Feminism

New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy was five months pregnant when she went to Mongolia on assignment. Her doctor had cleared her for travel, and she was excited to pursue one last adventurous story before settling down with an infant.

After defying her country's ban on woman drivers, Manal al Sharif was arrested. The outcry by people all over the world led to her release. She tells her story from growing up in Mecca, and adhering to the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to being a security engineer at Aramco, the Saudi national oil company.

Jill Soloway — who identifies as genderqueer and prefers the gender neutral pronouns they/them/their— created the Amazon series Transparent based on their own experience as the child of a transgender woman. Now they have a new Amazon series called I Love Dick.

Before she turned to writing, the National Book Award nominee ran away from home and worked as a stripper. Her new collection of personal essays is Somebody with a Little Hammer.

Full Frontal host Samantha Bee makes no bones about the fact that she was caught off guard by Donald Trump's victory on election night.

In 2009, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar was shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan while co-piloting an Air National Guard medevac helicopter. Though she was wounded in her rifle arm, Hegar managed to return fire while hanging onto a moving helicopter, which saved the lives of her crew and her patients.

Mike Mills' latest film, 20th Century Women, is inspired by the yearning to understand his mother who raised him. Set in Santa Barbara in 1979, it stars Annette Bening as Dorothea, a 55-year-old woman who grew up during the Depression and is struggling to raise her teenage son, Jamie, on her own.

In her new collection of personal essays Jessi Klein considers some of the absurdities of being female.

Growing up in the tribal region of Pakistan, Maria Toorpakai pretended she was a boy in order to compete as a weightlifter. Later she became an internationally known squash player.

Growing up, comics Nadia Manzoor and Radhika Vaz never dreamed that they would one day co-star in a sketch-comedy series about two immigrant Muslim women in Brooklyn. But Manzoor who grew up in a Pakistani-Muslim community in London, and Vaz who grew up in India now star in the web series Shugs & Fats. The series won a Gotham Award for breakthru short form series.

At 46, former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee says she's not very concerned with what people think of her.

"Being in my late 40s has been absolutely freeing and liberating for me," Bee tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I'm a married woman with kids. I'm a professional. People just can't [put me] me in a tiny box that makes sense to them, so now I just don't care that much what people think of me ... and now I do my own thing."

Author Peggy Orenstein says that when it comes to sexuality, girls hear that "they're supposed to be sexy, they're supposed to perform sexually for boys, but ... their sexual pleasure is unspoken."

In the '50s, four people collaborated to create a pill so women could enjoy sex. They fibbed about their motivations and skirted the law. Jonathan Eig details the history in The Birth of the Pill.

The film Violette is a fictionalized portrait of Violette Leduc, the trailblazing French novelist who was considered difficult. Te strangely gripping movie captures a key moment in feminist history.

The Essential Ellen Willis focuses on the writer's explicitly feminist culture criticism. It was edited by Willis' daughter, who published an earlier collection of her mother's essays in 2011.

A study released this year examined cases where law enforcement intervened in the lives of pregnant women who were believed to be endangering their fetuses. State laws are stepping in on behalf of the fetuses' constitutional rights — but what of the mothers' rights? Fresh Air looks at three perspectives in the debate.

Bridget Jones hasn't aged well. At 51, she's the "geriatric mum" of two small children, and finds herself yearning to plunge back into dating. Critic Maureen Corrigan says if you're looking for jolly feminist cultural commentary, you'd be better off reading a witty "encyclopedia of lady things" from the creators of the website Jezebel.

Many think of the feminist movement as a thing of the past, but Debora Spar says the battle isn't won yet. She tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about the misinterpretation that got us where we are, and the need to improve support and pay for working women.