The League of Wives with Heath Hardage Lee

This week and am super-stoked to welcome Heath Hardage Lee to the show. Heath and I discussed her new book: The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women who took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home (St. Martin’s Press, 2019). This is a really fascinating story about a group of women who challenged 1960s and 70s gender assumptions AND red tape to lobby the government to bring the POW/MIA husbands home from Vietnam. We also talk about writing for a broader audience and Reese Withspoon’s film production company making this story into a motion picture. Cool stuff! Here’s all the things we discuss:

• The League, the women, and what they sought to do

• The obstacles faced to the conventional gender assumptions of the 1960s and 1970s

• The military rules and regulations AND the red tape involved

• How the League acknowledged these assumptions and defied them

• Military wives, conservatism, and feminist icons for the modern era

• LBJ, Nixon and their differing approaches to the League

Have a listen…

You’ll also want to grab a copy of Heath’s prize-winning book, Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause (Potomac Books, 2014) - about Jefferson Davis’s daughter and her role in the post-Civil War South. You can check out Heath’s other work and make sure and catch her public appearances, all listed on her WEBSITE and for sure follow her on Twitter, and Facebook.

And please, be sure and subscribe to The Rogue Historian Podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite app so you never ever ever ever miss a show. That would be dumb.

With compliments,

Keith