Are Women People?
[Suffrage]. Miller, Alice Duer. Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times. New York: George H. Doran Company, (1915).
12mo, 94 pp.; bright golden-yellow vertically-ribbed cloth with printed blue label mounted at front cover; title, author and publisher stamped in blue at the spine; printed golden-yellow dust-jacket; top edge stained slate blue; touch of soiling to spine and bottom edge; touch of offsetting to endpapers; edgewear to jacket with a 2” closed tear top edge front panel. A very attractive copy and a remarkable find in the original dust-jacket.
First edition. The text includes: “Treacherous Texts”; “Campaign Material (For Both Sides); “Women’s Sphere”; “A Masque of Teachers: The Ideal Candidates”; and “The Unconscious Suffragists.”
Alice Duer Miller (1874-1942) worked her way through Barnard by selling her short stories to Scribner’s and Harper’s. Her fast-paced entertaining novels such as Come Out Of The Kitchen became bestsellers. Most readers today, however, associate the writer with her long narrative poem The White Cliffs about an English soldier and an American girl. A steady supporter of woman’s suffrage, she worked and lectured on behalf of the cause. She also wrote a poetry column for the New York Tribune from 1914 to 1917 entitled “Are Women People?” which is collected, in part, here. A sequel appeared in 1917 entitled Women Are People! A heavy irony suffuses the poems and short pieces, but they are wonderfully funny. To wit, an anti speaking of the “hazards” to be encountered at polls to her son: “You must not go to the polls, Willie,/Never go to the polls,/They're dark and dreadful places/Where many lose their souls;/They smirch, degrade and coarsen,/Terrible things they do/To quiet, elderly women—/What would they do to you!” Or, “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women”: “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...” Franklin, whose bibliography stops at 1912, does not include Are Women People?, but does cite her novel The Blue Arch.
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