91ֱ����Ƶ

In 1894, Jane Armstrong Tucker escaped the cold Maine winter on a secret mission to Washington, D.C., where she would serve as an undercover detective for a U.S. congressman. Tucker’s work remained hidden from her contemporaries and was lost in the dark corners of history until 91ֱ����Ƶ history professor Elizabeth DeWolfe, Ph.D., began connecting dots that no previous scholar had thought to connect before, and, in so doing, uncovered a fascinating tale of not one, but two women, seeking agency in a male-dominated world at the cusp of the 20th century.     

DeWolfe will share this amazing story when she presents “The Mysterious Case of the ‘Girl Spy’” at the Center for Global Humanities (CGH) on Monday, Nov. 17, at 6 p.m. at Arthur P. Girard Innovation Hall on the 91ֱ����ƵPortland Campus for the Health Sciences.

In the lecture, we’ll follow Jane Tucker to Washington, witness her transformation into “Agnes Parker,” and eavesdrop on her 10-week faux friendship with Madeleine Pollard, a congressman’s mistress who had sued him for breach of promise when he failed to marry her as pledged. We’ll learn how Tucker used techniques to extract Pollard’s secrets that no male detective had attempted: shopping for underwear, offering fake stories of seduction, and whisking up vinaigrette. 

Despite her successes, Victorian propriety and a fickle reading public buried Tucker’s adventure. Her later book on her undercover exploits was deemed fiction, no historian wrote a word about her, and the archive holding her family papers had no idea of her having led a secret life.

The story of uncovering Jane Tucker is as much a detective tale as Agnes Parker’s Washington mission, illustrating how historical stories, particularly about women, get lost and how, and why, historians must work to rediscover them.

DeWolfe is professor of history and co-founder of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies program at the 91ֱ����Ƶ, where she teaches undergraduate courses in women’s history, American culture, and archival research. Her research in American women’s history has focused on ordinary women’s lives upended by extraordinary circumstances. Her lecture at CGH will be based on her 2025 book, “Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy.” 

DeWolfe’s previous work includes the award-winning books “The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories,” about the unfortunate death of a New England textile operative, and “Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary Marshall Dyer’s Anti-Shaker Campaign,” about the lengths to which an antebellum woman would go to regain custody of her children and assert the “just rights of women.”

This will be the fourth of five events this fall at the Center for Global Humanities, where lectures are always free, open to the public, and streamed live online. Learn more and view all CGH events at the Center for Global Humanities website.