Monday 3/9/2026 – Humankind Special: The Life of Dorothy Day
When Pope Francis addressed Congress in 2015, he cited four great Americans: President Abraham Lincoln, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., writer and activist Dorothy Day and theologian Thomas Merton. Ms. Day, who died in 1980 at age 83, was a remarkable 20th century figure: journalist and founder of the “Catholic Worker” movement, which established soup kitchens and “houses of hospitality” in the Great Depression. More than 200 Catholic worker facilities remain in operation today. In this profile, we hear excerpts of a talk by Dorothy Day, along with recollections by her youngest grandchild, Kate Hennessy, a Vermont resident, who recently published a moving family memoir, "The World Will Be Saved By Beauty" for which she reconstructed the Dorothy Day story. Also heard is Kathe McKenna, co-founder of Haley House in Boston, a Catholic Worker hospitality center, inspired by the life and work of Dorothy Day. Today, more than fifty years later, Haley House operates a soup kitchen, food pantry, and other services. Most recently, they opened Dudley Dough, an inner city workplace that offers a living wage and for customers, healthy pizza.
Monday 3/16/2026 – WHER: 1,000 Beautiful Watts
WHER, the first all-girl radio station in the nation, went on the air in Memphis on October 29, 1955. It was the brainchild of sound legend Sam Phillips, who created the groundbreaking format with money he raised from selling Elvis Presley's Sun Studios contract. Women almost exclusively ran WHER. On the air they read the news, interviewed local celebrities, and spun popular records. Behind the scenes they sold and created commercials, produced and directed programming and sat at the station's control boards.
Monday 3/23/2026 – The Suffragist in the Basement
When it comes to women and monuments in the US, we seem to prefer mythical or allegorical women – think a lady in robes holding the scales of justice in front of a courthouse. It’s rare to see real women being honored for their actual accomplishments. But for decades, there was one statue in Wyoming that was an exception. Wyoming is known as the “equality state” because it was the first in the nation to pass women’s suffrage. And it recognized that history with a statue of Wyoming’s first Justice of the Peace and suffragist, Esther Hobart Morris, which stood outside the state Capitol building for 60 years. But today, that statue of Morris now lives underground in the Capitol basement. In this episode, we look at what the story of this one monument reveals about how women are mythologized and erased.
Monday 3/30/2026 – Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes
This program is the story of women in the ultimate Man’s World – the labs and Shuttle crew cabins of NASA. Told in the first person, these stories explore the experiences of NASA’s first woman engineers and scientists and its first astronauts. It also tells the fascinating story of a group of women pilots who – in the early 1960s – were led to believe that they would be America’s first women astronauts and were given the exact same physical tests are the Mercury astronauts. The program is narrated by Eileen Collins, the first woman commander of a Space Shuttle.