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Alva Erskine Belmont
Alva E. Belmont, photo dated 1911.
Born	Alva Erskine Smith 17 January 1853 Mobile, Alabama
Died	26 January 1933 New York, New York
Resting place	Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx
Spouse	William Kissam Vanderbilt Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont
Children	Consuelo Vanderbilt William K. Vanderbilt II Harold Stirling Vanderbilt
Parents	Murray Forbes Smith Phoebe Desha

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

Contents 1 Early life and entry into society 2 Architecture and Mrs. Astor 3 Marriages 4 Women's suffrage 5 Later life and death 6 Quotations 7 References 8 Bibliography 9 External links

Alva Smith was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama. Her parents were Murray Forbes Smith, a cotton trader, and Phoebe Desha, daughter of Robert Desha, a former US Representative and General in the War of 1812.^[1] The American Civil War ruined her family, who decamped, like many other upper-class Southerners, to Paris. Her family returned to the United States, this time to New York, after France's defeat by Prussia in 1871. Her mother was then forced by financial concerns to open a boardinghouse on West 23rd Street.

Alva joined New York's group of girls from good Southern families, ruined by the war, who attempted to marry into wealthy New York families. This was usually accomplished by a well-connected female friend introducing the young woman to a suitable match. Belmont had just such a presenter in María Consuela Yznaga del Valle, a childhood friend from Natchez, Mississippi, with grand Cuban and Spanish relations. Ms. Yznaga would herself later become the Duchess of Manchester. On 20 April, 1875, Alva Erskine Smith married William Kissam Vanderbilt, son of one of the richest men in America, at Cavalry Church in New York City.^[2]

As a young Mrs. Vanderbilt, she worked from 1877 to 1881 with architect Richard Morris Hunt to create a French Renaissance style chateau for her family at 660 Fifth Avenue in New York City. In 1878 Hunt completed their Tudor style retreat on Long Island, Idle Hour. In 1891, Hunt was again hired to design the Neoclassical style Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, as Alva's 39th birthday present and summer "cottage" retreat.

When she was snubbed by Caroline Astor, queen of the "400" elite of New York society, she held a magnificent masquerade ball that cost $3 million. Unhappy over being unable to get a box at the opera, she pressed for a new Metropolitan Opera House in New York that could accommodate her family.

She and W.K. Vanderbilt had three children: Consuelo, William K. II, and Harold Stirling. She was determined to find an aristocratic husband for Consuelo, and in 1895 maneuvered her into marrying Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. She then shocked society by divorcing her husband, at a time when divorce was rare among the elite, and receiving a large financial settlement. In 1896 she then married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, a man five years her junior. She immediately began extensive renovations to his sixty-room Newport mansion, Belcourt, and had another mansion, Brookholt, built in Hempstead, Long Island. Her husband died suddenly in 1908, upon which she felt "called by Christ" to a new cause.

Drawn to the women's suffrage movement by Anna Shaw, Mrs Belmont donated large sums to the movement, both in the United Kingdom and United States. In 1909, she founded the Political Equality League to get votes for suffrage-supporting New York State politicians, and wrote articles for newspapers. She befriended Mary Church Terrell and supported both black women and immigrant activists. During the women's union strikes of the period, she sat in court rooms and paid the bail charges. At first she supported the suffrage organization NAWSA, but left the organization because she disagreed with its more conservative policies.

With Alice Paul she formed the National Woman's Party, and became its key theoretician. The National Woman's Party was made up of feminists who picketed Congress and the White House, went on hunger strikes and courted arrest. Her mansions provided meeting places and housing for suffrage workers, and her finances supported the many activities around the country. She continued to write on behalf of an Equal Rights Amendment, and was president of the NWP in the early 1920s when it sought that law. Overall, Belmont's irascible and commanding temperament served her political cause well.

In 1929, she bought a house located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., for the NWP and Alice Paul. The house is now known as the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum; it is a historic house and museum of the U.S. women's suffrage and equal-rights movements.

In the mid-1920s she moved to France in order to be near her daughter Consuelo, now Mme Jacques Balsan, and to work for international women's suffrage. She died on January 26, 1933, from injuries sustained in a carriage accident a few days before, at the age of 80 years. Her funeral in New York featured all female pallbearers, women in suffrage costumes and a political theme. She is interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.

• "Just pray to God. She will help you."
• "First marry for money, then marry for love."

• The Vanderbilt Women: Dynasty of Wealth, Glamour and Tragedy Clarice Stasz. New York, iUniverse, 2000.
• Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age Amanda Mackenzie Stuart. New York, HarperCollins, 2006.
• Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt Arthur T Vanderbilt. Perennial, 1989.

• Long Island's Rebels With a Cause from New York Newsday
• Women in Philanthropy
• 75 Suffragists