| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America. By Ruth Crocker. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xxii, 526 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-253-34712-2.)

Ruth Crocker's Mrs. Russell Sage offers a new vantage from which to consider the American tradition of giving, one that bridges the Victorian and the modern and is necessarily influenced by gender. Crocker expertly demonstrates how Olivia Slocum Sage (1828–1918), the widow of Russell Sage, complicates the line between charity and philanthropy, adding to the growing literature that questions the gendering of the former as female and the latter as male (p. 228). Crocker also convincingly elucidates how women's activism extended beyond "radicals and freethinkers" to middle- and upper-class women for whom philanthropy was "a form of speaking" (p. 312). By documenting the life of Sage as an unlikely multimillionaire philanthropist in an era defined by such male giants as George Peabody, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, Crocker demonstrates the strong and complex roots of American giving.

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