Partner Kent Hyde, Ruth 'Rudy' Babcock
Ruth Reid (1903-1981) and Kent Hyde were both authors and lovers for over forty years. For most of their relationship Kent Hyde, a woman, passed as a man.
Ruth Reid was born Ruth Hatch in Salem, Massachusetts in 1903. She was born to a conservative family and in her teenage years left to live with her half brother and his wife in Greenville, South Carolina. She attended the University of North Carolina to study literature. At the University of North Carolina she met a gentleman by the name of Edgar, a German Jewish professor of philosophy. They were married in 1926 and moved to Hamburg after Edgar secured a teaching position there. Ruth pursued her PhD but never finished. Edgar left Germany in 1933 as Hitler came to power, but Ruth stayed until 1934 and carried on an affair with a Jewish doctor named Dena. Upon returning to the United States, Ruth began attending the Moody Bible Institute in North Carolina, eventually leaving to work as a missionary with Jewish immigrants in Cincinatti. After leaving missionary service she married a Mr. Reid and moved to Northern California with him and his sister in the late 1930's in order to take care of them. Shortly afterward she met Kent Hyde at Berkeley, where Hyde was working as a lab technician and Ruth was reading to blind students for extra money.
Ruth and Kent lived in Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Fairfax, Oakland, and briefly in upstate New York. They had four years alone together before Kent's mother moved in with them so that they could care for her. According to Ruth, Kent's mother hated Ruth and refused to acknowledge their relationship as she was a Free Methodist. She lived with Ruth and Kent for fourteen years. Despite the time period and location in which they lived, Ruth and Kent were not active participants in the gay movement. Ruth in fact has very few recollections of the time period related to gay activism or issues. Kent Hyde identified as a communist for a brief time and so followed the activities of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Throughout the 1950's, Kent and Ruth owned and operated a weaving shop called Reid-Hyde Handweaving in San Francisco doing both piecework and wholesale bulk items. Ruth had learned weaving during her time in Germany and brought the skills to bear at a time when they were both out of work. Both Ruth and Kent wrote constantly. Kent was a poet, published as early as the 1920's. Ruth never finished her novel. In 1951, Kent had her first attack of rheumatoid arthritis, paralyzing her temporarily. She continued to suffer from it until her death in 1968. Ruth and Kent had been together for twenty nine years. During Kent's illness in the late 1950's, Ruth began an affair with their close friend Ruth 'Rudy' Babcock, an occurrence which devastated Kent. Ruth and Rudy found an apartment together and Kent checked into a mental hospital in St. Helena. Upon her release, she moved in with Ruth and Rudy and shortly thereafter Ruth and Kent moved out again and found an apartment. The affair ended, but Rudy remained a friend to Ruth until her death in 1981. In her later years, Ruth became involved in the lesbian community. She worked on her writing in women's writing groups and developed supportive circles in the Berkeley area. Although her work was never published in its entirety, her autobiography Dark Birth was published in excerpts in The Wild Iris, Gay Old Girls and In the Life. A version of Dark Birth, excerpted and with notes from Jacqueline Marie is available under the title Wife of a Lesbian.
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