While Mitch McConnell’s love story with Elaine Chao is plastered on the walls of the University of Louisville, his alma mater, the name of his ex-wife, Sherrill Redmon, is nowhere to be found. “Big surprise there,” Redmon told the New York Times in 2014. That’s because Redmon’s beliefs contradict the foundation on which McConnell has built his reputation. Following their divorce in 1980, Redmon, who has a Ph.D. in American history, moved to Massachusetts, where she worked on the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project with none other than feminist icon Gloria Steinem.
Redmon wasn’t just a spectator in McConnell’s political career — she actively campaigned for him in the late ’70s. “Of course, the irony of all that is not lost on you,” she said during a 2017 conference at the University of Houston. But McConnell was different back then. Although he wouldn’t use the word “feminist” to describe himself, Redmon said, McConnell worked with late Senator Marlow Cook to promote the Equal Rights Amendment.
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But Redmon hasn’t always been so keen in discussing her marriage. “Despite Sherrill’s devotion to recording all of women’s lives, she didn’t talk about the earlier part of her own,” Steinem told The New Yorker in a 2020 email. The second-wave feminism leader doesn’t blame her. “I can only imagine how painful it must be to marry and have children with a democratic Jekyll and see him turn into a corrupt and authoritarian Hyde,” she added.
