Though she retired her pro-suffragist satire with the passage of the 19th Amendment, Miller never retired her feminist sensibility and deployed it in her light fiction, short periodical pieces and screenplays as one of the most prolific writers of the Algonquin crowd.

Alice Duer Miller was more than an elder stateswoman at the Algonquin Round Table; she also played the role of one of its matchmakers. Long before the daily gatherings were a twinkle in the eyes of Ruth Hale and Broun, Miller introduced them to each other in 1914 at a Giants baseball game. Hale, a self-possessed feminist, agreed to marry Broun in 1917, but with the agreement that there would be no exchange of wedding rings in their ceremony, no commandment for the wife to “obey” her husband in their vows and under any circumstances, no wedding music. Alas, Broun’s mother reneged on the no-music stipulation, and when, at the start of the ceremony, an organist began playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” Hale refused to go down the aisle until the offending music stopped.

Hale and her Algonquin friend and co-conspirator Jane Grant were happy to win the right to vote, but they were engaged on another front in the fight for social justice: a married woman’s right to keep her maiden name. Grant, herself a pioneering journalist and the first female correspondent to work at The New York Times city desk (where her male colleagues welcomed her with the pet name Fluff), shared Hale’s outrage that marriage symbolized the closing of the accounts for a woman’s individual identity.

For a short time, Grant and her husband, Harold Ross, shared an apartment with Hale and Broun, where the two women would lament losing the lack of formal recognition of their maiden names. Ross complained: “I never had one damn meal at home at which the discussion wasn’t of women’s rights and the ruthlessness of men in trampling women. Grant and Ruth Hale had maiden-name phobias, and that was all they talked about, or damn near all.” Ross suggested the two carping critics start an organization to deal with their grievances, so as to remove the irksome conversation from the comfort of their shared home.

In 1921, Grant and Hale did just that, calling their new organization the Lucy Stone League, named for the first woman in America to keep her maiden name. They gave it the motto: “My name is the symbol for my identity and must not be lost.” (Hale and Grant were successful in raising the visibility of the cause, but it wouldn’t be until 1975 when that right would be confirmed in the case of Dunn v. Palermo.)

The experiences of Grant and Hale show that at least some of the Algonquin members had their sights on more than entertaining the lunchtime crowds that gathered in the hotel to witness celebrities having so much fun. But they also show the gap between the Algonquin group’s reputation for iconoclasm and their lived reality. Grant not only fought for the legal recognition of her family name; she also struggled with her husband’s expectation that she clean up the messes he and his friends left in their apartment after his all-night (and usually all-male) poker games.

Clearly, not everyone was ready for the Algonquin New Woman — not even the Algonquin Hotel itself. When in 1921 Hale lit a cigarette in the lobby, the manager told her that women weren’t permitted to smoke there. Hale promptly boycotted the hotel, but with no support from the group. Some even poked fun at her lack of humor, which she took as a point of pride. Getting women to be taken seriously socially, politically and intellectually was no laughing matter. “I thank God that the dead albatross of a sense of humor has never been hung around my neck,” she said.