Woman suffrage, once the cause forlorn and rejected, has entered the drawing room. And the women who have invited it there are those who may lead . . . in a cause as in a cotillion.
Mabel Potter Daggett1
RARE is the revolution that arrives with such elegance. Invitations bearing the Tiffany hallmark were “very stunning and expensive,” “as gorgeously got up as smart wedding cards.” Complete with reply paper and envelope, 150 invitations summoned recipients not to a costume ball or a society wedding but to a political rebellion—a 1909 campaign by high society to win the vote for women.2
Katherine Duer Mackay, whose family name first appeared in the New York Social Register when that oracle of exclusivity began publication in 1887, was an unlikely choice to lead the suffrage charge.3 In her lineage she counted a fourteenth-century Scottish king, a delegate to the Continental Congress and his wife, that “famous belle of Revolutionary days, Lady Kitty Duer,” a Supreme Court justice, and two Columbia University presidents.4 The Duers were, in effect, High Establishment. As one scribe put it, “The names of Duer, King, Alexander, Van Rensselaer and Travers are ones for which the historian of New York finds frequent and honorable mention, and Mrs. Mackay traces her descent to all of them.”5
Described by Town Topics as “the perfect specimen of willful, wistful beauty,” the dark-haired Duer was an only child of privilege. Schooled by private tutors, summering in Newport, she was raised in a Manhattan home where servants wore uniforms.6 On a ship bound for Europe in the summer of 1896, she met Clarence Mackay, heir to a new money fortune of silver mining cable technology. On being introduced to the twenty-one-year-old belle, Mackay saw at once the source of her allure, observing, “She’s as beautiful as her name.”7
By 1909, when Katherine Mackay’s embossed suffrage invitations were mailed, she and “Clarry,” as the rags called him, had been married eleven years. Clarence Mackay was chairman of the Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation and a horse breeder of international renown. His fashionable wife hosted extravagant dinners at their home at 244 Madison Avenue, and at Harbor Hill, the 628-acre estate in Roslyn, Long Island, featuring horse stables and dog kennels, gardens and garages. Atop a hill was their house, larger than the Parthenon, designed by architect-to-the-stars Stanford White.8 One room, lined in cedar, was devoted exclusively to table linens.9 In 1904 Katherine Mackay published a novel, The Stone of Destiny, in which a husband laments a wife who cares little for the world beyond personal interests. Unlike her protagonist, Mackay did.
The mother of three, Mackay ran for a seat on the Roslyn school board in 1905, taking advantage of a law enacted twenty-five years earlier granting women in New York the right to vote in local school elections.10 The idea of a woman in government was still rare in politics, and all but unheard of in her circle. Friends, she reported, were “rather startled” that she planned to attend meetings with men.11 The press was equally astonished. Pondering why a member of the gilded class would seek public office, the Nation speculated that “women of leisure and culture . . . have the time that few men have” to devote to the work. In a reaffirmation of gender stereotypes, the magazine added that unlike men, women “care very much less for political influences than they do for the proper education of children.”12
During the campaign, her male opponent, Dr. J. H. Bogart, had belittled her for representing “petticoat rule.” After she defeated him, Mackay pushed a reform agenda that included an end to corporal punishment, making her an immediate favorite with students, who scrawled on fences, sidewalks, and barns the schoolboy graffiti “Mrs. Mackay Is All Right.” Showing considerable political acumen, Mackay persuaded Bogart to run for an open seat at the next election. This he did, winning the race, giving Mackay a grateful and reliable ally for her reforms. As the New York Herald put it, “His attitude toward the proposals that come from the woman who read him out of the school board and then read him back in again is now said to be as distinctly respectful and considerate as that clever woman could wish.”13 If she was a novice, she had proven herself an able politician, further enhancing her reputation.
