Book description
A New York socialite and feminist, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont was known
to be domineering, temperamental, and opinionated. Her resolve to get
her own way regardless of the consequences stood her in good stead
when she joined the American woman suffrage movement in 1909.
Thereafter, she used her wealth, her administrative expertise, and her
social celebrity to help convince Congress to pass the 19th Amendment
and then to persuade the exhausted leaders of the National Woman's
Party to initiate a world wide equal rights campaign. Sylvia D.
Hoffert argues that Belmont was a feminist visionary and that her
financial support was crucial to the success of the suffrage and equal
rights movements. She also shows how Belmont's activism, and the money
she used to support it, enriches our understanding of the personal
dynamics of the American woman's rights movement. Her analysis of
Belmont's memoirs illustrates how Belmont went about the complex and
collaborative process of creating her public self.
"A major contribution to our understanding of the women's
rights movement in America and to feminist biography and
historiography." -Ruth Crocker, author of Mrs. Russell Sage:
Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America
Sylvia D. Hoffert is Emerita Professor of History at Texas A&M
University and author of A History of Gender in America and Jane Grey
Swisshem: An Unconventional Life.
