Please join the Department of History and the Friends of History:
The French Resistance and Its Forgotten Women
with Dr. Lynne Olson
đź“… WED NOV 13
đź•‘ 5:30pm
✔️ZOOM RSVP: bit.ly/FrenchForgottenWomen
For several decades after World War II, histories of the French Resistance, which were written almost exclusively by men, largely ignored the contributions of women. Even now, many historians underplay the extent and importance of women’s participation in the Resistance, treating the subject, in the words of one historian, as “an anonymous background element in an essentially male story.”
In fact, French women were, as one U.S. intelligence official put it, “the lifeblood of the Resistance.” They collected intelligence, transported arms, escorted Allied pilots caught behind enemy lines to safety, and even led armed bands of Resistance fighters against German targets. One young woman — Marie-Madeleine Fourcade— led the largest, most important Allied spy network in wartime France. Another — a trailblazing archaeologist named Christiane Desroches — was a curator at the Louvre Museum by day and a member of Paris’s first organized Resistance network by night. Joined by tens of thousands of other women like them, they were crucial in helping to free France and win the war.
Dr. Lynne Olson is a New York Times bestselling author of ten books of history, most of which deal in some way with World War II. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called her “our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.”