When Mackay embraced suffrage, there was much excitement in movement circles, and some talk of installing her in a leadership role. “Workers in the cause have said that a leader was wanted who combined high social position and acknowledged intellectual attainments—one who would further compel serious attention to the movement and disarm ridicule,” explained the New York Irish-American.14 It helped that she was the epitome of femininity, projecting an air of ladylike refinement. “Mrs. Mackay, even when attending committee meetings, is always wonderfully gowned,” noted New Idea Magazine.15
Soon she would vie for press attention with Alva Vanderbilt Belmont—newly widowed, spectacularly rich, and eager to leave her mark on politics as she had on society. The domineering Belmont, more of a bulldog than a kitten, was accustomed to getting her way, and now she applied the skills of publicity she had mastered as a society hostess to align herself with the forces of reform. If Mackay’s ambition was cloaked in manners, Belmont’s was bald with audacity. If Mackay meant to persuade men of her circle with the allure of her beauty and the polish of her speech, Belmont would appropriate the hardball tactics of male politics, turning it against the men who had betrayed her. Together, Mackay and Belmont energized a suffrage movement that had sunk into what even its friends called “the doldrums,”16 creating the kind of buzz that only a celebrity feud can.
Harriot Stanton Blatch was the first suffrage leader to grasp the possibilities of Mackay’s entry into the field. Daughter of the movement matriarch Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Blatch had recently returned to New York after living in England for twenty years as the wife of a British businessman, stunned to find the American movement launched by her mother in “a rut worn deep and ever deeper,” one that “bored its adherents and repelled its opponents.” For political ineptitude, or perhaps naïveté, nothing topped one activist’s admission to Blatch that she did not lobby Theodore Roosevelt during the 1904 election because she did not want to “bother” him during the hectic campaign.17
Eager to reinvigorate the movement, Blatch in 1907 had recruited working-class supporters, borrowing a tactic from British suffragettes. Her pitch was simple: young workers toiling in New York’s garment industry could win improvements in salary and workplace conditions only if they had the ballot, and the suffrage movement could win the ballot only if it demonstrated widespread support. Forming an Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, she held meetings “in a dingy little room on 4th Street off the Bowery.”18 Soon, with a membership fee of twenty-five cents and the blessing of labor leaders who rallied their troops at Cooper Union, enrollment grew “by leaps and bounds.”
Within two years, the alliance between Blatch’s middle-class and working-class supporters had fractured. Union leaders suspected that Blatch would drop the working class as soon as suffrage was won.19 For her part, Blatch said she was tired of the “persistent need for funds.” She was convinced that “the money lying ready for suffrage is limitless; how to tap the reservoir is the only problem.”20 When Mackay came “to tell me in her charming, spontaneous way of her newly awakened interest in suffrage,” Blatch brightened.
Mackay told Blatch that she was not inclined, as a friend had suggested, to “ally herself with the orthodox suffrage forces and take office under their leaders.” Instead, she was more “inclined to forming a society of her own.” Blatch thought the situation clear. “Here was a young and beautiful woman, a social leader, longing for a broader stage to move upon than the usual outlet given by fashionable society. Naturally an office under a leader did not attract her in the least. She wanted to be on top, running a show herself.” Though Blatch was frustrated by the deliberate pace of Mackay’s planning—months were consumed in selecting a name for the group after “The Feminist Propaganda” was rejected—she patiently helped Mackay assemble a stellar team of reformers for her newly named Equal Franchise Society.21 Rabbi Stephen M. Wise, Columbia professor John Dewey, and New York Consumers League president Maud Nathan—along with suffrage leaders Blatch and Carrie Chapman Catt—all gave substance to an organization that might otherwise have been dismissed as the latest fad of bored ladies of leisure.22 “My conviction was that she could be of immense value to the suffrage cause by drawing into the movement valuable recruits,” recalled Blatch.23
News that Mackay would attend an Interurban Suffrage Council lecture at Carnegie Hall in December 1908 electrified interest. “All of the boxes in the hall have been sold at good prices, every reserved seat has been engaged and there are now in the hands of the committee of arrangements more applications for places on the platform than can be provided,” reported the Baltimore Sun. Those claiming space, and declaring their support for the still controversial issue, were a who’s who of wealthy socialites. There was Edith Kingdon Gould, an actress who had married the son of Jay Gould.24 Patriarch of family wealth, her father-in-law had been a railroad magnate, stock manipulator, and Boss Tweed ally considered so ruthless in business tactics he had earned the sobriquet the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street.”25 Also in prominent attendance were Edith Shepard Fabbri, great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt; Ruth Sears Baker Pratt, wife of a prominent banker who in 1925 would become the first woman elected to the New York Board of Aldermen and in 1929 the first woman elected to Congress from New York; Emmeline Winthrop, a member of the Colony Club and a founder of the Girls’ Branch of the Public School Athletic League; Hope Goddard Iselin, a millionaire by both her father and her husband and the first woman to compete as a crew member in the America’s Cup yacht race; Virginia Fair Vanderbilt, a Nevada silver mining heiress whose mother-in-law was Alva Belmont; and Dorothy Payne Whitney, perhaps the wealthiest woman in the room, who with her husband, Willard Straight, later founded the New School for Social Research.26 With their arrival, the Sun predicted a more “dignified” campaign, appealing to “the more influential members of society,” free of that refuge of the rampant, street corner speeches.27
