Her celebrity was protection against some of these risks and no protection against others. It made her highly visible, which meant that her movements were to some degree predictable and that the people watching her had to decide how much attention to pay. But it also meant that she was a relatively prominent figure in a system that was looking for prominent figures engaged in Resistance activity; the Vichy government and the German security services were not uninterested in the question of where famous French cultural figures stood on the question of collaboration versus resistance.
The specific intelligence she was carrying when she left France in November 1940 — information on German troop movements and military installations — was valuable enough that, had German security services known she was carrying it, they would certainly have wanted to intercept it. The fact that they did not know, and that the border crossing went without incident, was a function of the cover story, the celebrity, and the specific intelligence that enabled the concealment.
—
## The Women of the French Resistance
Josephine Baker was not the only woman involved in French Resistance intelligence work. The specific history of women in the French Resistance has been extensively documented in the scholarship of recent decades, and it reveals a picture of significant participation at every level of Resistance activity — from the administrative support that kept Resistance networks functioning to the field operations that required the same courage and exposed the participants to the same risks as male operatives.