Marie Mattingly Meloney

Marie Mattingly Meloney (December 8, 1878 – June 23, 1943), who used Mrs. William B. Meloney as her professional and social name, was "one of the leading woman journalists of the United States", a magazine editor and a socialite who in the 1920s organized a fund drive to buy radium for Marie Curie and began a movement for better housing. In the 1930s, nicknamed Missy, she was a friend and confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Personal life

Marie Mattingly was born on December 8, 1878, in Bardstown, Kentucky, the daughter of Cyprian Peter Mattingly, a physician, and his third wife, the former Sarah Irwin (1852–1934), an educationist and journalist who was the founding editor of The Kentucky Magazine, "one of the first publications of literature and science to be edited by a woman". Sarah Irwin Mattingly joined the faculty of the Washington College for Girls in 1891, and later became the school's president, serving until the school closed in 1896. Marie Mattingly had an elder brother, Judge Carroll Mattingly, who died "several years" before 1934 "from injuries received in a football game in his student days at Georgetown University".

Marie was educated privately at home and was trained as a concert pianist, but a horseback accident put an end to that endeavor and she turned to journalism. She once declared: "I have been lame since 15, and had a bad lung since 17 and have done the work of three men ever since".

In 1920, at the age of 42, she was described as "small, very frail, almost an invalid; a childhood accident had made her slightly lame. She had grey hair and immense, poetic black eyes set in a lovely pale face".