World War II History: Women of the OSS

Cora Du Bois

Dr. Cora Du Bois, American Bad-Ass of the OSS in Southeast Asia

As Women’s History Month draws to a close, I wanted to share some insights about one of my favorite scholars at war,anthropologist Dr. Cora Du Bois (1903–1991). During the Second World War, Du Bois served with the Office of Strategic Service (OSS)’s Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch. Initially a researcher in the “Chairborne Division” (as R&A was often called) in Washington D.C., Du Bois made her name as Chief of the OSS’s R&A Division at Kandy, Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), under the British-run South East Asia Command (SEAC). She was the only woman, let alone lesbian, to hold such a post. Documents available at the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, underscore gender biases she faced from her own side during the war, and how she weathered such storms by virtue of her talent, dedication, and service. Her career and service are worth celebrating.

Professional Tom-Girl

Born in Brooklyn on October 26, 1903, Du Bois came from a family of Swiss watchmakers and French entrepreneurs. Her brother was the black sheep, and Cora the star attraction: a brilliant “tom-girl” who liked adventures in the wild and sports as much as school and writing poetry. Her father’s early death from lung cancer shattered the family, but also provided a trust for her future in academia.

Du Bois received her MA from Barnard College in medieval history, but her intellectual curiosity was bound to the rising field of anthropology. She worked with pioneers such as Ruth Benedict, mentor of anthropology “rock star” Margaret Mead. Benedict had a penchant for working with what one sour colleague called “the deviants … the women, homosexuals, and Jewish students.” As Du Bois discovered her own sexuality, she took solace in writing poetry to express her true “nature,” as Oscar Wilde would put it, and gravitated toward anthropology’s more complex view of human culture and, especially, the role of outsiders, individuals, and outcasts.

Du Bois earned her doctorate in anthropology in 1932 at UC Berkeley under L. Kroeber and Robert H. Lowie, and conducted field research with a colleague in Northern California, studying shamans and other unique members of the Wintu people, and, later, the Ghost Dance movement. She also worked at cutting-edge research on the relationship between cultural norms and psychiatry. From 1937 to 1939 she traveled to Indonesia alone to study the native populace of the Alors islands at the village Atimelang, a mountainous region above the island’s northwest coast. There she established rapport with the locals, despised the Dutch’s colonial system and ethos, and gathered material for her landmark work, The People of Alors (1944). To help the locals she administered first aid against infections and “dispensed quinine or castor oil or aspirin.” Over time “the women and children were sufficiently used to my touch to forgive me the size of my body, the whiteness of my skin, and the blue eyes, which looked so frighteningly blind to them. That my nose was long and sharp was, however, to the very end of my stay, a never-ending source of merriment.” She returned home just before Germany’s invasion of Poland.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

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