"To Jail with Her!"

In Manhattan, a suddenly patriotic mob of pedestrians booed, hissed, cried: "If you were a man we'd lynch you!" at a woman being hustled out of a restaurant by policemen. The woman was Mrs. Harriet Fowler, owner of the building, who, having ordered her tenant, the restaurant manager, to remove U. S. flags decorating the building, and having been refused, had seized scissors, hacked one U. S. flag in two. In court this woman said: "I thought it was only a piece of bunting." In court another woman said: "I don't see how you could do such a thing. This makes me boil!"

The boiling woman was the judge, Magistrate Jean Hortense Norris of Jefferson Market Court. She brought her well-manicured fist down with indignant rage, remanded Mrs. Fowler to jail under $1,000 bail.

Since the advent of female governors in Texas and Wyoming, and the spread of the fame of Ohio Supreme Court Justice Florence Allen, Judge Norris' once unique reputation of "first woman judge" has been somewhat eclipsed nationally. Locally, however, she is more than ever a notable. She began her career when, only two years a bride, she was widowed in 1899. She had been educated in Germany, Brooklyn and the New York University law school, and soon became an expert tax counsel, social worker, suffragette. In 1919 she reached her magisterial bench, from which she has dispensed much advice as well as justice; advice, chiefly, to married couples. ("Kiss and make up before going to bed.") Sexless in the performance of her duties, she is every inch a woman in private life. There is nothing of the flat-heeled, bass-voiced "careerist" about the carefully gowned, French-slippered, tastefully bejewelled, vivacious dame of 49 whom many a discriminating New York bachelor is charmed to dine.