She had been born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in the Netherlands in 1876, the first of four children. The explanation for this must be largely a matter of conjecture, but Shipman argues convincingly that Mata's hunger for male attention can be traced to the abandonment of her family by her adored father when she was a girl. Yes, I have had many lovers, but it is the beautiful soldiers, brave, always ready for battle and, while waiting, always sweet and gallant. An officer is another being, a sort of artist, living outdoors with sparkles on his arms in a seductive uniform. It didn't matter to her what uniform they wore so long as they were 'strongly built,' or, as she put it herself: For starters she was a famous exotic dancer whose 'flimsy garments did little to conceal her naked body.' For another, all her life she had had 'a nearly insatiable longing for male attention' and had sought to fulfill it, after the end of her unhappy marriage, with a long succession of men, especially military officers. 'An international woman,' Shipman writes, 'was a worldly woman, a cosmopolitan woman, and by extension, a woman of loose morals.' Not to mince words, the French thought she was a whore, as did many others. Though as a rule I recoil from what some historians have called 'presentism' - interpreting the past according to the fashions and convictions of the present - in this case it is valid, for Mata Hari paid a very high price for being what her French interrogators called 'an international woman.' Pat Shipman (who teaches anthropology at Penn State and has published several other books) falls very much into the second camp, with the additional twist that she reads Mata Hari's tale from a contemporary feminist vantage point. More recently, as unknown or suppressed information has surfaced, doubts have been raised both about her culpability and about the motives of the French officials who hounded her.

Early ones tended to toe the French line and argue that she was indeed a spy for the kaiser's Germany and that her execution was warranted. That may be true of most people who were in the headlines nearly a century ago, but in her case it's a pity, because her life's story is a humdinger and because the charge that sent her before the firing squad and into popular lore - that she actively and effectively spied for Germany - almost certainly was false.ĭespite the relative obscurity into which she has fallen, her story has been told innumerable times and continues to attract biographers.

These days Mata Hari's name probably pops up most frequently in crossword puzzles, where solvers come across clues such as 'Spy Mata' or 'Infamous Hari' or, for the full eight letters, 'Executed WWI spy.' Her name has been reduced to one of those essentially useless bits of information with which the modern mind is cluttered.

Femme Fatale by Pat Shipman