Telling Women’s History: Three Questions and An Answer With Heath Hardange Lee
I first “met” Heath Hardage Lee on line when a mutual friend tweeted that anyone interested in women’s history needed to keep her eyes out for Heath’s upcoming book, The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam. I’ve been watching her progress ever since, including the announcement that Reese Witherspoon optioned the book even before its release. (This is huge!)
Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.
My new narrative nonfiction book, The League of Wives, tells the story of a group of American military wives of American prisoners and missing during the Vietnam War. These women AMAZED me. They were protocol-bound until the war came along and blew all the rules away. When their husbands were threatened, they banded together across race and rank and took on not only the North Vietnamese government, but their own as well. These women were FIERCE! I am always attracted to stories of strong women who speak out, but I particularly liked this scenario of women who were not by any means feminists but were very conservative rule-conscious people before the war. The organization and leadership that our country saw once these women decided to work as a group was astonishing. I’m inspired by these women and what they achieved every day.
If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
Sybil Bailey Stockdale. Sybil was the wife of Jim Stockdale the highest ranking American naval POW of the Vietnam War. As such, she mirrored Jim’s rank and took charge of the Navy POW and MIA wives. She conceived of and consolidated POW and MIA wives and their families from all branches of the military into one National League of Families for American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. She was so savvy politically and organizationally, and she had exceptional leadership abilities. If she were around today she could easily be President!
Sybil became the only wife of an active duty Naval office to be awarded the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award-the highest award the Navy can give a civilian. I think she needs a Presidential Medal of Freedom too. I would love to see a monument built to honor Sybil and her League of Wives in Washington, D.C. in front of Constitution Hall where they had their historic May 1, 1970 meeting. Sybil passed away in 2015, but no one should ever forget what she did for American war prisoners and missing as well as what she did to further the empowerment of American military wives.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
The biggest challenge in this researching is finding the stories themselves. So much of what women did for so long was NOT written down, not applauded or lauded like the efforts of their male counterparts. So locating primary sources especially on unknown women is very difficult. In the 19th century and early twentieth century women’s private letters and papers were often burned or thrown away upon their deaths since it was not seen as acceptable for private items to “go public”. The value of these items was not realized by most—even by the women themselves. Often you don’t know you are making history when it’s happening to you, as in the case of the POW and MIA wives whose primary goal was to save their husbands, not to preserve their own history or the history of the movement. That is why oral history and first person interviews with the women who lived through such events are so important. The exciting part is that often these women are being heard and listened to for the first time. So it’s often a fresh, new point of view these women give that no one has even thought to look for before.
In your role as the 2017 Dole Archives Curatorial Fellow, you curated a traveling museum exhibit based on your research for The League of Wives. How does telling history in a visual or multi-media form differ from writing history?
I LOVED working with the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics to create The League of Wives exhibit! I have spent a large part of my career working with history museums across the country. So to be given such a wonderful role and free rein to create however I wanted to was amazing. The best part was that I got to select my own “Dream Team” (all women of course) of experts to support the work. And now the exhibit is in great demand traveling the country and helping more people learn about the POW and MIA wives’ movement.
Telling history in a visual way gives the story a rich, textured layer. As a writer I hate to even say this, but the old axiom that “a picture is worth 1000 words” is often true! I find clothes/material culture items in particular connect deeply with viewers-they remember themselves wearing such items-or they visualize themselves wearing them or using them. It is a way of “trying on” the history. Items like clothes, artifacts and filmed interviews and audio draw a guest in to the story so that they WILL read the text labels and the historical documents. For a lot of people, that’s an easier way to digest a historical topic than reading a book about it.
As a writer, working on a visual narrative through the exhibit helped me so much to narrow down what the most important experiences and events were for the women in the story. It helped me cut out a lot of background noise that just didn’t need to be in the book-or in the exhibit. It also helped me choose the best photos for the inside of the book, which I see as a visual timeline of the women’s story.
And a question from Heath for me: How do you think war affects women on the home front differently than men?
This is one of those maddening questions where the answer is “it depends.”
