She ate stale crackers and dry oatmeal and made her own soap from animal fat.
She wore the same tattered black dress every day and haggled with shopkeepers over pennies. She never used hot water or heated her home; instead, to keep warm, she wrapped newspapers around her legs.
She was Hetty Green, a financier in the Gilded Age, worth a cool $100 million (which, in today’s dollars, is an extremely cool $3.8 billion).
I came across Hetty while doing some research on stingy billionaires.
I read about J. Paul Getty, who installed a pay phone in his mansion to prevent visitors from making calls at his expense; and IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, who reused teabags and paperclips.
I pored over articles about John D Rockefeller, who saved string, wore his suits until they were threadbare, and played golf only with old balls.
But it was Hetty Green’s thrifty ways that stood out above all the other penny-pinching billionaires.
The stories about her cheapness were legendary. Hetty was vilified and mocked throughout her life. She was characterised as a bitter, greedy old hag and described as a cantankerous, curmudgeonly crone.
She was fodder for the tabloids, who dubbed her the Witch of Wall Street.
More than 100 years after her death, she is still ridiculed.
The Washington Post gave her its worst mom award in 2023, partly because of gossip that her cheapness delayed treatment for her son Ned’s leg, which had to be amputated.
In 1972, the Guinness Book of World Records crowned Hetty the planet’s stingiest person – a “record” that still stands a hundred and ten years after her death.
History has not been kind to Hetty.
But if you scratch a bit at her Scrooge-like image, a more nuanced and complex picture of Hetty emerges.
Sure, some of the stories are sort of true, but most have been exaggerated and embellished. Why? Because Hetty was an unlikeable woman. And this is the fate of unlikeable women.
As UK writer Amy Kean argues in her movement to reclaim the term, ambitious women pay a price when they refuse to be small.
Hetty’s reputation as a cheapskate was built more on sexist Victorian attitudes than on her actual behaviour.
When asked why she was viewed as a cruel miser, she responded: “I am not a hard woman, but because I do not have a secretary to announce every kind act I perform, I am called mean and stingy.”
At the heart of her “stinginess” were her Quaker roots, which advocate simplicity and the responsible use of resources for the benefit of all. “I am trying to live up to the tenets of the faith,” she said. “That is why I dress plainly and live quietly. No other kind of life would please me.”
Hetty Green was frugal, but that’s not the same as stingy. She was a formidable force in the world of finance and one of the most financially shrewd people of her era. Her extraordinary accomplishments are all the more impressive because she lacked the advantages her male contemporaries enjoyed.
She understood risk, leverage, and value in ways they didn’t.
She traded actively on the New York Stock Exchange when it was a no-go zone for women. She was a pioneer of value investing, the strategy famously practised today by Warren Buffett.
And during the Panic of 1907, she functioned as a one-woman Federal Reserve, lending millions at reasonable rates to people in need, businesses, and, at the height of the crisis, New York City itself.
She could have exploited the situation, but charging excessive interest went against her moral code.
In a different world, the Witch of Wall Street would have been the Queen of Wall Street.
But Hetty was punished because she was a woman who would not be small.
The world rewards the same traits very differently, depending on who displays them. Getty, Rockefeller, and Kamprad are revered.
Their miserliness is considered eccentric, not mean. They have buildings and universities named after them. Yet, Hetty is in the Guinness Book of World Records for being cheap.
After her death, the fortune Hetty built went primarily to her children, who directed much of it to charitable organisations.
Ironically, while she is still being mocked, billions of dollars from the woman crowned the planet’s stingiest person have been quietly absorbed by hospitals, libraries, educational institutions, and charities, many of which have lost track of the source of the generosity.