Note: This is a 2 year old post. Unfortunately, Agent Carter has since been cancelled. However, my appreciation of the character remains and thus, when I happened across this post, I knew I had to publish it. Enjoy!
It’s 2015 and women in all fields have come far. Most people are progressive enough to look beyond gender as a factor and we are, in many ways moving towards a gender neutral society where we avoid judging a person for being different.
Agent Carter is a 1946 based period television show. Things were rather different back then. Those were better times, simpler times. Well, if you were a white heterosexual male. Otherwise, well-
Ability be damned.
Peggy Carter is a soldier, war veteran and hero all in her own right. And yet after the war, she’s rather disillusioned with her life stateside. Inspite of being a full time agent of the Strategic Scientific Research(SSR) her workload pretty much only includes taking the lunch orders, bringing coffee, manning the phones or filing the paperwork at best. She’s treated as an assistant instead of an agent.
A lesser woman would’ve given up. Made her peace with her stock in life. But not Peggy Carter. No. She takes life by the horns and deals with chauvinist colleagues and villains with equal wit, charm and badassery (that’s the scientific word for awesomesauceness)
It’s women like her who’ve made life easier for us in the present. She fights for respect and equality in an unfair world where her ability or skills aren’t what people see when they look at her.
She isn’t afraid to fight for what she thinks is right and is loyal to her friends and empathetic towards everyone, including her detractors.
Isn’t that the very definition of a hero?
Someone who can look beyond personal grudges and see and nurture the good in everyone.
Someone who upholds justice and peace, no matter the personal cost.
Peggy Carter is a woman who knows loss and pain all too well.
And yet, she hasn’t lost hope. She gets up in the morning hoping to make the world a better place, even if the world refuses to change.
She doesn’t do it for the glory, the money, the fancy ass costumes or the awe. She knows her value and doesn’t need people to sing songs or write of her exploits, she does it to know that she did good today. That she made herself proud.
But that isn’t the only thing that makes our girl a hero.
The thing that really made this character a hero in my eyes is that she isn’t infallible.
She stumbles, makes mistakes and sometimes she even forgets her value, who she is and what she is capable of.
We don’t just see the perfect hero, fighting the bad guys and saving the day…
We see the woman underneath, who just wants to be treated as a peer by her colleagues, who wants to grieve her lover’s death without having to seem strong, who sometimes forgets her value. We see the woman who cares deeply and genuinely about everything.
Peggy is more than a mask.
She is human.
And for me, that makes her one of the greatest heroes. She’s focused, driven, immaculate, badass but at the same time she’s kind, and immensely protective of those she calls her own and she makes mistakes.
She isn’t invincible. She doesn’t have super-anything.
But that doesn’t stop her from being a hero.
She rises to every occasion and I’m glad that ABC has renewed ‘Agent Carter’ because Peggy deserves it.
She makes me proud to be a woman and I’m so glad she was brought to life on our screens.
P.S. I’m pretty sure articles don’t actually have P.S.’s but this is important. I love the character but I think Hayley Atwell deserves a special shoutout. She has taken this one-off side role and turned into something amazing along with the entire Agent Carter crew. Kudos.
flyonthefourthwall 