. So we're gonna be focusing
primarily on the films here. So Natasha Romanov aka Black
Widow played by Scarlett Johansson, I mean she like holds
(31:49):
her own with the Avengers, goes against quote gods and
monsters without powers.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
So yeah, she was a founding member.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
After she was recruited by Clint Barton aka Hawkeye.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
She said, I have a very specific skill set.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
I didn't care who I used it for or on
I got on Shields Radar in a bad way. She
was trained from a very young age as a KGB assassin.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Also was one time a dancer. That's a recurring theme
on this list.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, and even after she joined Shield and the Avengers,
she still utilized her spy, stealth and infiltration skills as
well as her combat and weapons training.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
You can go.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Look, because of course someone's compiled all the training she has,
and it's pages and pages long. She also uses her weapon,
widows Bite, which is that glowing blue electroshock thingy around
her wrist.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
It's a grappling hook, a taser, disc shooter, a charger
for expandable batons.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I was gonna say, those things like that are why
I could not be a spy, because I would have
gotten myself, like I just you know, like the menute.
I looked at it kind of like the main with
Luke looking into his lightsaber. That would be that moment
of me is like tasing myself because I'm a cool
you know.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
It's so funny you mentioned that, because a Google does
me so well, but it's embarrassing this morning.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
They are like Mark Cable. So that's what me makes
some cringe. And I was like, I know which one.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
It is, light say, and it.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Was which is not in the movie, but all right, Yeah,
this thing also has like strangling wires.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
It's very multifunctional.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
She was trained in the Red Room, as you said,
where the graduation ceremony involved sterilization quote one last thing
to worry about makes everything easier, even killing. She was
top of her class though she struggled after she was
forced to kill an innocent man. She is definitely sexualized
and often weaponizes her femininity and the fact that people
think she is a woman who can't possibly be that strong.
(33:37):
She weaponizes that too. She's pretty manipulative. She's good at
lying and reading people. She is interrogating people who believe
they are interrogating her. When we first see her in
The Avengers, she tricks Loki to find out his motive
in that movie too. She's intelligent, good with technology, good
at playing roles, pretty sarcastic. She first appeared in the
movies in Iron Man two when she goes under cover
(33:57):
to spy on Tony Stark, which I thought was very convoluted.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Plotline, but whatever.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
She later helped recruit Tony Stark and Bruce Banner to
join the Avengers in the first Avengers movie, partly motivated
by her determination to save Hawkeye from Loki's control, which
she eventually does, and she's the one that figures out
how to close the portal to stop the Aliens that
are attacking from New York. I love explaining to lots
of these movies because they sound so weird when.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
They're like out of context and many ways.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
She does become the heart of the Avengers. She calls
them her family. She helps train the second generation of members.
She leaves the Avengers post snap and sacrifices herself so
that their mission has a chance of succeeding. She is
empathetic and understanding. She doesn't keep up on people. She's
sort of a reformed assassin. That's what I'm trying to say.
I think, yeah, because when I was reading through this,
(34:46):
I'm like, she at one time was, but when we
see her that's sort of a past life and she
still uses those skills, but not really her thing.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Right. Oh, I'm excited about the Black Widow movie.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Which I does. I realize it's still not come out.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Oh geez yeah, uh Sminty watch party.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
She's trying to make amends for her past, and that's
why the discovery that Shield has been infiltrated by Hydra
the Winter Soldier hits her so hard because she realized
she didn't know whose fly she was telling.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Also common theme in these spy stories.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
She blows all of her covers at the end and
then goes off the grid, and then you see her
working through this during Civil War first sighting with Tony
Stark over the Socovia Chords, but then helping her friend
Captain America, forcing her to once again go off the
grid and go on the run with Captain America post
snap or the blip, she's the term to keep fighting
to make things better, and I do want to put
asterix here.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
I feel like maybe fictional women around the world.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
I will return to this because a lot of you
are probably being like, well, there's a lot of feminist
issues you could unpack here about like the serialization thing,
the sexualization thing, the fact that she's the one that
sacrifices it's like not many women to go around.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
But yes, we're gonna put a pin in that for
now and.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Move on, right. I will say I do love her
relationship with Captain America Steve Rogers. That is platonic. I
do see it remains that way. I'm like, yeah, finally,
oh my god, me too. Although they at the beginning
it did seem like they were trying to.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, well, I think they were pretty much with anybody
with her at that point.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Maybe this will work, Maybe this will work.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Well, we're going to go and take it back to
the civil war. Oh yeah, I did that.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
So we have a Canadian woman, Sarah Emma Edmunds, who
escaped an abusive home an actually an arranged marriage, left
and changed her name from Edmunds to Edmund's son, and
she eventually made her way into the United States around
eighteen fifty eight, when she decided to disguise herself as
a man so she could travel across the country and
secure a job. She called herself Franklin Thomas and soon
(36:46):
worked as a very successful traveling Bible salesman.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
As the Civil War began in the States, she decided
to enlist as Franklin Thomas to assist in the war
on the Union side. By the way, she nursed wounded
soldiers in the hospital and worked as an attendant for
them for a while, but was moved to becoming a
mail carrier during that time for the Union, so she
would actually travel in these really dangerous conditions to carry milha.
