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How Missy Meloney Brought Women Into Politics
by Julie Des Jardins
The first biography of Missy Meloney, the most important woman you've never heard of.
Marie "Missy" Mattingly Meloney was born in 1878, in an America where women couldn't vote. Yet she recognized the power that women held as consumers and family decision-makers, and persuaded male publishers and politicians to take them seriously. Over the course of her life as a journalist, magazine editor-in-chief, and political advisor, Missy created the idea of the female demographic. After the passage of the 19th Amendment she encouraged candidates to engage with and appeal to women directly. In this role, she advised Presidents from Hoover and Coolidge to FDR. By the time she died in 1943, women were a recognized political force to be reckoned with.
In this groundbreaking biography, historian Julie Des Jardins restores Missy to her rightful place in American history.
BookBrowse Review
American Queenmaker is well written, but the author makes some spurious claims about Missy Meloney bringing women into the public sphere. At times, some of her opinions seem tone deaf: for example, the author's claim that Meloney did more for women voters than suffragists, even though Meloney herself disagreed with the suffrage movement and published anti-suffrage editorials during WWI. It seems that the author is pushing an agenda that her subject was an exceptional champion of women, but the evidence is convoluted at best." - Rose Rankin
Other Reviews
"Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Lou and Herbert Hoover are only some of the people whose lives she affected. Her accomplishments were vast, and Des Jardins capably brings them to light. The author opens our eyes to a woman who should be a household name." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Des Jardins makes a convincing case for Meloney's crucial role in showing American women how to flex their political muscle. Readers interested in women's issues will find this to be a valuable contribution to the subject." - Publishers Weekly
"Julie Des Jardins brings her considerable skill and insight to a biography of Missy Meloney, a pioneering newspaper editor, an advisor to presidents and policy makers, a friend to Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, and a mentor to artists, writers, and scientists...Des Jardins brings Missy Meloney out of the shadows and allows her at last the public acclaim she deserves."- Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, CUNY and editor of the series Lives of American Women
"Missy Meloney was a uniquely powerful woman - and she used that power not to advance her own career (impressive as it was), but to advance the careers of other women and the causes they cared most deeply about. Her fingerprints are all over early 20th century politics, mass media, and popular culture but we are only now seeing them thanks to Julie Des Jardins's intimate and groundbreaking biography." - Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
"Julie Des Jardins has done a fine job conjuring Missy Meloney as a force of nature and championing a woman who was herself a champion — especially of strong women. As a journalist, editor, and publicist, Meloney was skilled at diverting attention toward others, yet in American Queenmaker, Des Jardins has placed Meloney at center stage." - Susan Quinn, author of Marie Curie: A Life and Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady
This information about American Queenmaker was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Julie Des Jardins holds a PhD in American Women's and Gender History from Brown and until 2014 was a full professor of history at Baruch College, CUNY. She has taught at Harvard, Macalester, Tufts, and currently sits on the Advisory Council of National Women's History Museum in Washington, D.C. The author of four critically-acclaimed books (including a volume on Lillian Gilbreth for Westview's Lives of American Women series, edited by Carol Berkin), she regularly writes for academic journals and has written for the Smithsonian Magazine and Salon, and lectures widely on gender in America. Des Jardins lives in San Carlos, California.
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