Alice Stone Blackwell, whose mother, Lucy Stone, had labored alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the lonely vineyards of nineteenth-century activism, could barely contain her excitement. “Five dollars paid for single seats in the gallery merely to hear the speaking,” she exclaimed. “People clamoring for tickets . . . five hundred seated at table and five hundred turned away disappointed; people cheerfully paying two dollars for seats in another room, where they could not see the speakers during the luncheon, and submitting to uncomfortable crowding in a space far too small”—it was all a marvel.28 Blackwell knew that in the 1840s, when her mother had lectured against slavery and for women’s rights, so shocking was the spectacle of a woman speaking in public that men hissed or threw eggs.29 Now crowds were fighting for tickets to hear a female speaker. “Snobbery is a sorry thing, in a suffragist or in an anti,” Blackwell wrote, “but the suffragist has for so many years been sniffed at by the anti as an unfashionable, unpopular and unwomanly creature that she may perhaps be excused for breathing a sigh of relief. . . . It is nice to have ‘smart’ people demanding your tickets when they would not look at them before.”30
Six weeks after entering the arena, Mackay made her speaking debut at a suffrage luncheon in early 1909, signaling both the genesis of her activism—she aligned herself firmly with those who believed that the “mother’s vote” would ensure a more moral polity—and the confusion her involvement stirred among reporters accustomed to covering her as a socialite. “Mrs. Mackay’s address was followed by a great deal of applause, and Mr. Mackay leaned over to shake her hand,” wrote the New York Times, which often inveighed against extending the vote to women.31 Like critics trained to attend to details of an operatic ensemble, journalists reported on her attire as news. Whether they recorded these details to trivialize her activism or satisfy reader curiosity is difficult to ascertain. What is clear is that she and her cohorts were the media celebrities of the day, chronicled for their sartorial and, now, their political attire.
Even the anti-suffrage New York Times took note of the luncheon, reassuring readers that the initial excitement would fade, much like the fickle whimsy of fashion these socialites represented. The advent of women “of recognized social position as leaders in the woman suffrage movement has obviously increased the public interest,” the paper conceded. “Women who are supposed to be authorities on dress and manners, who are at home in the most exclusive social circles, are bound to influence others who . . . yearn for recognition.” Not to worry, though, these society activists were not in it for the long haul. “Fashionable agitation for the extension of the suffrage is not to be regarded as dangerous. Its leaders will soon find agitation tedious,” the Times added in full-throated mockery. “There are so many pleasanter things to do, when one has ample leisure and money.”32
Mackay’s Equal Franchise Society was an invitation-only organization, formed not to reach the masses but to invite the elite to experiment with a ladylike approach to the public square. It was dedicated to influencing the influential, what Harper’s Weekly called “persons of prominence in the social, professional and financial worlds.”33 But so extensive was press coverage that suddenly, suffrage at all levels had a spring in its step. Within a month of the society’s launch, five new suffrage organizations opened shop in the city.34 Among Mackay’s early converts was Charlotte Goodrich Morton, whose husband, Paul, was heir to the Morton’s Salt fortune and who had once been an anti-suffragist.35 “Mrs. Mackay and her friends have put the cachet of style upon a woman thinking for herself,” noted one newspaper.36
Much had changed in the ten years since 1900, when Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes Irwin had teamed up while at Radcliffe to organize the College Equal Suffrage League. Years later, Park observed that the impact of the College Equal Suffrage League had been to give suffrage “a kind of intellectual prestige,” just as the entry of Mackay and other “women of acknowledged social standing” had given the cause a “new and helpful impetus.”37 Now, as Park was traveling in the Orient, Irwin wrote to her with some passion about the change: “Altogether, Maud, the movement that when we got into had about as much energy as a dying kitten, is now a big, virile, threatening, wonderful thing.”38
Within months the Equal Franchise Society had attracted 250 members, a number that rose to 625 within the year.39 Even for upper-class women, the prospect of rubbing shoulders with gilded power was one lure. When Mackay invited suffrage speaker Ida Harper to give a lecture at 244 Madison Avenue, “naturally a member of Society felt that she had climbed several rungs of the social ladder when she was served tea and cakes by Mrs. Mackay’s . . . flunkeys in her blue and white drawing room.”40 Vogue was even more sarcastic about the motives of new suffragists. “There is no doubt . . . that the Woman’s Suffrage cause is to be made strong by an appeal to the snobbery of the general public,” said writers of Vogue’s “As Seen by Him” column. “Women and men will flock to its banner if they can drink tea from the same cups as the world of fashion and disport in the same drawing rooms.”41 Celebrity had changed what it meant to be a wealthy hostess. Playing to the public now meant expanding the invitation list beyond the gilded to include those who were interesting even if they were not in the Social Register.
