Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights

Introduction

ix INTRODUCTION Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, a wealthy New York socialite and militant woman’s rights advocate, was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1853. But it took a lifetime for her to become what she was. The process of self-making that she engaged in was a complex and collaborative one that took place in constantly changing contexts. The stories she told about herself reflected that reality. As literary scholar John Paul Eakin has pointed out, such stories are a product of our ability to imaginatively use historical fact, memory, and circumstance to respond to our particular needs in a specific moment in time.1 Thus, Belmont’s understanding of herself was always fragmentary and to some degree fictive. The story she told about herself and the stories others told about her are compelling and dramatic. Among other things, she married a millionaire , divorced him, and married a second. She forced her daughter to marry the most eligible aristocrat in Europe. After her second husband’s death, she embraced the cause of woman’s rights and then joined the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which represented the most militant wing of the movement. It was largely her money that paid for both its suffrage and equal rights campaigns. She was not its only donor but she was certainly its most generous one. The sources that document who she was and what she did provide the opportunity to explore the ways that lives are constructed and to relate that process of construction to the writing of autobiography and biography. Because self-making is rarely transparent, it presents a challenge to biographers, demanding that they work with layers of narrative texts created by a great number of people telling their stories in widely divergent contexts and at various periods in time. x | Introduction Biographers must deal with what their subjects say about themselves as well as what others said of them. From those sources, biographers must shape their own narrative, one that arises not only from their research and life experiences but also from the personal relationships that they have formed with the people they are writing about.2 In that sense, all biographies are in part autobiographies. Or as literary critic Paul Murray Kendall put it, “On the trail of another . . . the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn.”3 Belmont’s financial support was crucial to the success of the suffrage and equal rights movements. But her contributions, like those of many philanthropists, came with strings attached. The result is that Belmont’s story complicates our understanding of the interpersonal dynamics that characterized the American woman’s rights movement in the early twentieth century and the strategic choices that militant feminists made as they carried out their various campaigns. It was Belmont’s financial support of the NWP that initially piqued my interest in her. Why, I asked, would a socially prominent, immensely wealthy woman in her mid-fifties, who had a vested interest in preserving the status quo and had shown no previous concern about the obvious social, economic, and political inequities that plagued the United States in the early twentieth century, suddenly become a feminist? Why did she donate money to the most militant wing of the woman’s rights movement? And what were the consequences when she did? Belmont was strong-willed, domineering, and determined to be the center of attention. What impact, I wondered, might identifying the tensions that resulted from her presence, how they manifested themselves , and the strategies that were used to resolve them have on our understanding and assessment of the woman’s rights movement? And how might the master narrative of early twentieth-century feminism in America change if we placed at its center the story of someone who felt that she was bearing most of the burden for providing its leaders with enough financial support to carry out campaigns to promote suffrage and then equal rights? In order to answer these questions, I structure my narrative of the life of Alva Belmont around an analysis of documents such as memoirs that are explicitly autobiographical as well as those with autobiographical dimensions such as court records, letters, and interviews Introduction | xi written or dictated by those who, through their relationships with Belmont , participated in her self-making enterprise.4 So this is as much a book about those who helped to “make” Belmont as it is about...