page_title: Marie Mattingly Meloney
section_title: Society and community
hierarchical_section_title: Marie Mattingly Meloney / Biography / Society and community
caption_attribution_description: English: Historical figure Margherita Sarfatti, mistress of Benito Mussolini.
context_page_description: Marie Mattingly Meloney, 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.
context_section_description: In February 1925, Meloney was a member of the building fund committee of the Knickerbocker Hospital, which was to be erected at 130th Street and Convent Avenue. In 1929, she spoke at the dedication of a bust of the late Dr. Virgil Pendleton Gibney at the Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled at 321 East 42nd Street, giving tribute as a former patient of his.
  For many years she was a member and board member of the Carroll Club, "an organization of 1,400 young Catholic business women of New York and vicinity." She was also a member of the American  Centre of P.E.N. Clubs, and in May 1933 she joined a radio symposium on "Literary Freedom and Nationalism," with Dr. Henry Goddard Leach, editor of Forum magazine; Will Irwin, president of the American Centre; and Alfred Dashiell, managing editor of Scribner's Magazine, attacking the recent actions by the governing Nazi party in Germany in "banning of some German authors and the burning of their books and the books of other writers." "Asserting that bigotry had no place in a nation of intelligent people, she said the only weapon with which to fight ... was 'the courage to establish before the civilized world a standard of right thinking and right living and then persistently to support that standard.'"
  In April 1934, Meloney gave a studio party for Donna Margherita Sarfatti, Italian writer and art critic, in the studio of Leonebel Jacobs, One W. 67th Street. Guests included the Fiorello H. LaGuardias, Condé Nast, the Sinclair Lewises, the Norman Bel Geddeses, the Roy Howards, Dr. John H. Finley, the Ogden Reids, Dr. John Erskine, Nicholas Roosevelt, the Gutzon Borglums, Dr. and Mrs. Harry Woodburn Chase, the John O'Haras, the Brock Pembertons, the Joseph Auslanders, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Moses, Mrs. Helen Leavitt, Roy Chapman Andrews, Fannie Hurst and Louis Seibold.
  Meloney was elected first vice president of the New York Newspaper Women's Club in May 1935, and in June of that year she presided over a festive gathering on the East Side
  when Mayor
  LaGuardia officially renamed Exterior Street as Marie Curie Avenue.
  Her addresses while in Manhattan, New York City:
  February 1921: Thirty-one or thirty-three West 12th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue on the lower West Side
  December 1925: Twenty-six West 9th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue on the lower West Side
  October 1929: One Fifth Avenue, between East Eighth Street and Washington Mews, north of Washington Square Park
  January 1942: The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 301 Park Avenue
caption: Margherita Sarfati
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