A man with a million dollars can be as happy nowadays as though he were rich.
—Ward McAllister
I know of no profession, art, or trade that women are working in today as taxing as being a leader of society.
—Alva Vanderbilt
To many New Yorkers Society had become not a recreation and enjoyment, but a profession.
—May Van Rensselaer
We Society women work until we drop down in harness.
—Mrs. Arthur Drexel
During the Gilded Age, it was said that a lady’s name should be publicized only thrice in her lifetime: at her birth, her marriage, and her death. Did the grande dame of Gilded Age Society thus betray her own principles when she opened the door to her Fifth Avenue mansion for “An Interview with Mrs. Astor” in the Delineator, a monthly magazine owned by the Butterick Company, producer of home-sewing patterns and solid advice for women of the middle class? A professed admirer of Mrs. Astor’s “simplicity and charm and her many intellectual interests,” her interlocutor, Miss Rebecca H. Insley, late of Europe and Indiana, extolled her idol’s “wide range of thought and her independence of judgment,” her “graceful manner and choice diction.” Mrs. Astor so cherishes her “ideals,” confided Miss Insley, that at the very word, “her face lights up in a marvelous way.” Throughout her reign, Mrs. Astor guided through example, gesture, a withering glance. In her interview, she spoke more plainly for the ages. “The claimants to the succession vied for the distinction of giving the best entertainments, having the most beautiful clothes, the finest horses, the richest jewels—all weapons in the struggle for supremacy.” The regnant summa of social power, however, indisputably belonged to Mrs. Astor.