Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America (review)

Margaret Olivia Sage was one of the most generous women in American history. In addition to underwriting building projects on college campuses, she is perhaps best known as the founder of the Russell Sage Foundation, one of the pioneers in the professionalization of social work. In chronicling her life, Ruth Crocker has provided what is possibly the best biography of a female philanthropist to date. And no subject was more worthy of this attention than Mrs. Olivia Sage.

Little in her upbringing would have predicted that she would become one of the world's richest women. She was born in upstate New York in 1828, part of the generation that created the country's first multimillion dollar fortunes. Her father, an inventor, had limited success in vending his agricultural innovations, but did manage to send his daughter to Emma Willard's Female Seminary in Troy, New York, which later provided Olivia with a means of self-support as a teacher and governess. Other alumnae went on to equally distinguished careers, including the celebrated women's rights activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Nettie Fowler McCormick, the wife of reaper king Cyrus McCormick, and a noted philanthropist in her own right.

At one point, Olivia was supporting her family, but her situation changed dramatically in 1869 when she married Russell Sage, a family friend, and one of the country's wealthiest men. A partner of Jay Gould, Sage was both an avid investor and a leading figure in the Union Pacific Railroad and in Western Union, wielding a controlling share in the nascent communications and transportation revolutions of the late nineteenth century. He was also notoriously cheap, and actively shunned philanthropy duringmost of the couple's early years together, despite her urgings. Crocker contends that Olivia quickly began to construct "an identity around benevolence," albeit on an extremely modest scale (p. 96). She entered the field of philanthropy in earnest after Russell's death in 1906. As the heir to Sage's $75 million empire [or $1.5 billion in constant, 2004 dollars], the 78-year-old widow exclaimed that she was "just beginning to live".

Olivia Sage's situation was unusual in several ways. First, since the couple had no children, there were few pressures to keep the money in the family, a constraint that bounded most wealthy women's philanthropic enthusiasms at that time. Moreover, she had complete control of her husband's bequest at a time when many ostensibly wealthy widows, such as Boston's flamboyant art patroness, Isabella Stewart Gardner, found themselves hemmed in by nay-saying executors after their husband's death.

The bulk of her philanthropy fell into two categories: the Russell Sage Foundation, and gifts to men's and women's colleges, primarily for buildings such as dormitories. Although Crocker tries to present Olivia as a feminist, the women's suffrage movement received little of her generosity, aside from funds to cover the headquarter's rent. Her gifts to men's colleges—all of which discriminated against women—often overshadowed those she gave to women's schools, aside from her alma mater, the Troy Female Seminary. A few other women's charitable and evangelical groups also received sizable $1.6 million windfalls at her death in 1918.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is her relationship with Robert Weeks de Forest, an aristocratic New York attorney who became her philanthropic advisor. Although Olivia managed to sidestep impediments that barred most of her wealthy peers from control over their husbands' fortunes upon widowhood, Olivia allowed herself to be reined in by de Forest's aspirations and ambitions. It was an unusual partnership. While de Forest was the architect of the plan for the Sage Foundation, Olivia insisted that women be included on the board, a highly unusual pattern for foundations of that era. As Crocker explains, Sage was...