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June 18: Sylvia Porter
Sylvia Porter (Feldman), who began studying economics after the 1929 stock market crash and ended up with tens of millions of readers of her books and newspaper columns, was born on Long Island on this date in 1913. Porter wrote for the New York Post in its liberal heyday for more than 43 years (although she was not revealed to be a woman for the first eight years), as well as a monthly column for the Ladies Home Journal for seventeen years. In syndication, her Post column was carried by 450 papers and had a readership of forty million. Her own magazine, Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance, had 400,000 readers from 1984 to ’87, and her 1975 book, Sylvia Porter’s Money Book: How to Earn It, Spend It, Save It, Invest It, Borrow It and Use It to Better Your Life, sold more than a million copies. Porter’s writing combined thorough knowledge with plain language and was particularly embraced by women. “I like to think,” she said, “I’ve contributed in some way to the increasing willingness of the American public to take on the responsibilities of the economy.” She died in 1991 at age 77.
“I . . . walked into a vacuum where men were writing ‘peer talk’ to each other, trying to impress each other with the depth of their bafflegab.” —Sylvia Porter
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