Germaine Greer in 2007. Photo: Jonathan Ring.

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Germaine Greer was a hot, giant icon of the 1970s feminist uprising. She wrote “The Female Eunuch.” Rallied for gender revolution. Hit every hot button in the era of bra-burning and “hear me roar.”

Four decades later she’s still on fire. Still ready for revolution. Still standing up for women, even a woman who lived 400 years ago.

Anne Hathaway — not the movie star, but William Shakespeare’s wife — has had a bad rap, says Greer. She’s set out to set it right.

This hour, On Point: Feminist rebel and Renaissance scholar Germaine Greer, on Anne Hathaway — and women and the world now.

You can join the conversation. What’s your question for Germaine Greer? On feminism? Our times? Anne Hathaway?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Germaine Greer joins us from New York. Her book “The Female Eunuch” was a seminal text for the feminist movement in the 1970s. She is a scholar of Elizabethan drama, a professor emeritus at the University of Warwick, with a slew of titles to her name. Her book “Shakespeare’s Wife” came out in the U.S. last year. It’s now out in paperback.

Back in the day: Here’s Greer at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, July 1972…

(AP Photo)

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Whether you’re Michelle Obama or Meghan McCain or Jessica Simpson, laughed out of your Daisy Dukes, body image is a global superpower of an issue these days. With nipped and tucked and Photo-shopped bodies beamed all over the world, no one is safe from impossible expectations and instant judgment.

Psychotherapist Susie Orbach says it’s driving us around the bend, leaving millions — even the svelte — as prisoners of “body hatred.”

Orbach counseled Princess Diana on bulimia. Now she’s taking on the world.

This hour, On Point: Susie Orbach on our bodies and our beleaguered selves.

You can join the conversation. Are you at war with your own body? At peace with it? If there’s “body hatred” out there, who or what’s to blame? Hollywood? Botox? Diet ads? “The Biggest Loser”?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Susie Orbach joins us from London. A psychotherapist and author, she has for years been a leading thinker on eating disorders, gender and body image, and is convener of the website AnyBody. Her books include “On Eating,” “The Impossibility of Sex,” and the bestseller “Fat Is a Feminist Issue.” Her new book is “Bodies.”  You can read the introduction here.

Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton

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Sarah Palin’s debut on the national stage has grabbed America’s attention — and, many would say, stolen the show.

In the process, she’s also sparked new debates over gender and sexism. Here is a strong, conservative woman, a working mother, vowing to take on Washington.

But Ms. Palin wasn’t the first this season to take on the “good ol’ boys.” Before Sarah, there was Hillary, storming the citadel in colorful pantsuits. And let’s not forget Michelle Obama, and Cindy McCain, each navigating symbolic minefields of gender, family, and politics.

This hour, On Point: We hear women’s views on the women of ‘08.

You can join the conversation. Are Sarah, Hillary, and Michelle the role models you’re looking for? What do they tell us about where the women’s movement stands today? Tell us what you think.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from Seattle, Washington, is Sandra Tsing Loh. She’s a writer, performer, and NPR commentator, and her new book is “Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!” She writes regularly for The Atlantic Monthly, where her most recent essay, “I Choose My Choice!,” looked at sisterhood, empowerment, and working moms.

And joining us from Albany, New York, is Debra Dickerson. She’s a contributing writer for Mother Jones and author of “The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to their Rightful Owners” and the memoir “An American Story.”

And with us from New York is Kay Hymowitz, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor for City Journal, and author of “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age” and “Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age.”

Susan Faludi was a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who, in the 1990s, walked away from daily deadlines to become a big-time feminist interpreter of American life. She’s tough and she’s startling.

Now, Faludi is looking at post-9/11 America, and here’s what she sees: a frightened country that has retreated to a core national myth from the wells of history — vulnerable settlers, under attack by savages, putting big brave men out front and little women in the kitchen.

We are prisoners, she says, of a “master narrative” that is showing its age.

This hour, On Point: Susan Faludi and “The Terror Dream.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author of “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man,” and “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.”

Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and author of “Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)” and “Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America.”

Novelist Doris Lessing waited a long time for her Nobel. At almost 88, there’s never been an older winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, announced yesterday in Stockholm.

But Doris Lessing has always been on her own path. As a girl in colonial Rhodesia who broke out of convent school and made herself a writer. As a woman in the 1950s who smashed the mold of “little women” and insisted on full freedom, gender be damned.

Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook” made her a hero to a generation of budding feminists. And she’s still writing strong.

This hour, On Point: the work of Doris Lessing.

Guests:

Judith Kegan Gardiner, English professor and director of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She’s author of “Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the politics of empathy.”

Margaret Moan Rowe, professor of English at Purdue University and author of the critical study “Doris Lessing.”

Harvey Blume, literary critic and author.