(37:12):
She eventually was asked to be a spy and was
sent to get information behind enemy lines the Confederacy. She
often disguised herself as a woman, so she was a
woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.
Which I thought was awesome, or sometimes as an Irish peddler.
Of course, not much of this information was found on record,
since she was supposed to be a spy, but was
(37:35):
part of her own retelling in her memoir Nurse and
Spy in the Union Army. She kept seeing some battle
time and even getting injured while trying to carry mel
but eventually left after being denied furlough when she contracted malaria,
and she was afraid of being discovered as a woman
if she sought medical attention, and so Franklin Thomas left
and was charged with desertion. So she released her memoirs
(37:57):
in eighteen sixty four and gave it pretty much a
tell all, with some fictional takes on some of the events,
so I guess she was kind of embellished, but she
gave all the profits she made to different soldiers aid groups,
so it wasn't about her. And she actually went to
her infantry reunion in eighteen seventy six and was received
with open arms and was eventually recognized by the military
(38:20):
and cleared of desertion charges as well as given a pension,
So she had the backing of her soldiers, which I
believe was the second Michigan Battalion that she was able
to get her pension, which by the way, apparently literally
took an Act of Congress in eighteen eighty four for
her to receive. But after her death, she was buried
with military honors at Washington Cemetery in Houston, and a
(38:42):
year before her death, she was admitted to the Grand
Army of the Republic, which made her the one and
only female member, which I thought was super cool. So
we've talked about different other soldiers and she was another one.
To be fair, she was a Canadian woman, so there's
a little difference in her story, but she was able
to get pension and was able to get recognition for
her work.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah, yeah, well, hard pivot from the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
I know.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Our next fictional character is Hannah, which I just watched
last night. And I've been meaning to watch this for
a while because people kept saying this is a movie
you'd really like, and I'm like, I'm not sure, but
I did like it. So this is a film by
Joe Wright where Shorsha Ronan plays sixteen year old Hannah Heller,
who was raised from a young age to be an
(39:30):
assassin trained in the finished Wilderness by her father, who
was a former Black Ops officer. The CIA enhanced her
DNA to give her exceptional strength as part of a
program to create super soldiers. Her father ran away with
her and now they're kind of both on this list
of you know, must.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Kill and she is very deadly.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
She has weapons training, she can speak multiple languages. Her
father's very precise in the training of her, like never
lets her sleep without attacking her and always questioning her
to answer in these different languages. So while on a
mission across Europe handed to her by her father, she
is hunted by Marissa Weigler who's played by Kate Blanchette,
(40:11):
and she's an intelligent officer that actually Hannah thought she'd killed.
That was her mission was to kill her, but it
was a ploy, so she killed the wrong woman. She
killed a woman dressed like her. And there is an
Amazon Prime show based on the movie with Esma creed
Mile as Hannah. Because of how Hannah was raised so isolated,
she is quite curious about the outside world, like she's
(40:32):
never heard music, she doesn't know what dancing is, those
kinds of things. But also she's very very paranoid, which
makes sense it's an assassin coming of age story.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Okay, so I do know. I didn't. I haven't watched it,
but I've seen the previews for the Hannah Amazon Prime
show and I was like, hey, I know this. I didn't.
