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Phoebe Apperson Hearst explores the thinking and strategies of a middle-class border-state girl as she became an influential Gilded Age philanthropist. Phoebe Hearst's philanthropy ranged widely, from San Francisco schools to women's rights, from the Young Women's Christian Association to the research university. Hearst (1842–1919) helped many young women gain the education, credentials, and rights required for self-support and careers. Alexandra M. Nickliss seeks especially to clarify Hearst's thinking as she moved, step by careful step, from work in her teenage years as a Cumberland Presbyterian home companion and country school teacher of limited education to marriage with George Hearst, a wealthy man twenty years her senior, to motherhood, and to civic prominence. She shows how Hearst drew strength and knowledge from lasting relationships with her son's wet nurse, a remarkable woman school administrator, prominent museum leaders, and many others. As Hearst coped with a San Francisco from which her husband was usually absent, she found herself through repeated independent trips to Europe, through social affairs, and through giving to medical and educational causes in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. When her husband died in 1891 during his term as a U.S. senator, she accepted control of his complex business assets (worth between $10 and $20 million or perhaps more), just as her son, William Randolph, needed funds for his newspaper empire. Nickliss leaves to others the study of her engagement with the family's mines and company towns across the United States and in Mexico and Peru, although these were likely relevant to her philanthropy.
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