Because the United States has had the luxury of experiencing war at a distance for the last century, Americans tend to assume that women on the home front are separated from the front line. In that situation, women fill in the gaps left by men, whether that means learning to make home repairs, or functioning as a single parent, or running the family farm, or working a job that frees up a man to fight. Or like the women in the League Of Wives, becoming advocates for the missing, the lost, or the damaged.
When the home front and the front line are closer, women’s experience of war is more complex. Women who are near the front lines suffer still fill in the gaps left by men, but they also share the risks of war. They suffer the depredations of occupying armies, the threat of rape as a weapon of war, food shortages, danger from enemy shelling.
One of the things that surprised me the most in researching Women Warriors was that the most common circumstances under which women fought was in a siege—another form of filling in the gaps left by men. Throughout history women took to the walls or the fields with whatever forces they could muster to defend their homes, castles, and cities when a besieging army was at the door. For the most part, women played supporting roles: carrying food, water, and ammunition to the soldiers; boosting the morale of the city’s defenders and/or mocking the besiegers; and helping to rebuild defenses or dig trenches. Some picked up scythes, or swords, or machine guns, or mortars, and fought.
Sometimes the home front and the front line are only a few steps apart.
Want to know more about Heath Lee and the League of Wives?
Check out her website: https://heathleeauthor.com/
Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeathLee1
(Check in tomorrow for the next Telling Women’s History interview: I’ve got an entire month of some of my favorite history people talking about the work they do and how they do it. Next up, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World.)
In which I introduce novelist Greer Macallister and an interview series for Women’s History Month.
Last year historical novelist Greer Macallister ran a wonderful series on her blog for Women’s History Month titled #WomensHistoryReads. The concept was simple: she asked historians and historical novelists to answer three questions regarding writing and reading about women in history and asked each of us to ask her a question in return. I eagerly awaited each post as it came out. If you want to read them, this index gives you access to all of them: http://bit.ly/2NBhG3f
She’s running the series again this month, talking only to novelists. With her blessing, I’m borrowing (okay, stealing) her format for a similar series here on the Margins. Over the next month, Monday through Thursday, some of my favorite people involved in women’s history will answer three questions about the work they do and how and why they do it. I’ll chime in on Fridays.
The obvious person to start with is Greer Macallister herself. I know Greer from the days when we both hung out in a wonderful on-line writing group called Backspace. I love her books. I’m eagerly awaiting the next one, which comes out any day now. Here’s her official bio:
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister is a novelist, poet, short story writer, and playwright who earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her debut novel, The Magician’s Lie, was a USA Today bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and a Target Book Club selection. It has been optioned for film by Jessica Chastain’s Freckle Films. Her novel Girl in Disguise, also an Indie Next pick, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it “a well-told, superb story.” Her new novel, Woman 99, is forthcoming from Sourcebooks in March 2019. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Washington, DC.
Take it away, Greer:
Tell us about a woman from the past who has inspired your writing.
The first kernel of my new novel Woman 99 was the inspiring life of Nellie Bly, whose intrepid reporting adventures took her many places, including literally around the world. One of her most striking assignments involved feigning madness to investigate and expose the harsh conditions at the notorious Blackwell’s Asylum in New York City, which she did in 1887. In “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” she wrote, “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.” I took that as the jumping-off point for a story about a young woman who uses some of Nellie’s methods to get into an insane asylum, but for a different reason: to rescue her beloved sister. I chose not to write about Nellie herself since there are plenty of great non-fiction accounts already in existence–after all, she was a reporter! Most of what she did was very well-documented.
Do you think Women’s History Month is important?
I think it’s a shame that we have to have it but I’m glad we do, if that makes sense. It would be great if women’s stories from history were considered as important as men’s, that high school history textbooks made the names Kate Warne, Irena Sendler and Ida B. Wells as familiar as John Wilkes Booth, Oskar Schindler and W.E.B. DuBois. But until that happens, having an annual reminder to pay attention to these stories, to seek them out? I think it’s great. It’s no excuse not to call attention to great books by and/or about women the rest of the year, but it’s an excellent occasion to dig deeper and shout louder.
