Ruth Hale (feminist) - Later Life and Death

Later Life and Death

While Hale was intelligent, fearless, and honest, she was frustrated throughout her life by her physical unattactiveness and her too-earnest, often hectoring style. The writer and lawyer Newman Levy, a longtime friend of Hale's and Broun's, recalled a bitter exchange between Hale and an unidentified person. Adversary: "The trouble with you, Ruth, is that you have no sense of humor." Hale: "Thank God I am not cursed with the albatross of a sense of humor."

During the 1920s and 1930s, Hale continued to write, reviewed books for the Brooklyn Eagle, and also worked as a theatrical press agent. She was a leading figure in New York’s writer’s community, and, along with her husband, she was an associate of the Algonquin Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel.

Hale and Broun were quietly divorced in Mexico, in November 1933, although the two remained close and continued to reside on the same property in Connecticut.

Ten months later, in September 1934, Hale came down with an intestinal fever at her home in Stamford. Broun rushed his former wife to Doctor's Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but it was too late. She died on September 18 at age 47. She was buried in Rogersville, TN.