Code Name Hélène

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes a discussion of sexual assault and wartime violence.

Nancy Wake lived in the 1930s and 1940s when women’s opportunities were curtailed by sexist limitations to their professional opportunities and assumptions about their weakness and passiveness. They also faced persistent sexual harassment. Throughout the novel, Nancy combats sexist expectations and treatment and rises above them.

In her civilian life as a journalist, Nancy faces sexist discrimination from her editor at Hearst. When she gets a scoop, interviewing a Jewish refugee from Vienna who had been the subject of a photograph documenting the Nazi violence there, the editor initially refuses to run her story because they have “a man” in Berlin who is supposed to be covering the region. When Nancy’s story is finally published, it does not have her byline, because Hearst does not publish the names of female journalists. When her colleague Frank Gilmore objects, she minimizes the injustice because she “hate[s] being pitied” (83). Nancy overcame journalism’s endemic sexism to win a job as a reporter, but she finds that there are some barriers in the industry that she cannot surmount.

One of the biggest challenges Nancy faces while camped out with the Resistance is sexual harassment and the threat of sexual violence.