I haven't watched either one of those. Yeah, but I
do think it's interesting, like the fact that Amazon primetick
doesn't made it a series. They did the same thing,
not necessarily with a black widow, but chilled and made
it a spy show on its own. So I do
(41:02):
find that interesting too, because it is it's a very
big story that you could take in big rabbit holes
like you like think jumps that you don't realize is
going to happen.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yes, absolutely you can. And we probably have more twist
and turns in this episode. But first we have one
more quick break for words from our sponsor, Aeric Fact.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Thank you sponsor.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Twisting turns. Yes, because I am now going to take
it back to World War Two. Okay, so we're coming
because Hannah was kind of like today, what if she's
a spy? Yes, And I'm going to talk about nor
any Yacht Khan, who was born to an American mother
an Indian father in Moscow in nineteen fourteen, and she
was a direct descendant of the eighteenth century Muslim ruler
(41:55):
of my Sore Tippoo Sultan. Her father was a musician
and a Sufi teacher, and moved the family to London
and individually to Paris, where Khan was able to get
her education and eventually become a children's writer. After the
fall of Paris in nineteen forty, she actually escaped to
London where she joined the WAAF or Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
(42:17):
It was said her father had instilled in her the
desire for nonviolence and the unity of all religions, which
is what Sufie was, and that she had learned from
an early age to stand up for those who were
oppressed and was willing to sacrifice to do so.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
So.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Though she was not a British citizen, she wanted to
work and help in this fight. Soon after she joined
the WAAF, Con was recruited to join the Special Operations
Executive or SOE, which was a secret British organization that
since spies in occupied areas of Europe. So with CON's
education and her ability to speak French fluently, this was
(42:50):
perfect for her, so she against She knew different languages
was able to fit in. She became the first woman
a wireless operator sent by the UK and she actually
went into France and worked with Prosper, which was a
French resistance network. But when she first arrived, all of
her high ranking agents were captured as well as their
equipment by the Nazis, leaving Khan as the only operator
(43:13):
for the next few months. Unfortunately, she was eventually arrested
by the Gestapo or the Nazi secret police, after one
of her colleagues portrayed her. So you have all of
these like twists and turns, and there is a movie
out by the way that was released last year, I believe,
and she was tortured and placed in isolation by the
Nazis for information, but she never gave any information and
(43:36):
was eventually executed. And as in fact, one of the
people who questioned her talked about how impressed he was
of her because she was so brave and so steady,
So I thought that was really really interesting. In August
of twenty twenty, nor became the first South Asian woman
to be given the Blue Plaque, and there's possible talks
of her being on a British coin as well, which
(43:57):
would be super cool. She was also awarded the Georgie
Cross and the French Digia after her death, and a
statue was also enveled in twenty twelve in London honoring
what she did for the war. So she is a
big figure. And also there's this big conversation of the
fact that at that time she was a follower of
Mahatma Gandhi and even said, you know, after the war,
she would have to side with India over Britain, even
(44:20):
though she had fought for and it was, you know,
in service of Britain, but because where her heart lies.
And again she was about representing for those who were oppressed,
and she saw this community as being oppressed and she
was absolutely right. But it was really interesting the fact
that she's finally being recognized and giving all the accolades
that she should be given, and just being and seeing
(44:40):
what she had done and that she had died in
service for a country that wasn't technically hers.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
Well, that's an interesting segue until my next fictional pick,
which is Red Sparrow. And I chose this one very
specifically because it does include the heavy element of sexpionage,
which I think we'd come back and do a whole
episode on because the school that they mentioned in this
book slash movie that Red Sparrow goes to may.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Or may not be real.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
It might actually be a thing that people went to
and learned to basically have sex and have no attachments.
So it's a book by Jason Matthews that's set in
modern day Russia, which had a movie that came out
recently in which the titular character was played by Jennifer Lawrence.
I also watched this again last night, and I will
tell you it is tough. That was a tough watch.
(45:29):
I enjoyed it, but all right. So, after famous ballerino
Dominica Agarova suffers an injury that ends her dancing career,
which was gruesome and on purpose, she is coerced into
joining Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SBR, in order to
support her ailing mother. She is trained as a sparrow,
which is yes, someone who uses their body in seduction
(45:49):
as a weapon, also called sexpionage and given the code
name Diva. The world she operates in is brutal. There's
torture and there's rape, and there's no room for failure.
And even if you don't fail, they'll probably torture you.
And there's so much backstabbing you really can't trust anybody.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
And the training for.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
These pars involves stripping naked and performing sex acts on
strangers in front of other strangers, detaching from their bodies.
These lessons that are taught by the Unforgiving Matron, and
Dominica's main weapon is, as quote, anonymous sex object, even
though this obviously limits her and her capabilities, which some
have interpreted as a direct criticism of the depiction of
(46:32):
women in this genre, Like the movie and book were
directly criticizing those things, but in the end she is
the one who gets revenge. It's pretty satisfming playing those
that thought they were playing her. When I was watching this, though,
it's another one of those things, was like, damn, she's smart.
I would have just been like, ugh, I'm screwed. She
(46:54):
figures these things out on the fly, and she was
really good at reading people. That was kind of her
whole thing, that she could immediately figure out that a
piece of wants and needs that people had and fit
into it. From David Simms at The Atlantic, this is
a secret agent story in which the secret agent angrily
complains that she got sent to horror school by her government,
one that tries to flesh out the undercurrent of misogynistic
(47:14):
coercion inherent in so many of these narratives.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Yeah, kind of reminds me of the storyline with the Americans.
And I only watched a couple of episodes which has
Carrie Russell and her now husband, but they are Russian
spies that are sent into the US. But they have
a small scene where she is being trained and she
gets brutally raped by a teacher. But that's being taught.
This is what you have to deal with. This is
(47:38):
what you're going to have to learn, So you need
to learn here. So it's kind of like, oh, what's happening.
But yeah, I think, and it was so funny as
I was researching it. Red Sparrow did come up, and
a lot of different lists of people came into this.
