Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights

3. A Sex Battle

71 A Sex Battle During her days as a Vanderbilt, Alva engaged in the conventional sorts of philanthropy: founding a home for ill and convalescent children and supervising the building of an Episcopalian church near her home on Long Island. But she never expressed any interest in social reform or political activism.1 When she returned from Europe in 1909 after the death of her husband, however, she found her circumstances much altered. Besides the fact that two of her sisters had died, her divorce, widowhood, and self-imposed exile to Europe left her estranged from many of her old associates.2 She had long nurtured a deep resentment of male power and privilege. She possessed an intellect open to new ideas, an enormous amount of energy, considerable administrative ability, and a great deal of money. And not only had her daughter, Consuelo, taken up the cause of woman’s rights in England but one of her best friends, Kitty (Katherine) Duer Mackay, the wife of Clarence Mackay, the founder of International Telephone and Telegraph, had also become a suffragist.3 In 1908, Mackay organized the Equal Franchise League, hosted suffrage meetings in her home, and arranged a series of public lectures on the subject of woman’s rights in one of New York’s theaters.4 In late March of that year, Kitty invited Alva to attend a suffrage meeting at the exclusive Colony Club in New York City. There Alva met Carrie Chapman Catt; Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of woman’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Fanny Villard, the daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; Ida Tarbell, the muckraker; 3 • 72 | Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and Ida Husted Harper. All were prominent members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).5 Alva had little time to get involved, however. She left for Europe shortly after her husband ’s death in June. At loose ends when she returned from Europe in 1909, Alva accepted an invitation from Mackay to attend a lecture series featuring Harper, who had been a close friend of Susan B. Anthony. Afterwards Harper, who was always interested in recruiting new members, took Alva to NAWSA meetings held at the Martha Washington Hotel in New York. What struck Alva about those meetings was that while those in attendance talked about woman’s rights, they seemed incapable of taking any action likely to change women’s position in American society. “The audience, always approximately the same audience , seemed to consist only of old and convinced suffragists,” she lamented. They appeared to have no idea how to promote the cause.6 The atmosphere at those meetings reflected the general condition of the suffrage movement at the time. Efforts to win the vote for women had started in upstate New York in 1846 when six farm women petitioned the state constitutional convention in Albany to grant women suffrage.7 Two years later, those who attended the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention made the same demand.8 An argument over the issue of black suffrage after the Civil War split woman’s suffrage advocates into two groups—the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association—which did not unite until 1890. After that, the leaders of the newly created NAWSA initiated a strategy for winning the vote that focused on convincing state legislators to add a woman suffrage amendment to their state constitutions. By the time Alva became interested in the issue, only Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado had granted women the right to vote. NAWSA, whose headquarters was located in the small town of Warren, Ohio, was isolated from the seats of political power. And its campaign to win suffrage in state-by-state campaigns had stalled.9 What the movement needed was new blood, an infusion of cash, and a willingness to implement new strategies. A woman who had devoted her energy and intellect to fighting her way to the pinnacle of New York society, a woman who had helped design and supervise the building of a series of spectacular mansions, a woman who had managed to marry her daughter off to the most A Sex Battle | 73 eligible bachelor in Europe, Alva needed something to occupy her time, stimulate her intellect, and give meaning to her life. In short, she needed a new project. So in March 1909 she invited NAWSA’s president , Anna Howard Shaw, to dine. Shaw reported...