Hetty Green

Hetty Green, 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.

21 November 1834

Born on the same birth day (21 November): Andrew Caddick • Björk • Boulting brothers • Carly Rae Jepsen • Eleanor Powell • Jena Malone • Joe Darling • Karen Davila • Ludwik Gorzkowski • Martin Meichelbeck • Preston Zimmerman • Rain Phoenix • Ralph Meeker • Vincent Di Fate • Will Buckley (footballer) • William Wakefield Baum

Born in the same month (November 1834): Franjo Kuhač • Georg Hermann Quincke • José Hernández (writer)