Alice Duer Miller

Alice Duer Miller was a poet, novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter whose satirical work influenced the American suffragist movement. She was born to a wealthy family in Staten Island in 1874. She enrolled at Barnard College to study mathematics, and wrote a prize-winning thesis. In 1899, she met and married the businessman Henry Wise Miller, and the couple moved to Costa Rica to develop rubber cultivation for General Electric. They returned to the United States in the early 1900s, when Miller began to seriously focus on writing. For the next forty years, she published bestselling novels, some of which were adapted to film. Between 1914 and 1917, she also published a column titled Are Women People?, which featured sardonic sketches about gender inequality. Many of the verses were reprinted in her books Are Women People? (1915) and Women Are People! (1917). One of her last novels, The White Cliffs (1940), was adapted for radio and film. Winston Churchill later credited it with convincing the US to enter WWII. Miller died on August 22, 1942.