The article is devoted to the specifics of women's activities in the "mass espionage" of the early XX century. The First World War led to the emergence of new practices of confrontation and specific strategies for mobilizing the population. Thus, women, whose social appearance traditionally meant realization in the bosom of the family, have become an object of propaganda and a resource that can be used in the fight against the enemy. The author of the article traces the main channels of attracting women to the war of the special services, reconstructs the attitude of professional intelligence officers to female spies, examines the motivations of women entering this kind of service. As a conclusion, the idea is proposed that female gender did not have a negative context when selecting intelligence agents: women had important intelligence capabilities and abilities different from men's, and the general underdevelopment of intelligence and counterintelligence in the early twentieth century. It did not allow us to assert an unambiguously positive experience of using men (compared to women) in the war of the special services. This article is relevant due to the weak research attention in relation to the role of women in the wars of the special services in French historiography, as well as in the context of the politicization of the so-called "gender history" in the historiography of the United States and Western countries. The author draws attention to the current (mainly in Anglo-American historiography) trend of "deconstruction" of the image of Mata Hari as an "antiheroine" of the special services, which for a long time set specific guidelines for the perception of a female spy as a femme fatale, meanwhile, Mata Hari was a characteristic image of the era, and not an exception to non-existent rules.