Text size:

LI's Rebels With a Cause

For Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont and other suffragettes, `Failure is impossible'

By Kathy Larkin and Joyce Gabriel

'Brace up, my dear. Just pray to God. She will help you.'' That advice, which still might raise eyebrows today, was offered decades ago to a weary suffragette protester by Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont of Long Island, New York and Newport. The recommendation was typical of Vanderbilt Belmont, a dark-haired dynamo who pursued votes for women as vigorously as she had vaulted up the social ladder.

As a 30-year-old bride, she had outwitted society matriarch Carolyn Schermerhorn Astor -- better known as ``the'' Mrs. Astor -- who considered Alva nouveau riche despite her marriage to William K. Vanderbilt, and snubbed her. The then-Mrs. Vanderbilt gave a costume ball in her $3 million Fifth Avenue replica of a chateau. To secure her daughter's place at the ball, Astor was forced to come calling on the woman she had scorned.

Vanderbilt Belmont embraced women's suffrage with the same wit and determination. So did many other women with brains, education and money enough to make a difference in a battle that stretched back down the years to the mid-19th Century, when women's suffrage was entwined with abolition. In 1848, in upstate Seneca Falls, antislavery activists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined forces to fight for the women's movement with activists such as Susan B. Anthony. The two causes later split.

In the crucial two decades before Aug. 26, 1920 -- when Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, following the lead of many states including New York -- other prominent women joined their sisters to pick up banners, march, protest, even get arrested. As Natalie A. Naylor, director of the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University, points out, wealthy socialities with summer homes on the Island rallied to the cause. So did many women of Long Island's founding families such as Lisabeth Halsey White, who, in 1915, headed the Southampton League of the Congressional Union fighting for the 19th Amendment.

By 1909, Vanderbilt Belmont -- who had a home in Oakdale, now Dowling College; another in Uniondale, where she launched the unsuccessful Brookholt Agricultural School for Women, and a third in Sands Point, a gift from her second husband, horse-mad millionaire Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont -- was deep into the women's movement. She gave the remainder of her life and much of her money to it.

On Aug. 24, she opened her palatial Marble House in Newport, R.I., modeled on Marie Antoinette's Petite Trianon, to periodic suffragette meetings, hanging its marble halls with great purple and gold banners carrying the last words of Susan B. Anthony: ``Failure is impossible.'' Addressing that first gathering, Vanderbilt Belmont declared: ``The wife should not be the unpaid servant of the husband, but both must be equal.''

That same year, she rented the 17th floor of a Fifth Avenue building as headquarters for her own Political Equity League and for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She later broke with that group and its conservative leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, to head the National Woman's Party, made up of radical feminists who picketed Congress and the White House, went on hunger strikes and courted arrest. And she marched in the great 1912 Women's Vote Parade down Fifth Avenue at sunset, wrote a feminist operetta with party-giver Elsa Maxwell and had only women pallbearers when she died on Jan. 26, 1933, in France.

In 1911, Vanderbilt Belmont's path had crossed with that of another militant -- Rosalie Gardiner Jones, descendant of Long Island's Jones, Livingston and Gardiner families and a lifelong resident of Cold Spring Harbor. Together with other suffragette leaders, the two harangued a crowd at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, while ducking a barrage of eggs and tomatoes.

A debutante who had been presented at the Court of St. James's, a girl with three brothers, a graduate of Adelphi College and Brooklyn Law School, Jones was smart, aggressive and, at 28, smitten with the idea that a woman was as wise as a man. She was also venturesome and commanding -- traits that earned her the nickname ``General.''

With English suffragette Elisabeth Freeman, she crisscrossed Long Island in a horse-drawn wagon painted suffragette yellow and marked with names of all the states that had already granted women the vote. The march ended in May, 1912, in a mass meeting on Main Street in Huntington.

In December of that year, Jones gathered her troops for a 125-mile march from 242nd Street in Manhattan to the Legislature in Albany. For 13 days, the small army plodded through snow, rain and mud. Followers fell out and it was a small band of survivors that finally presented its petition to Gov.-elect William Sulzer. The press made ``General'' Jones and her parade headline news across America.

Jones -- who, at 44, married U.S. Sen. Clarence Dill (D-Washington) and later divorced him -- died alone and almost forgotten at 95 in a Brooklyn nursing home. Her ashes were scattered near her mother's crypt in Cold Spring Harbor.

But she and other feminists shattered barriers for generations to come. Writer Elizabeth Oakes Smith of Patchogue, who never lived to see women vote, was a powerful speaker for women's rights. So were Katherine Duer Mackay, who served on the Roslyn public school board from 1905 to 1910; Harriet Burton Laidlaw of Sands Point, and Helen Sherman Pratt of Glen Cove. Add Irene Davison of East Rockaway, who marched with Jones, and three-times-married Ida Bunce Sammis Woodruff Satchwell of Huntington, who became one of the first two women members of the state Assembly in January, 1919, about a year after New York had granted women the right to vote.