Olen: This brings us to Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. If she’s remembered today at all, it’s for forcing her daughter Consuelo to marry into the British aristocracy, something few of us today would view as acceptable gender politics. But your book reveals that she was very deliberately recruited into the suffragist movement.
Neuman: The head of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Anna Howard Shaw, thinks Alva could be a source of money. And so she recruits her to be a delegate to an international conference on women’s suffrage. It electrifies Alva. She has some ideas, and she uses her money, her standing, and her position.
The first thing Alva does is open the gates of her summer home, Marble House, in Newport, to the public for the first time, with all proceeds benefiting the organization, and it just commands enormous attention. She gives speeches and she launches herself as a figure in the movement. She comes in at the top. And I suppose this should not surprise us. Right? Because that’s where these women were accustomed to being.
But some people were very angry when Alva Belmont forced the National American Woman Suffrage Association to move its headquarters to New York from Ohio. She had the money to say, “I will pay your rent for a year. I will pay the salary of a press agent for a year.” For an organization that’s strong in numbers but often poor, this is a no-brainer. But a lot of people resented it.
Olen: But she ultimately leaves the organization, right?
Neuman: Yes, after a couple of years, she is frustrated by it. She is willing to give buckets of money, but she wants action and she’s tired of the plodding and the cautiousness and the infighting that's hobbling this organization. So Alva is recruited by Alice Paul, the head of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Alice Paul is young and more radical than the more traditional suffragists. Alva is interested in funding her, provided she gets a leadership role.
Olen: You mentioned Angelina Jolie earlier. How are women like Belmont similar to today’s celebrities?
Neuman: Well, I mentioned her because I thought it would help people understand that celebrity endorsement is not just a stamp, or a name, but these women, I suppose I would say, were the first to stand with the cause as political actors.
What was fascinating about these women is that they were the first to not just put their money behind a political cause. Traditional philanthropy for wealthy women was to help a hospital or school. The gilded suffragists, they used their money for politics but they also stood with politics. They wanted to organize. They wanted to rally. They wanted to march in the streets.