Katharine Hepburn: Her Mother's Daughter
A chip off the old block? Susan Ware looks over the careers of the Hollywood actress and her radical mother and finds reflections of the changing roles and attitudes of women in 20th-century America.
Her stationery is proudly emblazoned 'Katharine Houghton Hepburn', the name she shares with her mother. She uses the same distinctive dating nomenclature (XII.13 for December 13th) that her mother employed. Recently she gave her support to Planned Parenthood for a major fundraising drive called the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Fund.
Both mother and daughter figure prominently in twentieth-century women's history: Mother Hepburn as a suffragist and birth-control activist under Margaret Sanger, and daughter as one of the century's most prominent film and stage actresses, a symbol of women's autonomy and independence.
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