Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/509

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504
MILLER.
MILLER.

MILLER, Mrs. Annie Jennesa, dress-reformer, born in New Hampshire, 28th January, 1859. She was educated in Boston, Mass. Her maiden name was Annie Jenness, and she traces ANNIE JENNESS MILLER. her ancestry back to that illustrious stock which produced Wendell Phillips and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She is the most prominent of all the leaders in the movement for reform in the matter of woman's dress. Before her marriage she had won considerable fame in Massachusetts as a woman of letters. She is a young and beautiful woman, highly cultured, who has taken up with energy and with a great deal of taste and good judgment the question of dress reform, or "the principles of correct and artistic dressing." She has lectured in all of the leading cities of the United States, to crowded houses, and has been well received, being invited over and over again to the same places. She now lives in Washington, D. C. She is one of the owners of a magazine published in New York and devoted to the aesthetics of physical development and artistic designs for dresses, containing articles by the best writers on all topics of interest to women. She has presented her ideas on dress to large assemblies, and her influence is widely acknowledged. All the progressive and reformatory movements of the day appeal to her and have her sympathy and support. She is the author of " Physical Beauty" and of "Mother and Babe," the latter a work which furnishes information and patterns upon improved plans for mother's and baby's wardrobe. Mrs. Miller's ultimate hope is to establish at the national capitol an institution for physical development and the highest art of self-culture, which shall be under the control 'if able students of anatomy, chemistry and physical science.


MILLER, Mrs. Dora Richards, author and educator, was born in the Island of St. Thomas, Danish West Indies. Her father, Richard Richards, was from Liverpool, Eng., and her mother's family also was of English descent, through Hezekiah Huntington, of Connecticut. He was her grand-father and belonged to the same family from which came Samuel Huntington, signer of the Declaration of Independence. DORA RICHARDS MILLER. The death of her father while she was yet an infant caused her to be taken to the home of her Huntington grandmother, in the neighboring island of Santa Cruz. Hurricanes and earthquakes were among her experiences there, and not long before she left the island a negro insurrection took place, which resulted in the emancipation of the slaves in all the Danish Islands. Her mother, with the other children, had removed to New Orleans, La., but it was not until after her mother's death, when she was about fourteen, she joined there her unknown brothers and sisters, to reside in the family of a married sister. She was graduated with distinction, her school-girl essays having for several years attracted attention, and the editors of a New Orleans paper invited her to contribute to their journal. She had prepared herself for the profession of a teacher and undertaken the support and education of a young brother, and thought it best to give all her powers to that work. A few years later, when that and other duties were accomplished, she became the wife, in 1862, of Anderson Miller, a lawyer from Mississippi, and they went to Arkansas to reside. Troubles resulting from the war caused a break-up and those journeyings in the Confederacy, culminating in the siege of Vicksburg, which are recounted in her articles published in the "Century." entitled "Diary of a Union Woman in the Siege of Vicksburg" and "Diary of a Union Woman in the South." Her husband died soon after the close of the war, leaving her with two infant sons. She took up more earnestly than ever public-school work, rising steadily from grade to grade, till she was appointed to the chair of science in the girls' high school of