Bobbed Hair Genii
Although the rest of New York can’t seem to see why they are so excited about it, all the high brow married ladies of Greenwich Village are in a lather of emotion. Ruth Hale has set ’em free.
Rah for liberty, freedom and Ruth!
Owing to Ruth, the down-trodden girls with bobbed hair and hubbies, no matter how many times they are married, need not lug around the old man’s name any longer. No more of this “Mrs.” stuff south of Washington Square.
It seems that the young lady genii who inhabit the Village and have flights of soul and yearn and yearn, occasionally fall in love and get married and go to live in apartments with kitchenettes, dumb waiters, husbands and other furniture. But to their intense indignation, the butcher and everybody right away begins calling them Mrs. Thingambob, entirely forgetting the undying fame of the names they used to sign to their poems. So the girls proceeded to strike.
Fannie Hurst, the lady who says her husband comes to call on her twice a week, Inez Gillmore, who is married to Will Irwin, and a lot of girls similarly encumbered, organized the Lucy Stone League, Lucy being a lady who refused to stand for the outrage way back in 1855. Ruth Hale was one of the members. She is a writer young lady who married Heywood Broun, the dramatic critic, and dared anybody to call her Mrs. Broun.
The United States government took the dare. When she wanted to go to Europe, the State Department got in bad with Greenwich Village by writing out her passport in the name of “Mrs. Heywood Broun.” She indignantly refused to accept it, refusing to go to Europe at all and leaving the place flat.