She was the wife of millionaire Potter Palmer and early member of the Chicago Woman's Club, as well as president of the Board of Lady Managers.

[1] Known within the family as "Cissie", she studied in her home town and achieved a reputation as a musician, linguist, writer, politician, and administrator.

He made customer service a priority and carried everything from dry goods to the latest French fashions for ladies.

Palmer approved of Jane Addams' work at Hull House and gave aid when needed to the civil service.

"'If funds were lacking for any good cause, or if we had to make up a quota, we just asked the Potter Palmers,' commented Mrs. Carter H. Harrison, the Mayor's wife".

Women had a large presence in the fair and the plum position was the President of the Board of Lady Managers, which Bertha Palmer was selected to lead in 1891.

The board chose Sophia Hayden as architect for The Woman's Building and designer to supervise the interior decoration.

However, when Hayden wouldn't take Palmer's advice to accept rich women's donations of architectural odds and ends to decorate the exterior, fearing a horrible visual impact as a result, Palmer fired Hayden and hired the much more malleable Candace Wheeler to supervise the interior decoration.

[11] Led by Palmer, who approached Congress on the matter, the board also requested that the mint produce a new commemorative coin for the Exposition and their efforts resulted in the Isabella quarter.

Following the opening of the Exposition, Palmer sat for the fashionable Swedish painter Anders Zorn (1860–1920), who was commissioned by the Board of Lady Managers from the fair.

During the closing ceremony of The Woman's Building, Bertha Palmer delivered the final address stating, "Not only have the material exhibits drawn attention to the skill of women and shown the point of development which has been reached by them, but their interests, their capabilities, their needs, and their hopes have been brought before the public and thoroughly discussed from every point of view during the time of preparation for, as well as during the continuance of, the Exposition".

[12] According to at least one legend, Palmer helped invent the chocolate brownie when she directed that her kitchen staff come up with a confection smaller than a piece of cake for women attending the Columbian Exposition.

[13] One of Palmer's challenges as President of the Board of Lady Managers was greeting the highly official guests that arrived at the fair; the most difficult, Infanta Eulalia of Spain.

They depended on the curator Sarah Hallowell, a Philadelphia Quaker who they had met in 1873, for advice and she introduced the Palmers to the painters in Paris and to the latest artistic trends in the French capital.

In the years leading up to the Columbian Exposition, they became clients of the Parisian dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and began to collect French Impressionist works.

The frankness of his nudes had caused a stir at the fair and after resisting for a number of months, works by Rodin entered the collection as well and these were among the first acquired by American collectors.

According to the author Aline B. Saarinen, so fabulous were her jewels that a newspaper declared that when she appeared on the S.S. Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse with a tiara of diamonds as large as lima beans, a corsage panned with diamonds, a sunburst as big as a baseball, a stomacher of diamonds and all the pearls around her neck, Alois Burgskeller of the Metropolitan Opera, who was singing at the ship's concert, was stopped right in the middle of a high note.She traveled throughout Europe, dining with kings and queens and mixing with industrialists and statesmen.

In September 1907, Bertha Palmer and her son Potter II took part in the maiden voyage of the new Cunard liner RMS Lusitania from Liverpool to New York.

In 1914, she bought 19,000 acres (77 km2) of land as an exclusive hunting preserve called "River Hills" in Temple Terrace, Florida.

After her death, her sons inherited the land and eventually sold it to developers who created the Mediterranean Revival golf course community of Temple Terrace, Florida.

Her grandson Potter D'Orsay Palmer (1908–39) became a notorious playboy who married four times and died after a brawl in Sarasota.