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In 1894, Jane Armstrong Tucker escaped the cold Maine winter for a secret mission in Washington, D.C.: undercover detective for a US congressman seeking dirt on his former mistress. When she arrived in the warm southern sunshine, Jane became Agnes Parker, “girl spy,” and after completing her amazing task, disappeared from history—so well-hidden that 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 Jane’s secret life.

In this lecture we’ll follow Jane Tucker to Washington and eavesdrop on her ten-week faux friendship with Madeleine Pollard, the congressman’s mistress who had sued him for breach of promise when he failed to marry her as pledged. Jane was clever and used techniques to extract Pollard’s secrets 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 Jane’s adventure. 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 work to find them once again.

Biography

Elizabeth DeWolfe is professor of History and co-founder of the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies program at the ɫ����Ƶwhere 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 2025 book, Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy, reveals the previously untold story of Jane Armstrong Tucker, alias Agnes Parker, a stenographer who undertook a secret mission as an undercover detective. 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.”

Suggested Reading

DeWolfe, Elizabeth A. Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy. University Press of Kentucky, 2025.