Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights

6. The Last Word

175 The Last Word As she approached the age of eighty, Alva continued to be concerned about her image and legacy. Neither of her previous efforts at dictating a memoir seems to have satisfied her. So sometime between 1928 and 1932, she repeated the process once more by sharing her life story with her then secretary and companion Mary Young.1 Fiercely determined to be remembered, Alva through Young was free to make herself yet one more time. This would be her final attempt to reflect in any systematic way on her life and its meaning. We know almost nothing about Young or the nature of her relationship with her employer.2 She was apparently efficient, attentive, and compliant enough to bear the brunt of Alva’s volatility with some degree of equanimity for the five years of their association. The 173page manuscript that Young produced describes Alva’s life up until the death of her second husband. There is no evidence that Young took the same kinds of liberties in writing the text that Sara Bard Field clearly did. Young seems to have accepted Alva on her own terms. For her, Alva was who she appeared to be and the meaning of her life was what she said it was. The narrative that emerged from Alva’s conversations with Young is in some ways very similar to the one that she dictated to Field in 1917. In it, we find a description of Belmont’s pedigree, childhood, and early interest in architecture. Alva again described herself as a willful and insubordinate child. She remained convinced that she had had a profound influence on the development of American architecture 6• 176 | Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and interior design. She reiterated her belief that she had been a good mother. “I have always considered that motherhood involved a great responsibility as well as a great happiness,” she told Young. She took pride in the way she had educated her three children and the opportunities for self-expression that she had provided them.3 Alva’s anger over her husband’s infidelity was in no way diminished by the passage of time. She still believed that she deserved recognition for having made herself a pioneer in efforts to provide women with what she considered to be an appropriate response to their husbands’ illicit affairs. She was convinced that she was central to efforts to free her contemporaries from what she called the terror of “the bogy of social ostracism” for having demanded a divorce.4 “It was more than a personal matter to me,” she told Young. “It was a question of social justice not only to myself but other women situated as I was.”5 Indeed, male privilege appears to be the only social issue that concerned her as she reflected on her life before her entry into the woman’s rights movement. She, her friends, and her daughter had all been subjected to what she considered to be disgraceful behavior on the part of their husbands. A proud woman, she continued to feel the pain of the humiliation she suffered because of her first husband’s adultery. She believed that she had been the victim of a system that gave men the power to denigrate women: “For years I had witnessed the putting aside of wives of wealthy and prominent men. . . . Not by divorce. They did not want or need divorces. . . . They left their wives to maintain the dignity of their position in the world, such as it was, and to take care of their children while they amused themselves elsewhere.” Her memories of women in her social circle who were “practically deserted by their husbands who not only neglected them but insulted them by their open and flagrant and vulgar infidelities” were still vivid. “It was a time when men of wealth seemed to think they could do anything they liked; have anything, or any woman, they, for the moment wanted,” she said. Men with immense fortunes and secure social positions were notorious for their philandering, she told Young. She remembered that they were particularly inclined to flaunt their illicit behavior in Monte Carlo. There, she remembered, they appeared on the casino floor, not with their wives but with their mistresses, upon whom they “lavished” expensive clothes and sparkling jewelry.6 The Last Word | 177 There, however, the similarities between the Field manuscript and the one produced by...