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homosexuality a curable perversion. She professed to disdain men and insisted women had been enslaved by the institution of marriage. Yet she loved many men and married twice: she treated her first husband abominably, and was physically and emotionally abused by her second. She considered sex degrading, but was an enthusiastic advocate, and energetic exponent, of free love. Out here I’ve had chances to sleep with all colours and shapes, she wrote to a friend, shortly before meeting Ursula. One French gunrunner, short and round and bumpy; one fifty-year-old monarchist German who believes in the dominating role of the penis in influencing women; one high Chinese official whose actions I’m ashamed to describe, one round left-wing Kuomintang man who was soft and slobbery. She was a communist who never joined the party; a violent revolutionary and romantic dreamer; a feminist in thrall to a succession of men; a woman who inspired intense loyalty, yet inflicted enormous damage on many of her friends; she supported communism without considering what communist rule involved in reality. She was passionate, prejudiced, charismatic, narcissistic, reckless, volatile, lovable, hypercritical, emotionally fragile, and uncompromising. I may not be innocent, but I’m right, she declared. Ursula was entranced. Agnes Smedley seemed to embody political passion and energy, the very antithesis of the smug complacency she found in the bourgeois boudoirs of Shanghai. Your very existence is not worth anything at all if you live passively in the midst of injustice, Smedley insisted. Agnes was everything Ursula admired: feminist, anti-fascist, an enemy of imperialism and defender of the oppressed against the forces of capitalism, and a natural revolutionary. She was also a spy.
― Ben Macintyre,
Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

homosexuality a curable perversion. She professed to disdain men and insisted...

- 29th April 2021 0