Sylvia Porter (1913–1991)

History of Financial Advice Collection. The eleven hundred pages of Sylvia Porter’s Money Book remained in print for several decades and were profoundly influential on the American public. The work was a best seller, followed by dozens of similar titles, and came to shape the ways in which personal financial investment would be written about by women writers such as Jane Bryant Quin, Suze Orman, and Elizabeth Warren right up until the end of the twentieth century. The claim on the book’s back cover, made by Betty Furness of NBC’s Today Show, that it “should be on every family’s book shelf, along with the Bible and the dictionary”, provides a neat description of the work’s proselytizing and encyclopaedic character. The book begins with the practicalities of budget planning (and very Porter-like homilies, such as the “broken sugar bowl” method of saving) but it is far more comprehensive in its details, providing advice on how and when to buy everything, from the cradle (and obstetrician) to the grave (and mortician) and all that comes in between—day care, schools, colleges, clothes, homes, cars, vacations, doctors, weddings, divorces as well as stocks, bonds and annuities. Indeed, the sheer weight of these details, which include strategies for making sure that there is sufficient credit in your “blood bank account” (one can save on “costs of blood” by asking “friends and relatives to donate blood in advance” of planned surgery) provides its own testimony to the financialization of every aspect of American life in the early ’70s.… (more)