Feminism

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Hunters and Gatherers the new comic novel by Francine Prose, a story about a Manhattan community of New Age Goddess worshippers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux .August 1995)

Rome cofounded the Boston's Women's Health Collective, which published the book that became women's bible for healthcare, Our Bodies Ourselves. She talked with Terry in 1990 when the Women's Health Collective was celebrating it's 20th anniversary. Rome died of breast cancer on Saturday, June 24, 1995.

We continue our interview with NPR reporter and All Things Considered producer/host Linda Wertheimer. In this segment, she talks about her experiences as a woman during the early days of her career.

Judith Musick is the director of the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a pregnancy prevention and teenage-parent programs in Illinois, and author of the new book, "Young, Poor and Pregnant: The Psychology of Teenage Motherhood." Musick believes that impoverished adolescent girls become young mothers as an attempt to create a future and an identity.

Biographer Deirdre Bair has written acclaimed biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Her newest subject is writer and diarist Anais Nin. A reviewer in the Kirkus Reviews writes, "Bair's Nin emerges as the complex woman she was, a woman who inspired both wrath and passion in those whose paths crossed hers. It's called Anais Nin: A Biography.

Sexologist Leonore Tiefer has written a new book called "Sex Is Not a Natural Act: and Other Essays." She looks at our society's anxieties towards and ignorance about sex. She also questions what is "normal" sex. Tiefer received a Ph.D. in physiological psychology, and later specialized in clinical psychology to become a sex researcher, sex therapist and an Associate Professor at the Montefoire Medical Center in New York City. Tiefer has also been a sex columnist for the New York Daily News.

Panter is well known in the punk-rock scene, and was a founding member and writer of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse." She is a member of the punk band Honk if Yer Horny. In 1992, Panter co-founded The Bohemian Women's Political Alliance, a feminist organization of "the teenagers who dressed in black, the bad girls who climbed out of [their] bedroom windows at dark and caught taxis home at dawn."

Tannen is the author of the bestselling, "You Just Don't Understand." She has a new book about communication between the sexes, "Talking From 9 to 5: How Women's and Men's Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done at Work."

Author and activist Mahnaz Afkhami lobbied for many years for women's rights in her native Iran. For the past fifteen years, she has been in exile from her country for this work. During that time, she talked with other women in exile from all over the world. Twelve of these women's stories are recorded in her new book, "Women in Exile."

In 1990, an American Association of American Women survey found that the self-esteem of young girls plummets during adolescence. A year later, journalist Peggy Orenstein was commissioned to do a follow-up study, which resulted in her new book, "Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap." Orenstein talked to girls in two junior high schools, and examined some of the factors that influenced their feelings about themselves, including schooling, family, and class.

Adrienne Germain is Vice President for the International Women's Health Coalition, which works to improve women's reproductive health care and rights in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. She will serve as one of the delegates to next month's U.N. International Conference on Population and development in Cairo. She is also co-author of "Population Policies Reconsidered," about channelling efforts to control the population not only through fertility programs, but also by offering broad-spectrum health care to women.

O'Brien spent twenty years as a reporter for the Chicago Sun Times. In 1988, she worked as Michael Dukakis' press secretary when he ran for president. She now writes novels; her latest is called "The Ladies Lunch," about a group of Washington women who meet weekly for lunch, until one of their group, the White House press secretary, dies a violent and mysterious death.

Susan Douglas is a professor of media and American studies at Hampshire College. She has just written a book “Where the Girls Are,” that looks at women in baby-boomer pop culture. She explains how the media’s alternating images of stereotypical femininity and feminism created a kind of “schizophrenia” in American women. She talks about how this confusion has caused ambivalence in American women about what feminism means.

Father 'Gus' DiNoia is a Dominican Priest and a theologian to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. On May 31, the Pope issued an Apostolic letter to bishops declaring that women could not be ordained as priests. Though not a formal statement of doctrine, the letter was strongly put, and meant to cut off discussion about the issue.

Norma McCorvey. She was the plaintiff in Roe vs. Wade. In the lawsuit she was called Jane Roe to shield her privacy. In her new book "I Am Roe" (Harper Collins), she tells her story. She was poor, alone and pregnant. Her case became a landmark Supreme Court decision--it gave women the right to choose abortion. But McCorvey ended up giving birth to the child because the Supreme Court decision came too late.

Phil Niekro, Manager, and Lisa Martinez, pitcher for the new all female professional baseball team, the Colorado Silver Bullets. This is the team's inaugural season. The Silver Bullets are the first all-female team to be recognized by the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues and the first to compete only against men. Manager Niekro says, "Every time they make an error, they say 'I'm sorry.'"

Documentary film maker Allie Light. Her new film, "Dialogues With Madwomen," won the 1994 "Freedom of Expression Award" at the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, seven women describe their bouts with mental illness, including Light who checked herself into a day psychiatric facility for three months in 1963 because of problems with depression. Light co-produced the film with Irving Saraf. Their previous work, "In The Shadow of the Stars," won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Writer, feminist, organizer, and the founder of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem. She has a new book of essays, "Moving Beyond Words, (Simon & Schuster). In one of the essays she wonders -- what if Freud were female? -- and imagines what life would be like if one of the most "enduring, influential, and fiercely defended thinkers" in Western civilization were Dr. Phyllis Freud. In her new book Steinem also reflects on turning 60.

Psychologist Mary Pipher has worked mostly with teenage girls for over ten years.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan has a review of a new biography of a turn of the century journalist: "Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist." (Times Books).