In this sense, she can be seen as the architect of her own obscurity, or at best, her own infamy. She left no public monuments nor endowed any libraries, universities, or foundations whose staffs might have dutifully curated her reputation. Rockefeller, whose philanthropy managed to smooth out their rough edges for posterity, Hetty had little regard for her personal legacy. Many of the very attributes that led to the brilliant financier’s success also led to her undoing, both during her life and afterward. But in Hetty they’d have a hard time holding her up as a standard-bearer, during her own time - or in ours. Her riotous, headstrong disregard of how rich New York women lived their lives should also have been enough to make her iconic in these days when shapers of the #MeToo movement are looking for historic role models of women carving out their own paths in the face of male adversity. “At any rate, she had enough of courage to live as she chose and to be as thrifty as she pleased, and she observed such conventions as seemed to her right and useful, while coldly and calmly ignoring all the others.” It was the latter appraisal that helps explain why Hetty never became a household name, despite her ability to beat Gilded Age robber barons at their own game in an era when women were denied the vote, let alone given access to the halls of power. “Probably her life was happy,” the obit stated. When the inscrutable Wall Street titan Hetty Green died in 1916, having singularly amassed a fortune worth $2.4 billion in today’s money, the New York Times took a shrewd look at her legacy, or what would later be determined to be a shocking lack thereof.
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