I've never heard of Hetty Green, but she was once the richest woman in America. Born into an old whaling family, she inherited a fortune, then grew it dollar by dollar by investing in railroads, real estate, and more than a few municipalities - at one point, she was New York City's largest lender. (She also owned an entire town near Chicago, which I find fascinating.) Fiercely independent, she threw her husband out of the house after he gambled with - and lost - some of her money in a stock market crash. It is telling that in an age when she should have been Mrs. Edward Green, she was Mrs. Hetty Green - and more often than not he was known as Hetty Green's husband.
As Janet Wallach frequently makes her reader understand, Hetty Green's life and accomplishments are all the more amazing given that she died several years before women could even vote. Not that Hetty was a suffragette - she wasn't, not by a long shot. She openly scorned high society, intimating that the famously miserable Duchess of Marlborough, aka Consuelo Vanderbilt, had gotten what she deserved for marrying a Duke for his title. (From the sounds of it, Hetty Green was not an easy woman to like. She called her son's girlfriend Miss Harlot and her disdain for the woman was such that he did not marry her after his mother was cold in her grave.)
The Richest Woman in America is first and foremost a biography of Hetty Green. In many ways it is also a biography of the growing pains - and often death - of this nation's railways; railroads always formed a sizable portion of Hetty's portfolio and she studied every facet of them, buying, selling, trading and consolidating, but always with an eye to how the rails were increasingly the backbone of the country.
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