Feminism

Brigadier General William A. Moorman is Staff Judge Advocate for the Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. He talks about why Lt. Flinn was forced to resign and states the Air Force’s policy concerning sexual conduct.

Mahnaz Afkhami, executive director of the Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI), and Azar Nafisi, professor of English Literature at Tehran's Tabatabai University discuss this weekend's Sisterhood is Global conference in Washington D.C., a symposium addressing issues such as cross-cultural education and women's rights on a global scale. Afkhami has written a substantial manual for women's rights education in Muslim countries. Nafisi has conducted ongoing workshops in Iran, one of six SIGI world workshop sites, on women, their identities, and their rights.

NPR correspondent Margot Adler's commitment to political causes began in her childhood: she grew up in a household of communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era. As a student at Berkeley, she continued her activism. During this time, she exchanged letters with an American soldier in Vietnam. Her life in the sixties is the subject of her memoir, "Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution." (Beacon Press) Adler is now an expert on witchcraft and paganism.

In her books and plays Bornstein, a transgender activist, argues the need for the acceptance of nontraditional gender roles, meaning those not defined as either male of female. In her book "Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us," she writes about her sex-change experience and her view of society's conceptions of gender. She has also written the novel (with co-author Caitlin Sullivan) "Nearly Roadkill."

Jo Ann Kay McNamara talks with Terry Gross about her book "Sisters In Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia." It is published by Harvard University Press. McNamara is a Professor of History at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Wattleton headed the organization from 1978 to 1992. She was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family (her mother was a minister), and later studied to be a nurse. Her work as a public-health nurse exposed her to the hardship of women who tried to terminate their pregnancies in the days before legal abortion. Wattleton went on to be executive director of the local Planned Parenthood, and then president of Planned Parenthood nationally. Her new memoir is called "Life on the Line"

Associate Professor at Columbia University of Public Health Dr. Nahid Toubia. She is from Sudan, and was the first woman surgeon in her country. Toubia is director of "Rainbo" a research and information organization dedicated to the health and human rights of women, particularly women's reproductive and sexual rights. They've begun a campaign against female genital mutilation. Toubia has written a report: "Female Genital Mutilation: A Call for Global Action."

Laura Kaplan is the author of the new book, "The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service," (Pantheon Books). In 1969 this underground abortion service began operation in Chicago, four years before Roe v. Wade. The members of "Jane" were lay-persons who learned how to perform abortions themselves. Laura Kaplan was a member of Jane. She was also a founding member of a Chicago-based women's health-care center. (THIS INTERVIEW CONTINUES INTO THE SECOND HALF OF THE SHOW).

Writer Rebecca Walker. She's a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine, and is cofounder of Third Wave, a national, multicultural organization devoted to encouraging young women's activism. She has edited a new book of writings about feminism today, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. (Anchor Books).

Maureen Corrigan reviews Women on Ice: Feminist Essays on the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle (published by Routledge).

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem, by Carolyn Heilbrun (Dial Publishing).

Political scientist, specializing in women's studies, Amrita Basu. She teaches at Amherst College, and has just edited a collection of essays on women's movements worldwide, The Challenge Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective, (Westview Press).

Reporter Vicky Que is a reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and is attending the NGO Forum on Women, and the Conference on Women in Beijing.

Mike Tyson returns to the ring Saturday night after a four year absence. Three of those years were spent in jail on a rape conviction. .Tyson continues to deny the charge. Commentator Gerald Early says that Tyson's release from prison sparked new questions about an old debate in the black community: tensions between the genders. Gerald Early teaches English at Washington University where he directs the program on African and Afro-American studies. He's the author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prize fighting, Literature and Modern American Culture.

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."