DIRECTOR. SPY.

i don’t think we’ve met or else those words would have been different. peggy. peggy carter.     “    you’re stubborn. bullheaded. tempered. tenacious. in the words of one nick fury, a real pain in the ass. that last one wasn’t a compliment but that wouldn’t have stopped you from taking it as such. you’ve been keeping people on their toes for as long as you remember. having people second guess your actions allows you to do more, build more and fight for more. you’re always fighting for more. it’s a habit you develop when your brightest memory was fighting alongside the howling commandos, learning how to fight with brute strength and sheer determination.     “      i don’t leave just because someone wants me to or i wouldn’t have gotten to where i am.      “

you remember carrying all that weight on your shoulders. loss after loss after loss. friendships torn and hope barely holding on. you relate to this feeling all too well but you also know that now is not the time for lies. you were sick of hearing those. you had heard of enough of them     -----    from people who believed they had your best interest when they lied to you. your revival meant coming face to face with people who are different but different didn’t make them mean and it didn’t make them bad. you would take each interaction head on and treat this as a learning experience. society may have buried you, believing you would be at peace but you knew more than ever that society demanded more than you could give but you were going to give it all you got.      “   hey, don’t do that. it is not your fault. you are not responsible for this. we’re going to get you out of here, get you somewhere safe and you can tell me what your story is.     “

if someone asked you how it happen, you wouldn’t be able to give them an answer. hell, you barely remember a thing. you remember a woman with brunette hair staring down at you, face softened and a gentle welcome back, director carter. we’ve been hoping for you. S.H.I.E.L.D had fallen and all that was handed to you was a file. pages of pages concerning the who, what and how it happened. S.H.I.E.L.D, all that work that you had put with howard, with every one who had offered their services to build up the organization that you wanted it too, had be ripped from it’s rooted and tossed carefully into the unknown.

peggy takes up space, makes space and also knows how to use space to her advantage. when she fights, she’s loud and she uses anything in her disposal. she fights with intelligence and emotion, a serious balance, just the right amount that she needs. Peggy fights to protect, something that she learned from being around Captain America and that feeling lasted long after she lost him. She rarely fights to survive. That feeling lingers but most of it she left behind during the war and her involvement in the French Resistance.

Her fighting can be described as a “marriage between mixed martial arts moves and scrappy brawling”, which is connected to the fact that she was trained as a soldier and she uses that fighting to guide her. She fights face forward, largely using her upper body and well placed kicks but no less brutal. Her true power and strength lies in her resolve to keep moving forward but she relies heavily on her surroundings if deemed necessary. She is a balance of careful planning and grabbing for something to give her an edge, employing brute force to power her way through the fight.  

she also fights with emotional intensity and while others might find it a major weakness, she considers that one of her greatest strengths, employing it with an assurance that often follows pure swagger. The way she employs her emotions to showcase her fighting, in her case, is not considered harmful or dangerous. Peggy Carter also feels the need and prefers the good ol' fashioned method of getting her hands dirty. She has a strong, charismatic presence that commands attentio.  she doesn't need to stick to the shadows but she can also use the same shadows to camouflage her true intentions. she doesn't need a troubled past to drive her to do work on behalf of the good of mankind.

“Meaning cover the phones.”     /      “Rose, forward all calls to the briefing room. “    SEASON 01. EP. 01.

A Secret Intelligence Service officer has claimed women are ideal for espionage. Women are ideal for espionage because they quite good at multi-tasking and are quite good at tapping into different emotional resources. They say that one of the biggest reasons why women are excellent spies is because they are dealing with prejudice that comes from being a woman and the prejudice they have to face from their male counterparts. Women have played important roles in the world of intelligence, from the first World War up to the present.  They have worked as spies, cryptologists, and more.  What they didn’t for their efforts were the recognition that went unnoticed.

World War II was a foundation that allowed sexism to work to an advantage     ------    Nazi sexism helped: Germans’ stereotyped ideas about female domesticity blinded them, early on at least, to women spies in their midst. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade has had to deal with sexism head on, first from the likes of the men she served with, as their first reaction was “Good God, she’s a woman!    “     This pattern of skepticism at her skillset continues long after, resulting in her having to conceal and enabling her to hide her gender from the old-line British officers through masculine titles such as Hedgehog and POZ 55, out of fear that they wouldn’t take her seriously and she didn’t want to risk the lives of the agents who depended on the support or funding. This fear would prove to be true when she hears a British agent say ““This is a joke, isn’t it?” followed by another not so surprising reaction, ““You are the real POZ 55?”

Sexism was prominent and alive during this era yet one of the hardest jobs fell on women: In occupied Europe, being a wireless-radio operator was one of the most dangerous jobs. She would need to continue past this and persist in making the case for her department’s safety and welfare. Even under extreme pressure and torture, these same women refused to back down. Being a woman proved to be an intelligence asset. “I conducted my own investigation becuase no one listened to me. I got away with it because no one looks at me, because unless I have your reports, your coffee or your lunch, I’m invisible. “ (      Peggy Carter, EP 07     )

Often, wives would follow their husbands into the CIA field as a “contract wife”, as was Meredith, then-deputy chief of the CIA’s European Division. A contact wife was when a spouse sent abroad by the CIA with her agent-husband to provide secretarial-type support work for low pay. It is said that Women…were much better at detecting surveillance on foot. They would have to listen to men and higher-ups in the same field as them warning that women would be ineffective for recruiting agents and gathering intel abroad. while men were getting the high paying jobs and made up the lion’s share of highly paid roles in the agency, women accounted for 60 percent of the agency’s jobs in statistical analysis. During World War II, when it came to numbers, the war department went after women. Same with maps and code work: They specifically wanted to find women for that kind of work. They were simply better at it.   “   Peggy knows how to read morse code.     “     (    EP 08.    )