The James Bond Women

While women served greatly assuming many roles in intelligence services and operations through the growing expansion of opportunities throughout the war, women in the fictional world of espionage are portrayed much differently. As a result of the gender roles placed onto women during the war, women in spy fiction are rarely the central character and instead, was always secondary to their male counterpart. Women were depicted as either one of two roles: domestic, serving mothers and nurses, or seductive and alluring females who were viewed as sexual objects. In spy novels, female characters were depicted as pure, white and feminine, and usually given more prominence and independence than films. Spy novels stayed more true to accurate representations

The series was adapted into a television show and film, making Bond more than a fictional figure, but rather a cultural phenomenon. Bond films from the 1960s and 1970s specifically, depicted women as these ‘Bond Girls,’ who were usually secondary characters that were often infantilized and objectified because their characters would be reduced to sexual objects. The names of the Bond girls alone insinuated their roles within the storyline, where names like Honeychile Rider, Kissy Suzuki, Xenia Onatopp, Holly Goodhead and Pussy Galore were references to sexual positions. In the Bond series, women can be classified into four main categories: secret agents who assist Bond, innocent bystanders, ‘bad girls’ who turn ‘good,’ and femme fatales. Women who were secret agents were independent with many skills and fell in love with Bond, innocent bystanders were those who needed rescuing, bad girls abandoned their missions to help Bond and became good (who also fell in love), and femme fatales whose objective was to kill Bond but suffered the same fate like Mata Hari. The Bond series sometimes also portrayed women as weak or foolish. Female characters would always need saving from the hero and always fell in love with Bond, which typically ended with women bedding with