Not Senseless, Not Angels

One day last year, while perusing a newspaper from 1914 for a writing project, I came upon a piece titled “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women.” It was printed near the bottom of the page, with no accompanying explanation. For a moment, I was confused by the words before me:

1. — Because pockets are not a natural right.
2. — Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did, they would have them.
3. — Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.
4. — Because women are expected to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.
5. — Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.
6. — Because it would destroy man’s chivalry toward woman if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.
7. — Because men are men and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.
8. — Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

I soon learned I’d stumbled upon suffragist satire by Alice Duer Miller. Between 1914 and 1917, Miller published humorous sketches about gender inequality in a New York Tribune column titled Are Women People? Her catchy, rhyming poems mocked anti-suffragist messages and ridiculed the stupidity of the opposing side’s rhetoric. Many of the verses were reprinted in her book Are Women People? (1915) and its sequel, Women Are People! (1917).

Miller was a novelist, essayist, short story writer, screenwriter, and poet. Much like Dorothy Parker, she was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and intellectuals who traded witticisms over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. She published at least 30 books, mostly romantic comedies, and was among the first authors to collaborate with Hollywood. While her work is largely forgotten (with the possible exception of her suffragist poetry), she was widely read in her lifetime and influenced American political thought. Miller was an advisory editor for the first issue of The New Yorker and a ghostwriter for President Woodrow Wilson. She vacationed with Irving Berlin and lived next door to playwright Noël Coward. Babe Ruth called her a pal.

Despite a privileged background, Miller’s success was earned over decades of steady publishing and hard work. Initially, she started writing to pay her tuition at Barnard College, where she studied mathematics, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a prize-winning thesis. Later, when her husband’s business failed, she supported her family again by writing. This was unusual for a woman at the time. She must have keenly felt the injustice of being a professional who, among other things, was taxed without representation.

Her New York Tribune column was inspired by the hypocrisies of President Wilson, who employed democratic rhetoric while maintaining a stance against women voting. In response to a 1912 speech in which he said “Bring the government back to the people,” Miller asked, “Are Women People?” The phrase became a campaign slogan for the suffrage movement. She took the question a step further in an imaginary conversation between a dad and his son in her 1915 poem “Introduction”:

Father, what is a Legislature?
A representative body elected by the people of the state.
Are women people?
No, my son, criminals, lunatics and women are not people.
Do legislators legislate for nothing?
Oh, no; they are paid a salary.
By whom?
By the people.
Are women people?
Of course, my son, just as much as men are.

Not only does Miller’s humor skewer the opposing side, it dispels the myth that feminists are serious and dour, or that women are unable to participate in political discussion. The last lines of the poems often work like punchlines, but they make larger points. In “Feminism,” when a child asks the meaning of the eponymous word, a mother replies: “A Feminist, my daughter, / Is any woman now who cares / To think about her own affairs / As men don’t think she oughter.”

In her column, Miller frequently mimicked the voices of the people she was targeting. When Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said “My wife is against suffrage, and that settles me,” Miller wrote a poem from his point of view:

My wife dislikes the income tax,
And so I cannot pay it;
She thinks that golf all interest lacks,  
So now I never play it;
She is opposed to tolls repeal
(Though why I cannot say),
But woman’s duty is to feel, 
And man’s is to obey.

In another case, she adapted the rhyming couplets Rudyard Kipling chose for his 1911 poem “The Female of the Species,” which was a reaction to the suffrage movement. Kipling’s poem argues that “the female of the species is more deadly than the male” because a woman’s role in childbearing makes her emotional and vicious, thus she lacks a man’s sense of reason and, by extension, shouldn’t govern. Miller’s poem “Women” repeats the refrain, “For it’s women this and women that,” in a similar cadence. She insists on equality, writing:

We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too,
But very human beings, human just as much as you.
It’s hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime
When you’re treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.

***

Born in 1874, Miller was from a prominent, wealthy family in New Jersey and New York. She was descended from not one, but two, members of the First Continental Congress: Rufus King and William Duer. Her great-grandfather, James Gore King, made such a fortune in banking he was called “the Almighty of Wall Street.” She grew up on an estate in Weehawken, New Jersey, with “at least 12 servants,” including two coachmen, a chef, and a butler. As a child, she and her sisters played by the rock where Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Until her family lost their money in the Panic of 1890, Miller was enmeshed in the stuffiest of New York society, a restrictive environment where a woman who crossed her legs was said to have a “vulgar bar-room attitude.” As a child, Miller was consumed with two passions: poetry and mathematics. To her, higher math was “the only complete means by which the finite mind can hope to reach the infinite and it is the only satisfactory escape from reality I know.” She was so interested in astronomy, she would slip out of balls and dinner parties to visit the observatory at Columbia University, often still wearing her evening gown.