What’s your next book about and when is it coming out?
Woman 99 hits shelves on March 5, 2019, and I couldn’t be more excited! It’s about a young woman whose quest to free her sister from an infamous insane asylum risks her sanity, her safety and her life. I describe it in a lot of different ways, but this is probably my favorite: it’s kind of a 19th-century Orange is the New Black, following a group of women on the fringes of society who find connection and community in the last place you’d think to look. I’m also fond of the way Publishers Weekly summed it up in their review: “Macallister sensitively and adroitly portrays mental illness in an era when it was just beginning to be understood, while weaving a riveting tale of loyalty, love, and sacrifice.”
A question for Pamela: As you researched Women Warriors (which I am so excited to read!), were you able to get a sense of why women’s stories so often faded from the historical record? I imagine in some cases the elimination or manipulation of women warriors’ stories was malicious, but in others, purely a function of who was responsible for writing history down.
There are a lot of different reasons why individual women’s stories have been pushed into the historical shadows and buried in the footnotes. But once you get past the particulars, there are two stages in the historical process that filter women out of the story—as well as the poor and the minority groups of any given time and place. (It’s important to remind ourselves that for much of history western Europe was culturally backward, that Christianity was originally a minority sect that was looked on with suspicion by rulers as late as the twelfth century, etc. In short, the face of the dominant power changes over history, though it is usually male.)
In the first stage, someone decides what is important to record and preserve—a decision that often leaves women out of the story, or the burial cairn, or the inscription, or the archive. Sometimes women’s stories make it into a historical footnote or an archival collection because they are attached to those of important men. Sometimes they are told as a good example or a horrible warning. Sometimes they are left out of the official history for political reasons or because their presence detracts from the official narrative. And when they do appear in the historical record, their stories, like all historical evidence, are filtered through the assumptions of the (almost always) men who wrote them. Character assassination, salacious speculation, and hagiography are all common.
In the second stage, later historians often filter women out of the story because their (or should I say our?) presence doesn’t fit our shared cultural narrative about what’s important and who does important things. As a result, historians have often not looked at events through the lens of women’s lives and at the same time have not looked at examples of women involved in typically male spheres. And sometimes they have worked really hard to explain why the evidence that a particular woman was involved was wrong. It has been a “lose, lose and, yes, you lose again” game.
That began to change around 1980, with the rise of women’s history. But we have a long way to go.
Want to know more about Greer Macallister and her novels?
Check out her website: www.greermacallister.com
Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Check in on Monday for the next Telling Women’s History interview: Next up, Heath Lee, author of the The League of Wives.
It’s Publication Day for Women Warriors! (And I’m Giving Away Copies.)
On November 15, 2016, I announced here on the Margins that I had a deal with Beacon Press for the book the became Women Warriors: An Unexpected History. One way or another, I’ve been talking to y’all about it every since. Today is the book’s official publication day. If you pre-ordered the book, you should receive it shortly. (Maybe even today!) If you’ve been waiting for it to arrive on the shelves of your local bookstore or library, it could be there already. It’s available as an ebook and an audiobook* as well as a hardcover.
In case you can’t tell, I am thrilled, proud, and petrified. **
To celebrate, I’m giving away two copies of Women Warriors. To enter, just leave a comment here on the blog (not on Facebook or Twitter please) or send me an email by midnight CST on March 8.
On Friday, I’m starting a special series here for Women’s History Month: four short interviews each week with some of my favorite history people talking about women’s history, what they do, and how they do it. It should be big fun.
Thanks for your patience, support, and bravos over the course of writing this book. It’s been a wild ride, people. Cross your fingers for me. With a little luck it could get wilder yet.
*Narrated by the amazing Rosemary Benson, whose style has been described as elegant and assertive. Which sounds pretty dang perfect to me.
**This is my eighth book and my third official publication date. You’d think the thrill (and the terror) would wear off. Apparently not.
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I’ll share any big news here, but I’m not going to clutter this space with information about speaking gigs and small news. If you want to know where I’m speaking, you can find that information on the events page (which I’m going to update any minute now), or sign up for my newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b