Katherine Hepburn
1) The recent death of actress Katharine Hepburn at age 96 has engendered any number of eulogies of this media favorite whose career ran six decades. She is being praised both as a strong moral person and as a vibrant indomitable rebel who was an eminent role model for women. To set the record straight for the unknowing or the naive, let me say that both of these renderings are completely false.
2) It is bad enough to see the secular media depicting Hepburn as a high-principled woman of morals, an honest, frank soul always living by her convictions. But it is absolutely shocking to see a diocesan newspaper, even of the notoriously liberal Los Angeles Diocese, print an article describing Katharine Hepburn as having “Old World values,” and romanticizing her illicit love-affair with Spencer Tracy, a married Catholic man.
3) “She did not smash, but lived by a set of values so traditional that they would shock all those who are making her a mother goddess of breaking rules and improvising one’s way through life,” the article by Eugene Cullen Kennedy read (“Spencer called her Kath,” The Tidings, July 11, 2002). Sifting through her biographical data, I could not find this “set of traditional values” she supposedly lived by.
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4) What I found was that she was raised from childhood in a notoriously liberal environment. Long before it became “fashionable,” her mother was a feminist and an advocate of abortion-rights. In fact, Hepburn’s influential mother was co-founder with Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood. It was these “values” she instilled in Katharine, who supported women’s rights all her life, became a board member of Planned Parenthood, and asked that donations made after her death should be directed to that organization.
5) During her college years at Bryn Mawr, Hepburn lived a wild party life. Her penchant to break conventions was already apparent in her unorthodox dress: baggy men’s trousers, oversized sweaters and men’s shirts, shocking
2) It is bad enough to see the secular media depicting Hepburn as a high-principled woman of morals, an honest, frank soul always living by her convictions. But it is absolutely shocking to see a diocesan newspaper, even of the notoriously liberal Los Angeles Diocese, print an article describing Katharine Hepburn as having “Old World values,” and romanticizing her illicit love-affair with Spencer Tracy, a married Catholic man.
3) “She did not smash, but lived by a set of values so traditional that they would shock all those who are making her a mother goddess of breaking rules and improvising one’s way through life,” the article by Eugene Cullen Kennedy read (“Spencer called her Kath,” The Tidings, July 11, 2002). Sifting through her biographical data, I could not find this “set of traditional values” she supposedly lived by.
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4) What I found was that she was raised from childhood in a notoriously liberal environment. Long before it became “fashionable,” her mother was a feminist and an advocate of abortion-rights. In fact, Hepburn’s influential mother was co-founder with Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood. It was these “values” she instilled in Katharine, who supported women’s rights all her life, became a board member of Planned Parenthood, and asked that donations made after her death should be directed to that organization.
5) During her college years at Bryn Mawr, Hepburn lived a wild party life. Her penchant to break conventions was already apparent in her unorthodox dress: baggy men’s trousers, oversized sweaters and men’s shirts, shocking