Alice Roosevelt Just Didn’t Give a F**k

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We can’t imagine that it’s easy growing up with a famous parent, it must really suck to have your every achievement compared to those of the person who was also responsible for telling you to clean your room and embarrassing you in front of your friends as a kid. With that in mind, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt spent almost her entire life kicking the ever-loving shit out of her father’s shadow. 

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid learning about just how big Theodore Roosevelt’s proverbial dick was and yet somehow still found yourself reading a website where we’ve discussed that exact fact twice before, the short version is that the man was a freakin’ badass. Teddy Roosevelt was so supremely manly and wholly unfuckwithable that typing out Chuck Norris facts into a plagiarism checker will bring up a copy of his autobiography. He was a man so feared and respected in his time that his campaign speeches could have consisted entirely of nothing but him flexing and he’d have probably still won. And Alice was his eldest and hence best child, sorry to lay that one on you middle children.

The moustache
The moustache only chose to honor the strong.

Alice famously did whatever the fuck she wanted throughout her father’s presidency, famously using her status as the daughter of a man who could kill you without consequence and probably enjoy it, to break long held social taboos like smoking and walking around with a fucking snake.

She also took liked to pose for photos like she was about to beat the piss out of a Japanese mob boss.
She also took liked to pose for photos like she was about to beat the piss out of a Japanese mob boss.

And you better believe that Alice knew that nobody could touch her without incurring the wrath of her father or tasting the back of her fabulously well manicured hand, in a time when women were expected to be little more than furniture, Alice drank, partied and generally did all of the things men could do without anyone in the press calling them a harlot and relished every second of it.

She was also unafraid of speaking her mind or voicing her opinion, which she frequently did to dignitaries visiting the White House usually for no other reason than to piss them off. This culminated in a White House visitor rudely asking President Roosevelt to better control his daughter when she repeatedly interrupted their conversation with her own thoughts like a real person. The President famously told the flustered dignitary that he could either lead America or control his daughter, presumably before punching him right in the mouth and giving his daughter an almighty high-five that echoed from every wall in the White House. Speaking of Teddy Roosevelt, Alice also happened to share her father’s love of firearms and it’s noted that she’d frequently carry a pistol with her on long train journeys so that she could lean out of the window and shoot at telephone poles whenever she got bored.

As she got older, Alice refused to rein in her attitude, slowly turning from a kick-ass young woman who refused to let men dictate how she behaved, into an even more kick-ass old woman who refused to let anyone dictate how she behaved. As she entered her twilight years Alice was affectionately dubbed “the other Washington monument” by the press, who filled column after column with her acid-tongued barbs, one liners and antics. Ironically these were the same papers that had called her behaviour scandalous decades previously, proving that old people really can get away with anything provided they’re adorable enough.

Yep, that's about the right amount of adorable.
Yep, that’s about the right amount of adorable.

In her later years Alice became famous for sporting a rather large wide-brimmed hat and she wore some variation on this accessory in almost every engagement she ever had. When innocently asked about why she’d taken to wearing such awesome looking but impractical hats, in typical fashion Alice was quoted as saying that the hats mostly served as a way of preventing men she didn’t like from being able to kiss her when they met.

That’s not to say Alice was rude it’s just that she really didn’t like assholes and wasn’t afraid of letting them know. In fact she was reportedly only too happy to talk to anyone provided they weren’t a dick, famously having an embroided pillow on her sofa that simply read “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.

rooseveltx
What, you thought we were kidding?

What a kick-ass old lady.