Keira Knightley has written a highly personal and revelatory essay about childbirth and motherhood, and Gemma Arterton has written a short story radically reimagining her Bond film character Strawberry Fields, for the collection Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies, curated by Scarlett Curtis.

Knightley, whose daughter was born in 2015, is about to release Colette, in which she stars as the eponymous French writer, celebrated for her taboo-breaking literary work. It is her first lead role for some time, having scaled back her acting work after giving birth.

Now 33, Knightley made her name with a string of period films, including Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, and popular hits such as Bend It Like Beckham and the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

Her essay, titled The Weaker Sex, begins by describing her daughter’s birth: “My vagina split. You came out with your eyes open. Arms up in the air. Screaming.” She continues: “I remember the shit, the vomit, the blood, the stitches.”

Knightley’s purpose is to criticise the pressures and expectations placed on new mothers. She contrasts her postpartum experience with that of the Duchess of Cambridge, who gave birth to her second child the day after Knightley: “She was out of hospital seven hours later with her face made up and high heels on. The face the world wants to see … Don’t show. Don’t tell. Stand there with your girl and be shot by a pack of male photographers.”

Knightley goes on to outline her frustrations with her male colleagues and their hands-off parenting (“They don’t see their children. They’re working. They need to concentrate”) before stating: “I am not the weaker sex.” After outlining her resentment at male treatment – “I like them. But I don’t want to flirt and mother them” – she concludes: “Male ego. Stop getting in the way.”

Arterton’s contribution is a short story reimagining Strawberry Fields, the character she played in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace. In the film, Fields is an MI6 agent who succumbs to Bond’s charms, despite being assigned to force him to return from the field, and she is eventually murdered on the orders of villain Dominic Greene.

Released in 2008, Quantum of Solace was one of Arterton’s earliest significant roles, before solidifying her status with the well-regarded The Disappearance of Alice Creed and Tamara Drewe. She recently starred in The Escape, about a mother who walks out on her family, and will be seen shortly as Vita Sackville-West in Vita and Virginia, about Sackville-West’s relationship with writer Virginia Woolf.

Entitled Woke Woman, Arterton’s story describes Fields’ encounter with Bond in a Bolivian airport: “I meet Mr Bond at the baggage reclaim. He eyes me up, giving me the once over. I introduce myself. He makes some smarmy comment. ‘Mr Bond,’ I say, ‘I’m not interested in flirting with you. I am here to work.’” Unlike in the film, Fields refuses an invitation to Bond’s hotel room: “Maybe he is attractive, but he’s at least 20 years older than me, we’ve only just met, he’s a work colleague – the list goes on. Plus this man has a reputation. Don’t women who go up to his hotel room and sleep with him usually die in some horrific yet iconic way?”

Fields leaves, as she says, “unharmed”, before taking out a car full of would-be hijackers. She adds: “Thank God I wore flats. Although a stiletto heel might’ve come in handy …”

Speaking on the Feminists Wear Pink podcast, Arterton said she wanted to encapsulate her “feminist journey” from playing a Bond girl to becoming “almost a spokesperson for equality”. “I decided to write a piece about what would happen post-#MeToo, post Harvey Weinstein, if my Bond girl was a woke woman.”

Arterton added that she appreciated the camaraderie of the Time’s Up era, saying: “In my profession, there has has been a culture of competition: there’s one part for a woman, three female directors. We’re all fighting for a position and it shouldn’t be like that.”

She also revealed that Netflix gives compulsory harassment training to all cast and crew and prints a helpline number on every daily call sheet.