North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds: The Public Lives of Progressive North Carolina’s Wealthiest Women

337 Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds The Public Lives of Progressive North Carolina’s Wealthiest Women Michele Gillespie    Married to two of the wealthiest men in North Carolina, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser Vanderbilt (1873–1958) and Katharine Smith Reynolds (1880–1924) used their elevated social status, command of financial resources, and strong spousal support to lead significant reforms in their communities and across the state. While the two came from different social milieus and acquired fundamentally different educations in their youth, and although Edith Vanderbilt was not a native North Carolinian and Katharine Reynolds was, they shared a commitment to improving the social and economic circumstances of their fellow North Carolinians, secured regional and national reputations for their philanthropy, vision, and leadership, and were beloved by their fellow state residents. Edith Vanderbilt, born into a prominent New York family listed in the Social Register, married George Washington Vanderbilt (1862–1914), Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great-grandson, and moved to his newly constructed Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, after their Paris wedding and Grand Tour honeymoon in 1898. The two presided for thirteen years over a 125,000-acre estate in a 250-room home modeled after a sixteenth-century French chateau. The Vanderbilts had one child, daughter Cornelia. While the Vanderbilts constituted the epitome of the nation’s upper crust, Katharine and R. J. Reynolds represented the state’s homegrown elite. Born in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, Katharine married her first cousin, once removed, Richard Joshua Reynolds (1850–1918), founder and president of R. J. Reynolds Edith Vanderbilt driving a tractor with daughter Cornelia standing by, c. 1920 Courtesy of the Biltmore Company. Katharine Smith Reynolds and children, c. 1911 Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art. 340 Michele Gillespie Tobacco Company, in 1905. The two also honeymooned in Europe, returning to Winston-Salem, where the two eventually presided over a more modest country estate, one of Katharine’s own making, on a thousand acres with a thirty-tworoom colonial revival home. The couple had four children. Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Reynolds shared many experiences during their adulthoods, not the least being middle-aged widowhood. Edith’s fifty-oneyear -old husband suffered acute appendicitis and died from postsurgery complications in 1914. Four years later, Katharine lost her sixty-seven-year-old husband after his prolonged struggle with pancreatic cancer. Each woman had been an indispensable partner to her spouse, wielding considerable private influence and public authority during their thirteen-year marriages. Their prominent husbands’ deaths, however, altered their social position and relative power, presenting each of them with a series of challenges, as well as new opportunities to test their abilities, explore their ambitions, and make their own decisions. This essay explores the course of both of these privileged women’s public lives—as wives and as widows, as social reformers and as leaders—to highlight changing gendered expectations among the white elite in early twentieth-century North Carolina. Social class made Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Reynolds exceptional North Carolina women for their time. Unlike most southern women, they did not lack for education, opportunity, or money, nor were they constrained by family, household, or work commitments, although they were not completely removed from them either. While they lived in a deeply rooted southern social order, a segregated world that cultivated social rules about white women’s place to reinforce a brutal racial caste system, both Edith and Katharine were far more immune than most white women to the gendered strictures that racism imposed. Unfortunately, neither woman took to the pen and therefore did not leave behind great caches of personal letters, diaries, memoirs, or autobiographies . Still, enough public documents remain to trace their life stories, highlighting not only how these women fashioned their public selves but how they used their wealth and prominence to help reframe white women’s public roles in North Carolina in the process. Their success at doing so is significant, for it signals changing attitudes about what constituted white elite and middleclass women’s public responsibilities. More difficult to tease out is why these women pursued these new roles in the first place. Although both these women engaged in a number of social causes, neither attacked the most pressing issues of the day. However significant their philanthropic giving and leadership positions, theirs was a commitment to social improvement , not social justice. They did not oppose the social behavior and legal Edith...