April 5, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Mrs. Russell Sage: Women’s Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America
by Ruth Crocker
After Russell Sage, a financier who had a reputation as a robber baron, died in 1906, his wife, Olivia, embarked on a career as a philanthropist. She endowed a foundation with $75-million — worth $1.5-billion today — to create the Russell Sage Foundation.
But though she remained hidden behind her husband’s name, Mrs. Sage, an early feminist, was able to “put the money to her own use, demonstrating that then — as now — money disbursed by a woman with woman’s advancement in mind, from a room of her own, could fund institutional change and leverage opportunities for other women,” writes Ruth Crocker, director of the women’s-studies program at Auburn University.
Olivia Sage had to be financially independent at a young age; before she married Russell Sage, he swindled her father and sent him into financial decline. After her father’s ruin, she was forced to support herself, sowing the seeds of her later efforts for women’s education and financial independence.
When she died in 1918, Mrs. Sage had given away approximately $45-million ($917-million in today’s dollars). Ms. Crocker finds Mrs. Sage to be a complicated figure, one who was at once modest and snobbish: “Philanthropy empowered her to make concrete her best and worst impulses, her humane ideals and her prejudices, the ample generosity as well as the narrow-mindedness.”
Publisher: Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Ind. 47404; (800) 842-6796; fax (812) 855-7931; iuporder@indiana.edu; http://iupress.indiana.edu; 527 pages; $49.95; ISBN 0-253-34712-2.
