Elizabeth Milbank Anderson was born on December 20, 1850 in New York City, New York, United States. She was the daughter of Jeremiah and Elizabeth (Lake) Milbank.
She grew up under the best cultural and social advantages available to her generation, and in a home atmosphere of benevolence and public spirit.
Anderson was educated by private tutors.
Anderson traveled extensively, crossing the Atlantic some sixty times and visiting Japan in 1918. She owned notable paintings and a fine collection of Chinese porcelains.
From her father she inherited (1884) a considerable fortune, and it was greatly increased in her hands by wise management.
Barnard College owes a great deal to her interest in its critical early period. She became a trustee in 1894, and was vice-chairman of the Board from 1899 until her death. In 1896 she gave the administration building (Milbank Hall); and in 1903, at the cost of $1, 000, 000, the tract of three blocks which was developed as the Milbank Quadrangle. She provided funds for a dormitory on this site (Brooks Hall); contributed liberally to the general and special funds of the College; and helped many of its students with financial aid and personal friendship.
Medical missions in China, Negro schools in the South, the tuberculosis research laboratory at Saranac Lake, were other educational projects which received her help.
In the field of social work her interest was primarily in applying the results of research to the prevention of poverty and suffering, especially that due to ill health.
In 1904 she gave to the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor a building on East Thirty-eighth Street to be used for public baths, and for many years it served as a model and stimulated the provision of bath houses by the city. Through the same Association she provided hot lunches in over thirty public schools, until the city assumed responsibility for the work.
In 1909 she gave land, buildings, and endowment to the value of $1, 000, 000 to the Children's Aid Society of New York City, for a convalescent home for children at Chappaqua, New York. By a promise of $50, 000 a year for ten years she made possible the establishment, in 1913, of the Department of Social Welfare of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. She indulged freely in what she called "unconventional giving, " of which no record remains except in the memories of its beneficiaries.
At her death in 1921 the endowment had reached nearly $8, 000, 000. By the terms of her will it was increased to about $10, 000, 000, and the name was changed to the Milbank Memorial Fund. With characteristic far-sightedness she left the directors unhampered by limitations or detailed instructions, specifying only that the income be used to "improve the physical, mental, and moral condition of humanity, and generally to advance charitable and benevolent objects. "
Anderson made generous gifts to France and Belgium, and to the children of Serbia and Central Europe during and after the World War. As a tribute to her father and mother, Anderson founded in 1905 the Memorial Fund Association (later the Milbank Memorial Fund) to which she transferred securities from time to time, and which she used increasingly as a medium for her benefactions. For her services to France she was decorated with the ribbon of the Légion d'Honneur in 1918.
Anderson was raised in a conservative Baptist family closely associated with the Madison Avenue Baptist Church.
Anderson had an alert mind, sound business judgment, buoyant spirits, a keen sense of humor, strong likes and dislikes, decided and independent opinions. Loyalty and fearlessness she placed high in the list of virtues.
A portrait near the close of her life shows a head daintily and reliantly poised; delicate features under a high crown of soft white hair; eyes that seem to look through surfaces and pretensions with kindly penetration and interest; a mouth half smiling in tolerant sympathy, with perhaps a touch of amusement.
In 1887 Anderson married Abram A. Anderson, a portrait painter.