And when we talk about the more modern spies, you
see that a little more mentioned now not necessarily that
it wasn't done because when we talk about the female ninjas,
(47:59):
and one of the things they talked about was being
gacious and prostitutes and being sent out as well as
priestess to be prostitutes, and you know in their presence
to get that information, however, you know you need to
and they don't expect a prostitute to be a spy necessarily,
which we know is a plot line for a lot
of the movies because partially it is true, and a
lot of the old school spies, whether we're talking about
(48:19):
the KGB because I saw KGB references, which again you're
not supposed to know much about, but a lot of
details of being dancers or hookers or all of these
things that you see, it happened a lot more than
we know and or that's the part we know about
them because that was the public persona. So there's that. Yeah,
(48:40):
So that is kind of a conclusion. I do have
a little bit of bonus and just got some mentions
just to name a few more historical spies that we
could dig into later. Christine Grantville, who was Britain's first
female special agent, Belle Boyd aka Labill, yes, a spy
for the Confederacy during the Civil War the US. And
(49:01):
then Jessephine Baker, which I know people know that name,
who was an American born French dancer entertainer, was also
a French resistant spy.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Yeah, there's plenty.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, there were so many that I was like, Okay,
who am I going to focus on?
Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, it was hard to choose, which is why I
also have a bonus mension.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
And then some shout outs of.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Course, no, you had to, you had to.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
I know you had to, and you know I had
to include the Star Wars one, which is mar Jade.
And actually, I bet she's going to show up in
cannon suit, like official Disney cannon.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
So it's giving you a little heads up.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
So in the Star Wars Extended Universe slash Legends, which
is no longer canon, but before Disney came along, this
is what was up. She was a secret assassin, raised
and trained by the Emperor himself. She became so deadly
that she earned the title the Emperor's Hand, and she
hears this prophecy in her head that she will kill
Luke Skywalker, So of course she hunts him down and
(50:00):
then she finds him and catches him and they fall
in love and she's like, oh no, I can't kill him,
but I must.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
But Twist, the evil.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Wizard, who is now in power, has used Luke's cut
off hand to clone Luke and make an evil Luke
for two of you Skywalker. So she kills Luke and
marries Luke and becomes a Jedi. And this w plot
twist is one of my very favorite things ever.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yes, I laugh, laugh and laugh. Yes, I love it
and I am definitely laughing.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
And then bonus, just to I know that they exist.
There's Missus Smith the Bride, which we said pretty much
anyone in Kill Bill Alias may Day Interview to kill
Salts Nikita, Hey, I'm flex Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans, Yep,
Samantha Kine played by Geena Davis Tremble long Kiss good Night,
which I forgot about. It was a good throwback. Teashi
p Henson's Mary Goodwin and Proud Mary. Sure least they're
(50:52):
on in Atomic Bond and a bunch of other things.
She's an assassin a lot, She's.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
Assassin a lot.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Yes, she is Angelau she could.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Do it well and Angelia Jolie. I feel like they
actually could do it famous now but like being badasses
in general.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Yes. And then there's desk Strike Elektra.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
I say that with a little because I think I
would argue whether or not she's assassin depending on which
piece of fiction you're reading. But anyway, Lucy Anna Ava
and then Genesis, which I just wanted to throw in
there is the favorite character I've ever written. And she
is weirdly an assassin slush by, but I love her
and she's a hot mess and terrifying.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
I feel like all of them are kind of hot messages. Yeah,
so kind of just like, why are these lives so fascinating? Well,
We've looked at the many movies and characters that represent
the world, and is obvious we can't get enough. They
keep coming. I'm eatterly waiting full of Black Widow, Like,
I'm so excited for it. And the one thing we
saw throughout our research was that many believe because women
(51:54):
are seen as mild mannered and often either sexually or motherly,
therefore there couldn't be any possible threat from them. Right,
They're not real threats, which makes them even more effective.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
That was one of my favorite slash most annoying things.
Watching Red Sparrow last night, it was how many times
they were like, oh, you're a Sparrow, you can do
like these really sexual things, right, but you're only doing
it for your spy thing, right, And then she does
it and they like fall for it.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
I'm like, but you just said you know what she is,
that she did it.
Speaker 2 (52:24):
And you're the dumb ones to volve for it.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
So okay, yes, yes, please listeners, let us know if
we miss anybody, if you want us to go into
more detail on any of these characters or historical or fiction.
Speaker 3 (52:37):
Either way, we would love to hear from you. All right.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Email is Stephania mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. You
can find us on Instagram at stuff I'm Never Told You.
We're on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. Thanks as always
to our super producer Christina.
Speaker 2 (52:50):
Thank you Christina, and.
Speaker 1 (52:51):
Thanks to you for listening Stuff I've Never Told You.
Prospection of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, it's dieheart
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Stuff Mom Never Told You News
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Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
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