Re-Feminist History (aka Bitchstory)

In the shadowy margins of wartime intelligence, where secrets were currency and silence a shield, thousands of women worked behind the gates of Bletchley Park. These women, many of them barely out of university or recruited straight from clerical jobs, became essential cogs in the vast machine of British codebreaking—a machine that helped end the Second World War and shaped its aftermath. Among their silent victories was their indirect but essential connection to daring intelligence operations like Operation Mincemeat. During WWII, Bletchley Park operated as Britain’s codebreaking headquarters. Here, women made up roughly 75% of the workforce. They weren’t just clerks or secretaries—they were cryptanalysts, translators, mathematicians, and machine operators. Women like Joan Clarke (a brilliant mathematician and colleague of Alan Turing) played vital roles in decrypting messages from the German Enigma machine. Others ran the Bombe machines, compiled intercepted transmissions, and mo...

EPISODE LINK:  “The Ladies Behind The Plot That Tricked Hitler” When we think of espionage in World War II, names like James Bond creator Ian Fleming or the suave spies of Bletchley Park come to mind. But in the real world of covert operations, few figures were as quietly formidable as Vera Atkins, the woman who became the heart—and sometimes the moral compass—of British intelligence. While she is best known for her role in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and for placing agents behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Europe, her fingerprints can also be found on one of WWII’s most cunning deception strategies: Operation Mincemeat. Operation Mincemeat was part of a larger British deception campaign in 1943 designed to convince the Nazis that the Allied forces planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. To sell this lie, British intelligence created an entire backstory for a fake Royal Marine officer named Major William Martin, whose body was floated ashore in Spain car...

  EPISODE LINK: “The Ladies Behind The Plot That Tricked Hitler” History is often told through the lives of men on battlefields, but the real war stories—the ones that quietly turned the tide—are often tucked behind the scenes. Hester Leggett is one of those women history almost forgot, though her role in World War II intelligence was anything but forgettable. In the shadowy world of wartime espionage, the most powerful players often went unnoticed. One of them was Hester Leggett , a brilliant and discreet intelligence officer whose sharp mind and steady hand helped orchestrate one of the greatest deceptions in military history: Operation Mincemeat. A seasoned linguist and academic, Hester Leggett was recruited during World War II to work in British intelligence. She became a vital figure in the now-famous Double Cross System, a counter-espionage operation that turned German agents into double agents, feeding misinformation back to the Nazis. But Leggett’s most notable contributio...

EPISODE LINK:  “The Ladies Behind The Plot That Tricked Hitler” I am working in editing our latest episode. Lisa and I recorded about the women of “Operation Mincemeat”, an elaborate Allied plot during WW2 designed  to fool Hitler into shifting his troops.  There were a few main women key to this story.  This is one… Jean Leslie: The Woman Behind the Deception That Fooled Hitler In the vast web of World War II espionage, Operation Mincemeat stands out as one of the boldest and strangest deceptions ever executed. At its heart was a fabricated identity, a corpse dressed as a British officer, floating ashore with “top secret” documents. But behind this audacious ruse stood an unexpected heroine: Jean Leslie, a young British secretary whose photograph would become the linchpin in a global bluff. Jean Leslie was just 19 years old when she joined MI5, Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence agency. Intelligent and composed, she was assigned to clerical and administra...

EPISODE LINK:  “Awesome Asian Women” We had an absolute blast talking to Karen Wang Diggs, author of the book “Awesome Asian Women”! Karen was a freakin’ delight! She’s the real deal-a true intersectional feminist and a gifted storyteller with a passion for lifting women up. Her book contains inspiring stories of over 120 women, from Empress Wu Zetian to Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth (who was just on Stephen Colbert and we love!)  It is going to be a fixture on the Bitchstory bookshelf!  Karen joined the zoom call and said “Hey bitches!” And we immediately knew she was our people! So many people are still triggered by the word “bitch”, so her greeting  and made me cackle and instantly love her.  It was such a great way to start an interview. Karen is very humble.  She wrote this impressive book in a very short period of time, so I think she’s both driven and probably very intuitive.   One of the main inspirations for Karen to write this impressive coll...

  EPISODE LINK:  “I’m Not Your Muse” Lisa and I had the pleasure of speaking to two very cool women recently.  The author and illustrator of “I’m Not Your Muse” and companion deck (so cool!) “More Than Muses”, Lori Zimmer & Maria Krasinski!   We discussed at length where this vision and inspiration came from and how they brought it to life.  (This book feels like it was made for our podcast, and you can bet your ass we’ll be using it often!) This book highlights women from all walks of life who created all kinds of art and in the process broke out of society’s boxes.   “Muse” has historically been a passive role, a box that art/society has frequently put women into and told them they were pretty or inspirational.   But women and the art they create themselves can be unpretty, controversial, political, and a plethora of other things.  The women in this book are those women.  They blurred lines and defied constructs and broke out of boxes. ...

EPISODE LINK: Rosalind Franklin and the DNA discovery that was stolen from her So Bitchstory just did our first collab! Ash from @fthat_pod joined us to enlighten us about yet another woman who was robbed by the patriarchy.  Rosalind Franklin made one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century and yet, if you google it, it is still credited to the dicks who stole her discovery!  Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was crucial in understanding the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. In the 1950s, It she captured the famous “Photograph 51,” an X-ray image that provided key evidence of the helical structure of DNA. Her data was shared—without her direct permission—with James Watson and Francis Crick, who used it to build their model of DNA in 1953 (which they initially got wrong!) While Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962, Franklin had died of ovarian cancer ...