Kate's outrage over the Washington Post's feminist assessment of O'Connor strikes me as well-placed. The article, which tries to illustrate the chilly relationship between the women's movement and one of their most emancipated, ceiling-shattering members, starts by probing O'Connor's reasons for retiring. Her husband is in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. She's leaving to spend time with him during these dimming years of sentience. And it's this decision the Washington Post uses to frame their article, because it's this decision they've coaxed a feminist into critiquing come the third paragraph.
It's articles like this that make feminism seem a heartless, frigid ideology populated by hordes of Hillary-clones, and we're talking Hillary in the Ed Klein context. Any movement that honestly felt room for outrage when a 75-year old woman retires to spend time with an irreversibly ill husband would be heartless beyond imagining. Feminism, of course, isn't. Quite the opposite. It's the Washington Post who searched for this attack in order to frame an article they wanted to write. And it's Suzanna Sherry who wanted appearance in the paper bad enough to provide the quote.
