Katherine Hepburn

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorCollege, Undergraduate February 2008

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Katharine Hepburn is a woman with a great deal of guts. She is not your ordinary ninety-four year old straight-laced New England socialite. Katharine is an intensely private person with a lot of energy and zest for life. She does her own housework, goes shopping, and even chops her own firewood. Katharine rises before dawn, stands on her head for four minutes, and swims in the freezing Long Island Sound. She still loves to play tennis and indulge in her great love of painting. She has done exactly what she wanted to do in her life from taking control of her career to her private relationships. Katharine is very independent person who has always had to make her own way through life. According to her parents, she was "brought up to believe the most important thing you can do is to better a man's position in the world-and woman's" (Pope 118-124).

She thinks a man and a woman have an obligation to take care of each other.

Katharine still gets around the community of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. She has been going to the same local grocery store for thirty years and enjoys having lunch in New York with her family, friends, and staff. She likes to attend social events and galas whenever possible. Katharine also is a supporter of Planned Parenthood, an agency for reproductive rights for women; this was one of her mother's causes. Her courage in being herself has made generations of women look up to this incredible honest woman.

In the small New England town of Hartford, Connecticut, a daughter was born to Doctor Thomas Hepburn and feminist Katharine Houghton Hepburn. It was May 12, 1907, and she was the first daughter born, of six children. Her Mom and Dad had six children in fifteen years, Tom...