Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life of Power and Politics

Sponsored by The Book Club of California

A financial manager, businesswoman, and reformer, Phoebe Apperson Hearst was one of the wealthiest and most influential women of the era and a philanthropist, almost without rival, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Most people know her as the mother of William Randolph Hearst, the famed newspaper mogul, and as the wife of George Hearst, a mining tycoon and U.S. senator. By age forty-eight, however, Hearst had come to control her husband’s extravagant wealth after his death.

Hearst supported a number of significant urban reforms in the Bay Area, across the country, and around the world, giving much of her wealth to organizations supporting children, health reform, women’s rights and well-being, higher education, and progressive voluntary associations, among other endeavors. She worked to exert her ideas and implement plans regarding the burgeoning Progressive movement and was the first female regent of the University of California. Hearst held other prominent positions as the first president of the Century Club of San Francisco, first treasurer of the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs, and head of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life in Power and Politics offers the first biography of one of the Gilded Age’s most prominent and powerful women.

An in-person presentation that will also be live streamed by Alexandra Nickliss, author and professor of history at City College of San Francisco

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