tIme March 16–23, 2020HALL’S DRIVER’S LICENSE
FROM THE 1930S
1940s1943
Virginia Hall
A perfect spy
She was known as the Limping Lady, because of a pros-
thetic leg, but secretly, she was a hero. During tours in
occupied France with the British Special Operations
Executive and CIA predecessor Office of Strategic
Services, American spy Virginia Hall was an intelligence-
industry innovator. She used makeup and savvy subter-
fuge to escape capture by the Gestapo, who unsuccess-
fully hunted her for assisting the French Resistance.
Hall trained resistance cells that performed guer-
rilla sabotage like blowing up bridges and even derail-
ing a freight train, and set the stage for the Allies to in-
vade Normandy and Provence. At the end of the war, she
reported that her team had captured 500 Germans and
killed 150. The Nazis called her “the enemy’s most dan-
gerous spy.”
Her work is credited with convincing British and
American military officials to deploy other women as
spies during a major moment for women in war. In 1942
and 1943, the U.S. Armed Forces finally allowed women
to enlist. But female war veterans still struggled for rec-
ognition and benefits.
Though never publicly lauded during her lifetime—
she received awards, but didn’t want to blow her cover—
Hall was the U.S.’s most decorated WW II woman civilian.
She is credited with developing spy tactics that are still
used by the CIA today. ÑErin Blakemore
1944 | JUSTICE SEEKERRECY TAYLOR
BY AMANDA NGUYENaLL justICe movements are IntertwIneD wIth one an-
other. They are threads that make up the fabric of the American
story. Progress today is possible because of the groundwork laid
by trailblazers who stood up for what was right, even when it was
dangerous. Each trailblazer has had other formidable women
who shaped her career. For Rosa Parks, it was Recy Taylor.
In 1944, Taylor, a 24-year-old African-American mother
from Alabama, was walking home from church when six
white men kidnapped and gang-raped her at gunpoint. In
Taylor’s time, women—and people of color—were seen as
neither reliable narrators of their own stories nor humans
with equal worth and dignity. But Taylor refused to stay si-
lent. Despite death threats and her family’s home being fire-
bombed by white supremacists, Taylor channeled her painful42