| Coordinates | 28°36′50″N77°12′32″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Alva Erskine Belmont |
| Caption | Alva E. Belmont, photo dated 1911. |
| Birth name | Alva Erskine Smith |
| Birth place | Mobile, Alabama |
| Death place | Paris, France |
| Resting place | Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx |
| Spouse | William Kissam VanderbiltOliver Hazard Perry Belmont |
| Children | Consuelo VanderbiltWilliam K. Vanderbilt IIHarold Stirling Vanderbilt |
| Parents | Murray Forbes SmithPhoebe Desha |
As a child, Belmont summered with her parents in Newport, Rhode Island and accompanied them on European vacations. In 1857 the Smiths moved to New York City, where they briefly settled in Madison Square. When Murray went to Liverpool, England, to conduct his business, her mother, Phoebe Smith, moved to Paris where Alva attended a private boarding school in Neuilly-sur-Seine. After the Civil War, the Smith family returned to New York, where her mother died in 1869.
Unable to get an opera box at the Academy of Music, whose directors were loath to admit members of newly wealthy families into their circle, she was among those people instrumental in founding the Metropolitan Opera Association, based at the Metropolitan Opera House. The Metropolitan Opera long outlasted the Academy. Marble House would be built next door to Astor's much simpler Beechwood estate. Marble House set the pace for Newport's subsequent transformation from a quiet summer colony of wooden houses to the legendary resort of opulent stone palaces. though some believed that William hired a woman to pretend to be his mistress so that Belmont would divorce him.
By this time, organized suffrage activity was centered on educated, middle-class white women, who were often reluctant to accept immigrants, blacks, and the working class into their ranks. Belmont's Political Equality League only partially broke with this tradition. She established its first "suffrage settlement house" in Harlem, and she included black women and immigrants in weekend retreats at Beacon Towers, her Châteauesque style castle in Sands Point, New York. However, she also contributed to the Southern Woman Suffrage Conference, which refused to admit blacks.
The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), organized by Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman, separated from the NAWSA in 1913. Belmont then merged the Political Equality League into the CU. Now committed to securing the passage of the 19th Amendment, she convened a "Conference of Great Women" at Marble House in the summer of 1914. Belmont's daughter Consuelo, who promoted suffrage and prison reform in England, addressed the gathering, which was followed by the CU's first national meeting. Belmont served on the executive committee of the CU from 1914 to 1916.
In 1915 Belmont chaired the women voters' convention at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The following year, she and Paul established the National Woman's Party from the membership of the CU and organized the first picketing ever to take place before the White House, in January 1917. She was elected president of the National Woman's Party, an office she held until her death. The National Woman's Party continued to lobby for new initiatives from the Washington, D.C. headquarters that Belmont had purchased in 1929 for the group, now the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum.
Category:American socialites Category:Vanderbilt family Category:American feminists Category:1853 births Category:1933 deaths Category:Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (The Bronx) Category:People from Mobile, Alabama Category:Belmont family
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
