Although they did not participate directly in the family’s financial strategies, a few served as confidantes and advisers to their husbands others exercised deft political machinations in gatherings at their sumptuous country houses and London salons. Drawing on archives, memoirs, and published sources, the author focuses on the British branch of the family, examining eight generations of Rothschild women whose influence reached into politics, literature, social reform, Zionism, science, and the arts.
Since Meyer’s will specifically excluded his “daughters and sons-in-law and their heirs” from any share in his businesses, histories of the influential family have focused almost exclusively on men-an omission that historian Livingstone rectifies in a richly textured narrative. Natalie Livingstone, author and journalist, will be in conversation with Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History.A multigenerational portrait of a powerful family.įrom its origins in a Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, the family of Meyer Anshel Rothschild (1744-1812) and his wife, Guttle Schnapper (1753-1849), spawned an extraordinary financial dynasty that spread throughout the world. Rothschild women helped bring down ghetto walls in early nineteenth-century Frankfurt, inspired some of the most remarkable cultural movements of the Victorian period, and in the mid-twentieth century burst into America, where they patronized Thelonious Monk and drag-raced through Manhattan with Miles Davis. Excluded from the family bank, they forged their own distinct dynasty, becoming influential hostesses and talented diplomats, choreographing electoral campaigns, advising prime ministers, advocating for social reform, and trading on the stock exchange. In The Women of Rothschild, Natalie Livingstone reveals the role of women in shaping the legacy of the Rothschild dynasty, following the extraordinary lives of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twenty-first.Īs Jews in a Christian society and women in a deeply patriarchal family, they were outsiders.
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