Alva Vanderbilt Belmont
Alva Vanderbilt Belmont , née Alva Erskine Smith (born January 17, 1853 in Mobile , Alabama , † January 26, 1933 in Augerville-la-Rivière near Paris ) was an American suffragette and president of the National Woman's Party ; and high society lady of the "Four Hundred" in New York society ( Belle Époque ).
Life
Alva was the youngest daughter of four children of the cotton manufacturer Murray Forbes Smith († 1876) and his wife Phoebe Desha († 1869), daughter of the general and congressman Robert Desha (1791-1849). Shortly after Alva was born, her parents moved to Newport, Rhode Island, and from 1857 to New York City . During the American Civil War , Alva lived with her mother in France , where she studied at a girls' school in Neuilly-sur-Seine . Alva returned to the United States with her parents in the early 1870s and was introduced to society shortly thereafter. At a ball held by the Vanderbilt family , Alva met her future husband through her childhood friend María Consuelo Yznaga del Valle (1858-1909), later Duchess of Manchester. On April 20, 1875, Alva Smith married in New York City the wealthy railroad tycoon William Kissam Vanderbilt (1849-1920), the second son of William Henry Vanderbilt and his wife Maria Louisa Kissam. The joint connection resulted in three children: Consuelo (1877–1964), later Duchess of Marlborough, William Kissam (1878–1944) and Harold Stirling (1884–1970).
After their marriage, Alva Vanderbilt was determined to raise the social status of the Vanderbilts by trying to impress the then Grand Dame of New York society, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor (1830-1908). Between 1877 and 1881, her husband built a French Renaissance-style townhouse for his family on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan , New York City, through noted architect Richard Morris Hunt . build. Seven years later, Richard Morris Hunt was commissioned to build Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, in a neoclassical style . The house was used as the Vanderbilt family's summer home.
In the winter of 1881, Vanderbilt held a masquerade ball in their townhouse on Fifth Avenue and invited all the Four Hundred families of rank and name (including Livingstone-Armstrongs, Rothschilds , Leiters, Belmonts, Morgans, and Goulds ), so also Mrs. Astor with her daughters. On March 26, 1883, Alva Vanderbilt's legendary costume ball took place. Allegedly, the cost of the lavish festival is said to have been around 250,000 US dollars, or around 3 million dollars by today's standards. The banquets, balls, garden parties, dinners, dance evenings and costume parties of the American money aristocracy were famous and filled the social columns of the newspapers. But all the desired goal was participation in the social life of the English aristocracy . Alva's daughter Consuelo, later Duchess of Marlborough, and her childhood friend Mary Victoria Leiter (1870-1906), later Baroness Curzon of Kedleston, were introduced to London society in 1894.
In March 1895, Alva Vanderbilt filed for divorce , which was a scandal in society. The reason was that her husband had a secret love affair with the Spanish dancer La Belle Otéro (1868-1965) for several years . As a severance payment, she was awarded $ 10 million and the Marble House . William Kissam Vanderbilt married Ann Rutherford Sands Harriman in 1903.
On January 11, 1896, Alva Vanderbilt married in Newport, Rhode Island, the banker Oliver Hazard Belmont (1858-1908), eldest son of the German - Jewish banker and politician August Belmont and Caroline Slidell Perry. The marriage, which all reports said was a happy one, remained childless. Along with her second husband, Alva Belmont became a generous patron of the arts and donated large sums to hospitals. After the death of Oliver Belmont in 1908, she traveled through Europe for several months .
After her return to New York, Alva Belmont worked with Anna Howard Shaw , Lucy Burns and Alice Paul , and a number of other women between 1912 and 1920 in the successful struggle for women's suffrage in the USA. In July 1914, at a time when women didn't even have the right to vote, she and Molly Brown organized an international women's rights conference in Newport, Rhode Island, which was attended by numerous women's and human rights activists. She organized events and also funded the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution , which guaranteed women the right to vote, was passed in 1920 by the United States Congress . Even after that, Alva Belmont remained active in women's politics until the mid-1920s.
Alva Belmont moved to France in the late 1920s. Here she bought a town house in Paris and the Loire castle Château d'Augerville , built by King Charles VII for his mistress Agnès Sorel , in Augerville-la-Rivière. On May 12, 1932, she suffered a stroke and was paralyzed on one side. She was able to speak again after a while, but suffered a second stroke on November 3 of the same year after becoming paralyzed and unable to speak again. On January 26, 1933, she died of bronchitis and was buried next to her second husband Oliver Belmont in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx .
The Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument is named after her.
literature
- Sylvia D. Hoffert: Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2011, ISBN 978-0-253-35661-1 .
- Amanda Mackenzie Stuart: Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt. The Story of a Daughter and Mother in the Gilded Age. Harper Collins Publishers, New York NY 2005, ISBN 0-06-621418-1 .
- Jerry E. Patterson: The First 400: Mrs. Astor's New York in the Gilded Age , Rizzoli (2000) ISBN 0-8478-2285-0 .
- Margaret Rector: Alva, That Vanderbilt-Belmont Woman , Dutch Island Press (1992) ISBN 0-934881-13-8 .
Web links
- Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (1853–1933) (English)
- Biography - Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (1853–1933) (English)
- Alva Erskine Smith on thepeerage.com , accessed September 11, 2016.
Remarks
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Vanderbilt Belmont, Alva |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Smith, Alva Erskine (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American society lady and suffragette |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 17, 1853 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mobile , Alabama |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 26, 1933 |
| Place of death | Augerville-la-Rivière near Paris |