But what made Ms. Kempton famous, for a New York minute, was a blistering essay in the July 1970 issue of Esquire magazine called “Cutting Loose,” in which she took aim at her father, her husband and her own complicity in the regressive gender roles of the era.
The basic point of the essay was that she had been groomed to be a certain kind of bright but compliant helpmeet, and she was spitting mad at herself for succeeding. Her father, she wrote, considered women to be incapable of serious thought and was skilled in the art of putting women down; their own relationship, she said, was like that of an 18th-century count and his precocious daughter, “in which she grows up to be the perfect feminine companion, parroting him with such subtlety that it is impossible to tell her thoughts and feelings, so coincident with his, are not original.”
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