Mrs. John J. O’Connor was no bra burner. “I come to you,” she told the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs, “with my bra and my wedding ring on.”31 “She was not an angry feminist,” recalled newspaper reporter Ned Creighton. Nor did she act like a coquette or a supplicant. “Early on, women had to use their feminine wiles—oh, you’re so big and I’m so small. She wasn’t like that. She didn’t play it that way,” recalled lobbyist Rory Hays. “But she wasn’t a crazy feminist, either.”32
