Hetty Green

Hetty Green (November 21, 1834 – July 3, 1916), was an American businesswoman and financier known as "the richest woman in America" during the Gilded Age. Those who knew her well referred to her admiringly as the Queen of Wall Street due to her willingness to lend freely and at reasonable interest rates to financiers and city governments during financial panics. Her extraordinary discipline during such times enabled her to amass a fortune as a financier at a time when nearly all major financiers were men. Two days after her death on July 3, 1916, The New York Times paid tribute to Green: It was that Mrs. Green was a woman that made her career the subject of endless curiosity, comment, and astonishment...Her habits were the legacy of New England ancestors who had the best of reasons for knowing "the value of money," for never wasting it, and for risking it only when their shrewd minds saw an approach to certainty of profit. Though something of hardness was ascribed to her, that she harmed any is not recorded, and victims of ruthlessness are usually audible...That there are few like her is not a cause of regret; that there are many less commendable, is one. As a highly successful investor, with a Wall Street office, she was unusual for being a woman in a man's world. Unwilling to participate in New York City high society, conspicuous consumption, or business partnerships, she may have been eccentric and curt with the press but she was a pioneer of value investing, and her willingness to make low-rate loans (with her well-tended reserves of currency) in place of the failing banks during the Panic of 1907 helped bail out Wall Street, New York City, and the United States economy. Nonetheless, she was seen in her widowhood as an odd miser all in black, sometimes referred to sensationally as the Witch of Wall Street, and later the Guinness Book of World Records even named her the "greatest miser," for a time. Stories that were often cited include her refusal to buy expensive clothes, pay for hot water, and her habit of wearing a single dress that was replaced only when it was worn out. Later evaluations have seen her as perhaps eccentric, but mostly out-of-step with the excesses of the Gilded Age wealthy, and the contemporary expectations for women, especially of her class.