Feminism

Sallie Bingham came from a family of newspaper magnates. After she was ejected from her paper's board of directors, she sold her share of stocks to fund various organizations for women in her home state of Kentucky. The Bingham family's internecine conflicts later came under public scrutiny, and was the subject of two books. Sallie Bingham's new memoir, Passion and Prejudice, tells her side of the story.

Guest critic Leslie Savan says the portrayal of women in recent television commercials reflects what she calls the "gal" archetype -- clumsy but charming, and always insecure, they never have the upper hand at home or work.

Feminist scholar Barbara Katz Rothman says that feminists must confront the cultural shift toward privileging the unborn fetus over the pregnant women. New technologies and the rise of paid surrogacy, Rothman argues, have contributed to this change.

Lorde is open about her identity as a black lesbian feminist; she hopes her visibility will help other women like her feel less alone. She joins Fresh Air to talk about her romantic relationships with men and women, and the tensions between African American and feminist communities. Her new collection of essays, A Burst of Light, deals with her experience with breast cancer.

Literature professor and writer Carolyn Heilbrun writes about women's issues under her own name, and detective novels under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. She believes that the path forward for feminism is androgyny and a greater blurring of gender roles and identities.

Television journalist Marlene Sanders was a pioneer in advancing the role of women in the newsroom. In the 1970s, she covered the feminist movement; she says no male journalists were able to get the story right. She has a new book about women, co-authored by Marcia Rock.

Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg links the eating disorder to Victorian standards of femininity and contemporary ideas of health and beauty. Her findings suggest that increased social mobility put women and girls at greater risk for the disease.

Guest commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews Writing Red, an anthology of women's writing from the 1930s which brings to light the often overlooked experience of working class women during that decade.

The writer published her first story she was 35; her first novel came out nine years later. Her latest book, Silver, is about marriage, domesticity and suburban life.

Poet Sharon Olds. She writes passionate and intensely personal poems about her childhood with abusive and alcoholic parents, and her own experiences as a mother and a wife. Suicide attempts in New York, and encounters on the subway also provide inspiration for her work. Sharon Olds is the recipient of the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection titled The Dead and the Living.

Rock Critic Ken Tucker looks at several women rock musicians who reject female rock stereotypes and work in highly idiosyncratic and original styles. The groups and individuals includes the Sugarcubes, Jane Wiedlin and M.C. Lyte.

Writer Doris Lessing. Since her first novel, The Grass is Singing, published in 1950, she has written many books and plays, including the Children of Violence series, The Golden Notebook, and more recently Shikasta and her "space-fiction" series. Her new novel is titled The Fifth Child. Fresh Air book critic John Leonard once described Mrs. Lessing as "one of the half-dozen most interesting minds to have chosen to write fiction in English in this century."

Short story writer and novelist Alice Adams. Her fiction deals often with women in transit and transition. She's best known for the 1984 novel Superior Women. Her new novel is titled Second Chances.

Comic Sandra Bernhard. She's best known for her appearances on "Late Night With David Letterman" and in the Martin Scorsese film "The King of Comedy." She's now starring in the Off-Broadway one-woman show "Without You I'm Nothing," that is part stand-up comedy, part satire on the "women of rock and roll."

Critic-at-Large Laurie Stone discusses the new ABC show "Home." The format is similar to the morning news shows, like "Good Morning America," and "The Today Show," mixing live interviews with pre-produced segments, all of which revolve around domestic issues, like how to make pot scrubbers out of onion bags.

Film director Fran Rubel Kuzui. She's just completed her first film, "Tokyo Pop," about a young American punk singer who moves to Japan in the hopes of reviving her stalled career. (Interview by Faith Middleton)

Playboy and Village Voice columnist Cynthia Heimel. Heimel brings her sassy wit to the plight of the single woman of the 80s, beset with such traumas as tackling urban life and surviving the Great Boyfriend Crunch. Her books include Sex Tips for Girls and But Enough About You. (Interview by Faith Middleton)

British novelist Fay Weldon. Her works include The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Praxis and Down Among the Women. Her latest novel, a love story, is titled The Hearts and Lives of Men, and was written as a serial over the course of a year for the British magazine Woman. (Interview by Faith Middleton)

Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek, authors of the book Mothers of Invention, a compilation of inventions by women. Some have been rather mundane, like Liquid Paper and drip coffee. But others include radium, the computer language COBOL and the first computer compiler. The authors are better known for their writing about rock and roll. (Interview by Faith Middleton)

Book critic John Leonard reviews S, the new novel by John Updike. The novel is a modern story that draws from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.