Housewife and Socialite
Although popularly imagined as wholly preoccupied with "Society", for the first several decades of her married life "Lina" Astor was principally occupied with raising her five children and running her household, typical of women of her class in mid 19th century New York City. In 1862 she and her husband built a four-bay townhouse in the newly fashionable brownstone style at 350 Fifth Avenue, the present site of the Empire State Building, next door to her husband's older brother, John Jacob Astor III; the two families were next-door neighbors for 28 years although the Astor brothers did not get along.
Read more about this topic: Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor
Famous quotes containing the words housewife and/or socialite:
“This is the first national administration we’ve ever seen where the housewife couldn’t afford to buy groceries and the farmer couldn’t afford to grow them.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Socialite women meet socialite men and mate and breed socialite children so that we can fund small opera companies and ballet troupes because there is no government subsidy.”
—Sugar Rautbord, U.S. socialite fund-raiser and self-described “trash” novelist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 7, by Studs Terkel (1988)