Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights [Hardcover]

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.

Absorbing biography of a wealthy and strong-willed feminist

Sylvia D. Hoffert is Emerita Professor of History at Texas A&M University and author ofA History of Gender in AmericaandJane Grey Swisshem: An Unconventional Life.

A major contribution to our understanding of the women's rights movement in America and to feminist biography and historiography.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. An Impossible Child
2. Every Inch a General
3. A Sex Battle
4. Immortalizing the Lady in Affecting Prose
5. Belmont's Orphan Child
6. The Last Word
Postscript: My Turn
Appendix: Belmont's Financial Contributions to Woman's Rights
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Read anIU Press blog interviewwith the author

Hoffert's refined understanding of how a biographer's subjectivity shapes the narrative of someonlƒ—