We were charmed by the lecture given by Alexandra Nickliss at the Book Club of California last Monday. She is a professor of history at City College of San Francisco, who has recently authored Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life of Power and Politics.
In a wide-ranging talk about Ms. Hearst we learned that she 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, municipal policy formation, progressive voluntary associations, and urban architecture and design, 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, which later became one of the world’s leading research institutions,” noted Nickliss, who has written the first biography of one of the Gilded Age’s most prominent and powerful women.