Please note: this event has passed
Speaker: Prof Kathryn Olmsted, Professor of history and interim chair of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of California, Davis
Chair: Prof Kristie Macrakis, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech.
This talk will discuss the critical role that gender played in the career of a significant female spy. Elizabeth Bentley was one of the top Soviet case officers in America during World War II. After her lover and supervisor, Jacob Golos, died in 1943, she took over his agents and networks. But because of her gender, the FBI repeatedly dismissed her as a possible espionage suspect. Being a woman also protected her from Soviet assassins after she began to act erratically.
Though Moscow officials considered several ways of killing her, they appeared to hesitate because of her gender. They regretted their inaction, though, when she defected to the FBI in 1945. Once again, her gender played a key role. The first FBI agent to whom she confessed dismissed her as a psychopath. After she went public, the press derided her as a pathetic, middle-aged vamp who made up stories of espionage to wreak vengeance on men who had rejected her. It was not until after the release of secret documents in the 1990s that historians could determine that she was telling the truth.
Kathryn Olmsted is a professor of history and interim chair of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley; Challenging the Secret Government: the Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI; Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11; Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism; the forthcoming (fall 2021) Lords of Isolation: British and American Newspaper Publishers in the Age of Hitler; and a co-editor of The Central Intelligence Agency: Security Under Scrutiny.
