"Gunmiss" or "Gunmadam"?
About the only trace left in New York of the once burning question of the moral aspects of bobbed hair is the daily appearance in the news of the young Brooklyn woman who evidently took seriously what some people said on the subject and embarked upon a career of crime befitting the cropped state of her tresses.
Women as assistants to bandits, however, appeared in history long before bobbed hair; the drama of the Restoration is filled with female lawbreakers whose hair was probably never cut in their lives, and much further back than that we find that men who lived by their wits have found women willing to share their lot.
To prove that, even among newspaper headline writers the bobbed hair phrase has become a bit vieux jeu, the elusive Brooklyn girl has been dubbed by at least one enterprising journal a “gunmiss.” But since she is married should it not be “gunmadam”?
[New York Post, February 11, 1924, p.10.]
Women as assistants to bandits, however, appeared in history long before bobbed hair; the drama of the Restoration is filled with female lawbreakers whose hair was probably never cut in their lives, and much further back than that we find that men who lived by their wits have found women willing to share their lot.
To prove that, even among newspaper headline writers the bobbed hair phrase has become a bit vieux jeu, the elusive Brooklyn girl has been dubbed by at least one enterprising journal a “gunmiss.” But since she is married should it not be “gunmadam”?
[New York Post, February 11, 1924, p.10.]
posted by A. Mattson at 11:56 AM
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