Alva Belmont
Pioneering Women
Alva Erskine Smith was born in Alabama. Her father was a cotton merchant and her mother was the daughter of a U.S. Congressman. Her family moved to New York City before the Civil War broke out.
She attended school in New York and Europe.
She married into the wealthy Vanderbilt family in 1875. Twenty years later she divorced her husband and received a large financial settlement. Then she married into another wealthy family, the Belmonts.
First marry for money, then marry for love.
When Mr. Belmont died in 1908, leaving her a rich, powerful widow, she turned her attention to women’s rights. She encouraged women to publicize their cause through parades and mass meetings.
She held a series of suffrage lectures at her “cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island.
To help bring working women into the suffrage movement, she raised money and supported 20,000 garment workers on strike.
When the leaders of one organization found her too radical, she joined another. She contributed her time, celebrity, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign for women’s right to vote.
Someone must pay the price in criticism, even in ostracism, for every advance which the world makes.
After women won the right to vote here, she worked for women’s rights in France. When she died, she left $100,000 to the National Woman’s Party. Its headquarters in Washington, DC, is named, in part, for her.
Today the world holds up its hands in horror over something which tomorrow it will have to accept as an established fact.