Nearly 50 years after it first shocked readers nationwide, Alix Kates Shulman's, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is still being hailed as a feminist classic. Inspired by the iconic protest of the 1968 Miss America Pageant, and called by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement," the 1972 book continues to hit home with its comic portrayal of growing up female in a man's world in white middle-class pre-feminist America. The book was re-released last year. At 87, Alix is still writing, speaking, and taking her message to the streets.

Alix talks about writing those daring sex scenes, her own terrifying illegal abortion, how fiction can change minds, and the slow but effective changes brought about by wave after wave of the women's movement.

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(Broadcast date: January 8, 2020)