Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is a pleasure to thank those without whose help this book would never have been written and published. Like feminist reform movements, no book project can flourish without financial support. I would like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University, the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Re­ search at Texas A&M University, the History Department at Texas A&M University, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, for theirs. Laura Micheletti Puaca and Art Lindeman provided invaluable help as my research assistants in the early stages of this project. I am deeply indebted to Sarah Hutcheon and the archivists at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University for their assistance in accessing the documents in their collections. Paul Miller and John Tschirch of the Preservation Society of Newport County in Rhode Island and the archivists in the Special Collections Library at Duke University were both welcoming and helpful. My thanks also goes to Nancy Cott for inviting me to participate in the 2007 Schlesinger Library Summer Seminar in Gender History, “Writing Past Lives: Biography as History ,” and to the participants who provided thoughtful critiques of an early draft of one of my chapters. Peter Filene, my former colleague at UNC, read the entire manuscript in one of its earlier versions and provided invaluable help in revising it. Rebecca Schloss, Kate Engel, Cynthia Bouton, and April Hatfield read and commented upon all of my chapters. Ruth Crocker, Robyn Muncy, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Kathleen McCarthy, Nancy Robertson, Wendy Gamber, and Theda Perdue offered me encouragement when I was much in need of it. Leon Fink, vii viii | Acknowledgments editor of Labor, graciously gave me permission to republish material taken from my article “Private Secretaries in Early TwentiethCentury America.” The Huntington Library, the Schlesinger Library, the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library, the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library at Duke, and the Preservation Society of Newport County gave me permission to quote from their documents. I am grateful to Bob Sloan, his staff, and the readers at Indiana University Press for their help. And finally, I thank my family, whose love and support have nurtured and sustained me for so many years. Sylvia D. Hoffert Chapel Hill, North Carolina ...