Here's where I think we're going, now I've kicked the tyres on this thing a bit:

• I've got a few more standalone episodes in production, but the podcast is returning to my original plan – deeply researched, carefully produced, multi-episode documentary series that look at a known moment in history but recenter women's experience. I'm aiming for one a quarter because it's about as much research as my dissertation, and we're starting with the American Revolution. Members will get to binge it all on day 1; everyone else gets the weekly drip.
• Every Saturday, and early this week because it's Easter, everyone gets the newsletter of assorted nerdery as my friend Jonn Elledge calls it (definitely subscribe to him too). Sometimes serious, sometimes sillier (like today) but hopefully always educational. Main topic at the top, scroll down for bits and bobs. Some bobs may end up behind a paywall.
• As the catalogue grows, all archives, occasional essays as well as the video explainers that are proving popular on social media will live here, for members only. As membership grows, I hope to also host online community events, just for us.

Sounds good? Let's go! And happy Easter too! 🐣

What D-Day stories were we missing? The weather's, apparently.

The World War II movie is the epitome of popular history media. And it never (fine, almost never) has women in lead roles. War is a man's affair, we're told. Blockbuster films require drama, conflict, things blowing up. Surely we can't make a big budget movie about sad wives on the home front and non-combatant troops handling logistics, you understand. Then they go and make a movie about... the D-Day weather forecast.

In Pressure (out in May in the US, in September in the UK), General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) and Britain's chief weather guy James Stagg (Andrew Scott) battle it out over when to storm the Normandy beaches – fear not, the trailer really wrings all it can out of that particular metaphor – while avoiding the rain. Spoiler alert: The landings were originally scheduled for June 5, 1944 and were pushed 24 hours because of storms on the Channel.

The film is perfectly pitched for the Rest Is History dad crowd, a famously underserved audience, down to the Major Wint... er, Damian Lewis supporting role. Kerry Condon plays the one female character, the real-life Kay Summersby, Eisenhower's chauffeur, secretary and trusted thought partner. Wikipedia editors call her "his right-hand man" and they must think it's a compliment.

Will I watch this? Of course. You're talking to the woman who does a yearly rewatch of Band of Brothers. And I love this success for the playwright, David Haig. But that doesn't mean I won't complain about it. I mean no disrespect to Group Captain Stagg; weather is a fundamental element of war, Napoleon taught us that. But if you can make a hero out of a meteorologist sitting in Bedfordshire and a villain out of the British weather, surely you can make a film or two about the women of WWII for once. Here are my pitches.

1. D-Day Girls

The incredible story of the 39 women who in 1942 joined the SOE to infiltrate France on behalf of Britain's secret service. Many were French women who had fled when the Nazis marched in, answering De Gaulle's call to join him in London. There was Andrée Borrel, a tomboy, working-class girl from the suburbs of Paris who was the first to parachute back into her occupied homeland. She was murdered in a concentration camp before reaching her 25th birthday. Add Odette Sansom, a bored suburban mum in Somerset, French-born but married to an Englishman. With her husband on the front, she left her three daughters in a convent school and joined the Spindle network. Its leader would become her second husband – who doesn't love a romantic secondary storyline? She survived 14 Gestapo interrogations under torture without giving away a thing. Noor Inayat Khan was an Indo-American-British Muslim woman born in Moscow and raised in France. She fled Paris in 1940 but parachuted back as a radio operator for the Prosper network. She too resisted torture after her arrest, and was executed at Dachau. What about Lise de Baissac, a Mauritian aristocrat who'd emigrated to France as a teenager and a fiercely independent single woman in her mid-30s when the war broke out? She teamed up with her brother Claude de Baissac to ready Resistance troops on the ground for D-Day. And let's not forget Violette Szabo, who, when she was stopped by German troops, engaged them in a fierce gun battle, allowing her male comrades to escape and survive. She too was executed.
Genre: Espionage + sorority. Think Bridge of Spies meets Band of Brothers, with less testosterone.
Source material: There's already a best-selling nonfiction book, just buy the rights.
Cast: Céleste Brunnquell as Andrée Borrell, Adèle Exarchopoulos as Odette Sansom, Ambika Mod as Nour Inayat Khan, Eva Green as Lise de Baissac, Louis Garrel as her brother, Lyna Khoudri as Violette Szabo.

2. The Face of War

Martha Gellhorn was one of very few reporters to land in Normandy on D-Day. She had covered the war all over Europe and Asia, and the Spanish civil war before that, but the army refused to accredit even experienced women for the invasion, so she went as a stowaway on a hospital ship. For her daring, she was stripped of all accreditations and had to fight her way onto every story. Later she revealed the horrors of Dachau to the world. Gellhorn pioneered the way we write about wars today, focusing not on troop movements, but on the impact on civilians and the collision of quotidian domesticity with geopolitics. She's often introduced as Ernest Hemingway's third wife and the only big movie about her focuses on that relationship (she's portrayed by Nicole Kidman, he by Clive Owen). Hemingway was a jealous and domineering husband, who admired her talent before resenting it, stealing her commissions and blocking her career. Guess who didn't get out of the boat on D-Day?
Genre: Biopic + journalism movie (my favourite kind). Yes we already have Lee, but who says we only get one?
Source material: Plenty of Gellhorn's own writing, much of it autobiographical, like The Face of War, which is lending its title; her authoritative biography by Caroline Moorehead; Starry and Restless, by Julia Cooke (next on the podcast), which connects her with two other great reporters of the era, Rebecca West and Emily Hahn.
Cast: Since Kate Winslet has already played Lee Miller (she can cameo), I want to see Carrie Coon on this one. Rachel Weisz can play Rebecca West and Kristen Stewart as Emily Hahn.

