In 1931 she sold the first of what would become nearly 80 short stories to The New Yorker (about a stylish young woman smoking alone in a train’s club car). A year after the Easter Parade she gave birth to her first child.

After marrying and leaving her childhood home to work at Vogue, Hale was about to turn 21 herself.īorn in Boston in 1908 (the same year as Simone de Beauvoir) to a prominent old New England family, Hale belonged to the first generation of American girls to come of age with the right to vote, and to assume the future was theirs for the taking. And, crucially, white - as in “free, white and 21,” the era’s infamous catchphrase. Photos chronicling the event show Hale as a Jazz Age renegade, picture-perfect for the media of the time: young, well-heeled, with bobbed blond hair tucked beneath a chic cloche hat. “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom,’” The New York Times reported the following day. The new permissive attitudes didn’t extend to smoking in public, however. It was still the Roaring Twenties, a decade of unprecedented autonomy for women. Mary Allesbrook is the daughter of Harriet Boyd Hawes.On the last day of March 1929, a young woman named Nancy Hale joined what appeared to be a political campaign called “Torches of Freedom.” While boldly smoking cigarettes, she and her comrades marched down Fifth Avenue during the fashionable New York Easter Parade, to protest the stigma around women smokers. Mary Allsebrook's lighthearted and extremely readable account of her mother's extraordinary experiences shows Harriet Boyd to be truly one of America's pioneers. While the past and its arts were her profession, the present and the future were her passionate interest - whether local social problems in her home town of Boston or international affairs which took her to lunch with Mrs Roosevelt at the White House. While prominent as a lecturer and teacher, archaeology was only a part of her life: in 1897 she was nursing with the Red Cross in the Greco-Turkish war, in 1915 she was nursing Serbian typhoid victims on Corfu, and by 1917 she was in Northern France setting up a rehabilitation center within sound of the front. She was the first woman to lecture to the Archaeological Instituite of America - ten times in fourteen days in January 1902. At a time when few women traveled on their own, she discovered, excavated and published an account of the Minoan town of Gournia in Crete. Synopsis: Harriet Boyd was the first woman to lead an archaeological excavation in the Aegean.

Born to Rebel by Mary Allsebrook