Looking forward to the Women's Marches this weekend, we're bringing together a collection of women's voices: women who worked hard, pushed the envelope, and took risks to make their communities a better place.

A cadre of Chicagoans who are hard at work salvaging our recorded history -- on film, video and audio tape -- recently swapped stories.

The spirit of critical inquiry and curiosity about how human society is organized pervades Terkel’s radio archive and many of the conversations take an anthropological and sociological approach to understand our world.

“I wanted to write.” This comment, from a 1966 interview with Chicago theater critic Claudia Cassidy, sums up the life motivations of so many of the women journalists and broadcasters who spoke with Studs Terkel about their life and work, and sometimes about the challenges of being a woman in what was still very much a man’s world.

Many of the great figures in Native American culture and activism appeared on Studs Terkel’s radio show, from writers such as Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, and Simon Ortiz, to musicians such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, to activists and scholars like Roger Buffalohead and Vine Deloria.

Terkel’s interest in sports was skewed heavily in favor of one sport: baseball.

The struggle for women to achieve social equality was one of the great revolutions of the 20th century (a struggle that continues well into the 21st century) and Studs Terkel’s daily radio show featured many of the leading advocates of feminism and women’s rights.

Studs Terkel’s daily radio show was, among other things, a kind of public service through which new and evolving ideas about mental and physical health issues were discussed with candor and a lack of sensationalism.

Living in Chicago, a city that underwent a tremendous transformation over the second half of the 20th century to become a major center of Latin American culture, Terkel engaged with many of the leading figures of Latino artistic and social movements.

Always defying simple categories and genres, Studs Terkel interviewed many artists who didn't fit into society's patterns.