Mata Hari's execution by firing squad in 1917 is the image most people carry of women and espionage, and this film asks whether that reputation, the dancer turned German spy, was ever really deserved. It sets her story against Florence Nightingale's, the Crimean War nurse remembered as a selfless angel of the wards, and questions how much of both legends is myth built around women stepping into roles war made available to them. Historians walk through the evidence against Mata Hari, thin and largely circumstantial, and the realities of Nightingale's nursing reforms, less saintly and more administrative than the popular image suggests. The film uses archival photographs, wartime documents, and expert interviews to trace how each woman's public story was shaped by what society needed a female spy or a female nurse to be. It ends less interested in clearing or convicting either woman than in showing how the femme fatale and the ministering angel became the only two roles history was willing to give them.