Alva Belmont

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Alva Erskine Belmont ( January 17, 1853 - January 26, 1933) was a multi-millionaire American socialite and a major funder of the women's suffrage movement.

Born Alva Erskine Smith in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of a cotton planter, the American Civil War ruined her family, who decamped, like many other high-society Southerners, to Paris. Her family returned to America, this time to New York, after France's defeat by Prussia in 1871. Alva's mother was forced to open a boardinghouse on West 23rd Street. Alva resolved to try to marry a rich man, joining New York's belle underground of girls from good Southern families ruined by the Civil War who married New York bankers, brokers and merchants. The technique was for a well-connected female friend to introduce the young woman to a suitable match. Alva had just such a presenter in María Consuelo Yznaga del Valle, a childhood friend from Natchez, with grand Cuban-Spanish relations, and who later became the Duchess of Manchester. On April 20, 1875, she married William Kissam Vanderbilt. Alva proceeded to spend millions after she married Vanderbilt, building mansions and throwing grand parties.

As a historian wrote, Alva was "[d]ynamic, cunning, quick-witted, endlessly self-publicizing and diabolically ambitious."

Alva and William K. divorced with Alva receiving a hefty settlement. On January 11, 1896, Oliver Belmont married Alva, five years his senior. As a member of the Newport summer colony, Alva reigned over two of the greatest summer "cottages" in Newport, Belcourt and Marble House. Marble House had been her 39th birthday present from her former husband and Belcourt was the summer residence of her second husband.

Drawn to the women's suffrage movement by Anna Shaw around the time of Oliver Belmont's death in 1908, Alva donated large sums to the movement, both in the United Kingdom and United States. She founded Political Equality League (1909) financed both the NAWSA and Alice Paul's Congressional Union and National Woman's Party (of which she became the head in 1921 and to which she donated the Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, D.C.). She was a lifelong racist. "I was a natural dictator," she wrote of herself. "I enjoyed nothing so much as tyrannizing over the little slave children on my father's cotton plantation." There are historians who now believe that her strong racist attitudes helped to perpetuate barriers against black men and women to keep them from voting [1], [2]