3. Clipped Wings

There was some flying in WWI, but WWII is when airborne conflict really took off. Every nation was desperate for pilots, so women were soon called upon to do the less glamorous bits of flying, carrying freight and ferrying planes to where they needed to be, in order to free the men up for combat. Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary attracted pilots from all over the world as it alone accepted women at the time – 1 in 8 of their signups, who were paid 20% less than their male peers. They were under the command of Pauline Gower, a former débutante who gave joyrides in a flying circus for a living. The US later had a dedicated unit, the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots), led by Jacqueline Cochran, later the first woman to break the sound barrier, and Nancy Love, who started flying as a teenager. The job brought no glory, but it was nonetheless perilous. These women flew experimental aircraft for testing and damaged aircraft for repair, often without navigation instruments. They even trailed targets for live fire combat practice. The ATA's death toll was 1 in 7; 38 WASPs died as well, the final one Hazel Ying Lee, the first Chinese American female pilot. Not considered soldiers, the women were given no life insurance and their funeral expenses were not covered. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was the only country to allow women to fly combat missions. The Night Witches were a bomber regiment of very young volunteers, founded by Major Marina Raskova, the "Russian Amelia Earhart", who led precision raids over Germany, cutting off their engines and gliding in silence over their targets. Raskova died while attempting a forced landing near Stalingrad and received a state funeral.
Genre: Let's make this one an international TV production. This is clearly Masters of the Air, but female and global.
Source material: There is an absurd number of books about this. Just look at this Goodreads list. I stole the title Clipped Wings from one of them.
Cast: Florence Pugh as Pauline Gower, Rhea Seehorn as Jacqueline Cochran, Julia Garner as Nancy Love, Stephanie Hsu as Hazel Ying Lee. Tough casting Russians right now, so maybe Olga Kurylenko or Noomi Rapace for Marina Raskova.

4. The Lost Manuscript

This one takes us straight from World War II into the Cold War, and we're going arthouse with two parallel timelines. The first, 12th-century Germany. We follow the rise of Hildegard von Bingen, mystic, intellectual, artist, Da Vinci-like superstar savant of the German Renaissance, and eventually saint (I'll tell you about her some other time). Second timeline, February 1945, Dresden. An open bank vault in a bombed out city. Hildegard's original works had been moved there for safekeeping during the war. Only the Riesencodex remained, a mammoth volume of her collected works preserved in a metal box. Soviet soldiers seized it for the communist state. To get it back, the nuns at Hildegard's abbey in Eibingen teamed up with Franz Götting, the state librarian; Margarete Kühn, a medieval scholar with access to the Soviet sector of Berlin and ambitions to take vows at the abbey herself; and Caroline Walsh, the wife of an American soldier stationed in Germany. Together they organised an incredible switcheroo: Margarete obtained a loan of the manuscript under cover of research and replaced it with another old volume procured by Franz. She handed it to Caroline who crossed occupied Germany with 35 pounds of old velum hidden on her person until she reached Eibingen and handed the Riesencodex to the mother superior. It took years for the Soviets to realise they'd been played.
Genre: The Name of the Rose meets Ocean's Eleven
Source material: Janina Ramirez tells the story in her book Femina.
Cast: Diane Kruger as Hildegard von Bingen, Sandra Hüller as Margarete Kühn, Christop Waltz as Franz Götting, Katherine LaNasa as Caroline Walsh, Olivia Colman as the mother superior.

And a fifth movie that's actually been made

The Six Triple Eight (available on Netflix) tells the story of the only all-Black, all-female unit deployed in WWII, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was tasked with sorting and delivering mail to soldiers on the Western front. "No mail, low morale" was their motto. Before you tell me the postal service isn't all that compelling, I don't entirely disagree, but let me remind you this all started with a movie about a weather forecast.

Bobs and bits

• Incidentally, a staff writer at The Atlantic is the granddaughter of a WASP and she just wrote about their (fruitless) battle to be recognised as veterans.
• Speaking of Band of Brothers, I was moved by this interview with Kirk Acevedo (he played Joe Toye with that wonderfully coarse voice) who talks about roles drying up, having to sell his house and the disappearance of the middle class actor. It's happening everywhere. I see it in journalism, my brother sees it video games, my friends see it in screenwriting, in the theatre or in music, my professors told me not to bother with a PhD because they see it in academia... the creative middle class is disappearing. It predated AI but AI makes it worse. Value is still being created but it's not captured by those who create it. It's intercepted by tech platforms, big monopolies and a few superstars. You're either Taylor Swift or you're starving. Let's be real, we don't want to be out here constantly begging you for 5 quid a month on Substack or Patreon (who also take their pound of flesh). It's just the only option left where creatives feel a modicum of control over their destiny. Pretty dire.
• On a recommendation from BH member Michaël Jarjour, I just listened to this brand new podcast, The Wrong Side of History by Jay Singleton. The concept is slippery but clever – understanding history's bad guys the way they understood themselves. The first series is about American women who opposed getting the vote, the majority view at the time. Jay's the sole narrator, no expert interviews, so you have to trust him, but the research on episode 1 is solid.
• Victoria Bateman and I told you in episode 1 how much more frequent it used to be before the Industrial Revolution for women to work in waged labor, and we shared a bunch of business cards of 18th century entrepreneurs. In that vein, the National Archives have a fun story about Mary Parker, an East London wine merchant, during the American Revolution.
• My MA classmate Amy Freeborn wrote a very necessary article about re-examining the witch as a symbolic feminist figure. The feminist study of Early Modern witch hunts played a huge part in the rise of women's history as a field and got a lot of us engaged, but the more we learn, the more we have to nuance the picture. Not everyone's willing to do the hard work of intellectual honesty. I'll write about this some more.
• Women's History Month is over. Thank God. Now we get to hear from people who actually care.