Forbes-Robertson was active as an actress from age 17, and a suffrage speaker in England before she moved to
New York City in 1907 to continue her theatrical and political work. She joined the New Theatre Company, and played leading and ingenue roles in plays including
The Morals of Marcus,
The Mollusc,
The Cottage in the Air, and
Strife by
John Galsworthy. She was a member of
Heterodoxy, a feminist debating club based in
Greenwich Village, and vice president of the
Actresses' Franchise League. During
World War I she was president of the British War Relief Association, raising funds in New York for military hospitals abroad. Mrs. Hale left the stage after marriage and motherhood, but continued as a lecturer on women's rights,
dress reform and fashion, and theatre topics, into her later years. On January 18, 1916, she spoke before the General Assembly of Kentucky on women's right to vote. In 1919 she spoke at a large rally in support of the
Girl Scouting movement at the
DAR Constitution Hall in
Washington D. C. Mrs. Hale also wrote several books, including
What Women Want: An Interpretation of the Feminist Movement (1914),
The Nest Builder (1916, a novel),
Little Allies: A Story of Four Children (1918), and ''What's Wrong with Our Girls?
(1923). In What Women Want'', Hale surveyed the state of the American feminist movement in the 1910s, declaring: Women have often been taunted with lack of the creative and reasoning faculties. But until the present age the number of women possessing opportunities to develop these has been so small in proportion to men as to make any comparison invidious. Only now are the faculties of women emerging from obscurity....When as many women as men are free to express themselves, there will remain but one struggle on earth, the struggle of all the dispossessed, men and women alike, for their inheritance. ==Personal life and legacy==