The Women of Rothschild by Natalie Livingstone

The most recent generations profiled include entomologist Miriam Rothschild (1908 2005), known the 'Queen of Fleas' her sister Nica (1913 1988), a patron of jazz musicians including Thelonious Monk and her daughter Rosie (1945 2010), a psychotherapist and feminist art historian. The mother of five boys and five girls, Gutle's female descendants spread across Europe, hobnobbing with prime ministers and celebrities, lobbying popes and rabbis for social reform, and even breaking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park. The family tree begins with matriarch Gutle Schnapper (1753 1849), whose dowry enabled her husband, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, to start building the family's banking empire. Historian Livingstone (The Mistresses of Cliveden) delivers a comprehensive and colorful group biography of the women of the Rothschild dynasty. 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.Ībsorbing and compulsive, The Women of Rothschild gives voice to the complicated, privileged, and gifted women whose vision and tenacity shaped history. Misfits and conformists, conservatives and idealists, performers and introverts, they mixed with everyone from Queen Victoria to Chaim Weizmann, Rossini to Isaiah Berlin, and the Duke of Wellington to Alec Guinness, as well as with amphetamine-dealers, suffragists and avant-garde artists. They became influential hostesses and talented diplomats, choreographing electoral campaigns, advising prime ministers, advocating for social reform, and trading on the stock exchange.

Excluded from the family bank, they forged their own distinct dynasty of daughters and nieces, mothers and aunts. In The Women of Rothschild, Natalie Livingstone reveals the role of women in shaping the legacy of the famous Rothschild dynasty, synonymous with wealth and power.įrom the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park to Buchenwald, and from the Vatican to Palestine, Natalie Livingstone follows 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.

The Women of Rothschild by Natalie Livingstone