Women are People!

Alice Duer Miller

Aug 2021 · Graphic Arts Books

About this ebook

Women Are People! (1917) is a collection of poems by Alice Duer Miller. Inspired by her work as an activist for women’s suffrage, Miller published many of these poems individually in the New York Tribune before compiling them into this larger work. Focusing on the opposition of politicians and citizens alike, Miller makes a compelling and frequently hilarious case for the extension of voting rights to women across the nation. With her keen eye for hypocrisy and even keener ear for the rhythms of the English language, Alice Miller Duer crafts a poetry both personal and political. In “Liberty,” she lampoons the hypocrisy of men who praise the goddess of Liberty while denying women access to basic human rights: “O Liberty, how many men there are / Who do you honour in a flowing phrase, / In martial measures and in patriot lays, / Invoking you as a goddess and as star/ [...] / But when you first approach them, when you turn / On their pale eyes your eyes’ unwavering light, / [...] / They fly before you, crying in their fright: / ‘Arrest this wild-eyed jade! Police! Police!’” In these lighthearted lines, Miller satirizes the exclusion of women from American democracy. Succinctly and convincingly, with humor and with lyric grace, Miller makes her case for suffrage and the rights of women very clear. As she expresses in her ironic title, women are indeed people—despite the lengths to which they must repeatedly go to prove it. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Alice Duer Miller’s Women Are People! is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

About the author

Alice Duer Miller (1874-1942) was an American novelist, poet, screenwriter, and women’s rights activist. Born into wealth in New York City, she was raised in a family of politicians, businessmen, and academics. At Barnard College, she studied Astronomy and Mathematics while writing novels, essays, and poems. She married Henry Wise Miller in 1899, moving with him in their young son to Costa Rica where they struggled and failed to open a rubber plantation. Back in New York, Miller earned a reputation as a gifted poet whose satirical poems advocating for women’s suffrage were collected in Are Women People? (1915). Over the next two decades, Miller published several collections of stories and poems, some of which would serve as source material for motion picture adaptations. The White Cliffs (1940), her final published work, is a verse novel that uses the story of a young women widowed during the Great War to pose important questions about the morality of conflict and patriotism in the leadup to the United States’ entrance into World War II.