| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.4

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| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Rich, Poor, and In Between: Class Identity and Power in U.S. Women's Politics,1870s–1918

CROCKER, RUTH. Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xviii + 526 pp. Introduction, illustrations, note on sources, select bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34712-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22045-5.
Mrs. Russell Sage is the first biography of Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage (1828–1918), better known as Olivia Sage. Crocker moves beyond the studies of white women married to wealthy men by examining Sage's rise to become "a socially prominent New York matron" (7) and philanthropist who helped move the welfare state forward. The author includes an extensive bibliography and footnotes. She does an admirable job of writing about Olivia Sage's life based on "about 5,000 letters" (ix). Crocker also builds upon the scholarly work of others on a wide range of women reformers and philanthropists, from studies of specific women such as Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Josephine Shaw Lowell to works that explore the complex roles of race, gender, and class in various reform movements and campaigns.¹	1
Olivia Slocum received a privileged education at Troy Female Seminary, even though her father suffered "business failures" (6) and her family fell apart. To survive economically, she worked as a teacher and governess from 1852 to 1869. During her wage-earning years, she "experienced two decades of indecision and powerlessness" (7); yet she enjoyed her independence. The structure and nature of Olivia's Slocum's class identity, power, and politics changed when, at the age of forty-one, she married Russell Sage. Once married, Olivia Sage struggled to find a class identity that adhered to traditional and conventional notions of womanhood. She also had "access to power" and room to "critique male privilege" and "to articulate demands more usually associated with middle-class reformers—demands for the vote, for a voice, for educational equality, and for control over their own resources" (4).	2
Despite her loss of independence while married, Olivia built an identity and reputation as a New York matron involved in women's "politics and state-building" (5). Olivia joined the Woman's National Indian Association to "civilize" Native Americans. She worked with the Lady Managers of the Woman's Hospital Association in New York, "where physicians could treat and define ('construct') the diseases of women" (106). While serving on the board of governors of the hospital association, she increased her clout and challenged the power of her male colleagues. According to Crocker, by becoming a leader in the Emma Willard Association, a group of Troy Female Seminary graduates, Sage had "a public role independent of her husband" (127–28). The New York Exchange for Women's Work (an organization of female workers, women who owned small businesses, and professionals, most of whom were teachers, that attracted the support of wealthy female patrons) provided Sage with another arena for philanthropic work and a platform on which to express her views on public issues, including women's suffrage which garnered her support in 1893.	3
Russell Sage died in 1906, making Olivia, who had no children, a wealthy widow. During widowhood, she completed her transformation from a socially prominent New York matron into a member of the "philanthropic elite" (3). In 1907, with the help of Robert de Forest, Olivia Sage created the Russell Sage Foundation and served as its president from 1907 to 1918. By the time the foundation was up and running, she had become a full-fledged philanthropist who made "large donations to institutions of all kinds in her late husband's name" (8). These institutions included mostly schools, colleges, and universities. The foundation advanced welfare policies by "funding investigations of social and industrial conditions, initiatives in urban planning, child welfare, and public health" (235)—key issues in the Progressive Era.	. . .

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