The late Pittsburgh Mayor Sophie Masloff was a “character who had character.”

That’s according to Barbara Burstin, an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Sophie: The Incomparable Mayor Masloff.” The book was released in 2019 through Word Association Publishers in Tarentum.

Burstin will detail Masloff’s improbable journey — from her humble beginnings in the city’s Hill District to her ascent to office — during a free lecture in Fox Chapel.

Hosted by the American Association of University Women, the event is scheduled for 10 a.m. Sept. 9 at Faith United Methodist Church, 261 W. Chapel Ridge Road. Doors will open at 9:30 a.m.

“She loved politics because she loved people,” said Burstin, who specializes in U.S. history, Jews in the U.S. and the Holocaust.

Masloff was the first Jewish mayor and the first female mayor in the city.

Born in 1917 to Romanian Jewish parents, Masloff spoke only Yiddish until she started elementary school. After graduating from high school, she transitioned directly into a nearly four-decade career as a clerk in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.

Never shy about her love for the Steel City, Masloff was elected to city council in 1976 as one of only two females on the board in the 1970s.

In January 1988, Masloff was elected city council president, ultimately succeeding Mayor Richard Caliguiri when he died in office four months later.

Masloff settled into the highest office on Grant Street and by the end of her tenure in 1994, she had become one of the city’s most high-profile leaders.

She was an unlikely leader but one of Pittsburgh’s most memorable, Burstin said.

“She faced a number of challenges, but the biggest was not that she was over 70 when she became mayor, but that she was a woman in a town that many say is still a ‘man’s town,’ ” Burstin said.

“She was too often considered a lackey who was run by her handlers. But she was her own person, a real visionary who first proposed a ballpark on the North Side.”

Audience members might be surprised to learn that Masloff also spearheaded the Regional Asset District — “without her charm with the state Legislature, that program, which has awarded over a billion dollars to cultural institutions in Allegheny County since its inception, might never have gotten off the ground,” Burstin said.

“Sophie was a force in her own right who never got her fair due.”

Masloff served as mayor from 1988 to 1994 before retiring to her home in Squirrel Hill. Even then, she continued her civic-minded duties as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2000 and 2004.

She was honored in 2007 with a street near PNC Park renamed in her honor.

Burstin, who earned a doctorate degree from Pitt, has authored several award-winning books on the Jewish experience in Pittsburgh, including “Steel City Jews: A History of Pittsburgh and Its Jewish Community.”

The upcoming program is free and open to the public.

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