In 1895, Miller entered Barnard College to study mathematics. A woman going into higher education was so troubling that the socialite Caroline Astor visited Miller’s mother to voice her opinion on the subject, sighing, “What a pity, that lovely girl going to college.”

To pay her tuition, Miller started publishing verse and short stories in magazines such as Harper’s. In 1896, her first book, Poems, was published. She co-wrote it with her older sister, Caroline King Duer, who later became an editor at Vogue. The collection sold well enough to go into at least three editions. Miller's early poems often spoke from the point of view of a lady who is courted by overeager young men: “I wanted you to come to-day— / Or so I told you in my letter— / And yet, if you had stayed away, / I should have liked you so much better.”

Here, the cleverness of Miller’s later poetry is lacking for the most part, as if she hasn’t yet developed her mature voice. However, one poem, “The Snare of the Fowler,” reveals the strategy she later employed in her suffragist work: Don’t attack your rival directly. Instead, cleverly mock her so that others will laugh at her too.

Do not abuse the girls he likes—’tis far
           From wise—for he will only think you spiteful;
Praise them, and show how ludicrous they are,
           And, ten to one, he’ll find the joke delightful.

In 1899, she met businessman Henry Wise Miller, who was about to go to Costa Rica to develop rubber cultivation for General Electric. According to his memoir All Our Lives (1945), Henry was smitten. “Looking up, I saw Alice by the fireplace. Somewhere, in that interval, my life changed. Three days later she promised to marry me.”

In a photograph from this period, Miller wears a lace Edwardian dress with her hair swept up under a large hat. Her round eyes peer at the camera with curious intensity. She looks like a proper lady, but there’s tension in the hand resting on the windowsill and in the shoe peeping from the gown, as if she might start tapping her fingers or jiggling her foot. In a 1927 profile in The New Yorker, Harvey O’Higgins describes Miller as having “a fine old stone exterior, extremely cold and formal, and she lives inside it like a bubbling child. If you listen carefully at the door of her most sedate silence, you will hear chuckles.”

Soon after they married, the Millers moved to Costa Rica, where she became a homemaker and mother to their son, Denning, who had been born in New York before the couple’s departure. In his memoir, Henry describes a disciplined, energetic lifestyle. While Miller set mathematics aside after marriage, writing was a top priority and she treated it as a serious vocation. “We were up before six, and with me off to work and the household chores behind her, she sat down to her desk to write, a schedule that was to continue without interruption for forty years,” according to Henry. Miller wrote in the morning, often pacing the room thinking through the language before putting words to paper. The rest of her time was filled with industrious making and doing. She sewed clothes and made “crazy” quilts so “you couldn't move for fear of disturbing the patterns spread out on the floor or draped over the furniture.” She cooked, knitted, made lamp shades, took Spanish lessons, swam, and went for long walks, especially when she lived in New York. She “attacked” everything she did with “perfect intrepidity,” explains Henry. It was a noisy home filled with the clatter of her sewing machine and typewriter.

Later in life, Miller became a passionate baseball fan and rejoiced when, as she explained in a radio broadcast, times had changed enough that “no woman need now hesitate to go to a game alone.” Nevertheless, she often invited friends to go with her, especially Ethel Barrymore “whose deep voice … has added to my pleasure at many a game.” Among her possessions after she died was a photograph from Babe Ruth inscribed to “my pal, Mrs. Alice Miller.”

In 1903, the “bottom dropped out of the rubber market,” writes Henry, and they moved back to New York. For the first time, 29-year-old Miller knew actual poverty. They floundered to survive. Henry worked as a clerk at the Stock Exchange and on side hustles while Miller taught English at a girls’ school and tutored math students. She wrote late into the night, working on book reviews, short stories, essays, novels, and poems. “Anything she could sell,” according to Henry.

Despite this, it took 13 years before she saw success. Her novel Come Out of the Kitchen! (1916) was an unexpected hit. A frothy romantic comedy set in a manor house, it follows a love story between a winsome cook and her wealthy employer. Like much of Miller’s work, the plot is consumed with class distinctions and the treatment of workers—as well as romance. The novel is delightful and funny, a kind of Jane Austen light.

“Neither of us had to worry about money again,” writes Henry of the success of Come Out of the Kitchen! “The tide had turned overnight and it ran at full flood for many years.” The novel was serialized, turned into a Broadway play, rewritten as a musical, and made into multiple films. Soon Miller began working for Hollywood, writing original screenplays for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, and RKO over the years. Movies were routinely made out of her fiction, most notably Roberta (1935), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

She also appeared as an actor in the film Soak the Rich (1936), playing a wealthy teenager’s stuffy tutor. Tall and stately, carrying herself like someone who’d spent time walking around with a book on her head, Miller speaks with a fluting high-class accent throughout the film. It’s an embodiment of her cultural position at the time—at once straddling her Victorian past and the cutting-edge film industry.