For her part, Mackay credited the spike in interest to a Cornell University professor of medicine who had argued that whenever women made political advances, the birth rate declined and the number of nervous breakdowns increased. “We have enrolled twice as many members this month as we did last, and for that I think we must thank the ‘antis,’” said Mackay. “Since Max G. Schlapp’s lecture at the Colony Club, we have taken in an unusually large number.”42 Mackay disbanded the membership committee, seeking not to vet potential recruits but to welcome them. No longer were invitations sent to the privileged. Society was knocking at the door. “Society women . . . seemed to feel they were really exercising a civic duty in participating in the movement,” marveled the American.43
If Mackay’s Tiffany-embossed invitations signaled the advent of the ladylike politician, the interjection of feminine gentility into the raw masculinity of politics, Alva Belmont’s entry into the field was more like a bomb, destabilizing both the society to which she once aspired and the suffrage campaign to which she now pledged herself.
Despite portraits of Alva as a figure of clawing ambition, climbing the ladders of society to enact her very own “rags to riches” story, she was, like Mackay, a child of privilege.44 Her father, Murray Forbes Smith, moved the family from the South, where he ran a business selling and transporting cotton, to New York when Alva was six years old, joining the exclusive Union Club.45 Becoming a successful Wall Street broker, Smith leased a house at 40 Fifth Avenue, one of the most expensive on the block, designed by architect Calvert Vaux in the 1850s for a wealthy merchant.46 After the war, Smith relocated his business to Liverpool and his family to Paris. There Alva was schooled, and she and her sisters were “introduced to the highest levels of French Society.”47 On their return to New York, he found the business climate changed, or so it seemed to him, from a culture where a man’s word was his bond to one where greed was king. “The clever arts by which big deals were put through seemed to him underhanded,” recalled his daughter. Murray Smith’s fortunes fell along with his health, and this decline of stature, Alva later suggested, is what propelled her to wed wealth. As she put it, marrying William Kissam Vanderbilt in 1875 seemed an answer to her predicament, a way for “my practical nature” to ease a dying man’s wounded pride.
If she married to ease her father’s financial quandary, the union suited her interests as well. From childhood, Alva Smith had showcased an imperious personality, plotting her own agenda. By her own account, as a child she had wrangled a bedroom of her own by swinging a towel “with an awful deliberateness” and smashing “every one of the china ornaments” in the nursery. Though she endured a whipping from her mother, nursery attendants insisted she be separated from the other children.48 Mission accomplished.
Power was at the center of Alva’s ambitions, marrying a Vanderbilt a treasured goal. The lavish costume ball that fascinated the public and forced the old money Astors to open the gates of social validation to the arriviste Vanderbilts in 1883, the campaign to manipulate her daughter toward a royal wedding that made Consuelo a duchess, the infamous 1895 divorce from a philandering husband with details leaked to a press hungry for celebrity misdeeds—all made her marriage a narrative of excess.
Later, in marrying Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the third son (some said the “wayward son”) of financier August Belmont, Alva found a “quiet and companionable marriage” with a quintessential sportsman who delighted in life as a “gentleman of leisure.”49 Oliver’s father, August Belmont, had served as the first New York representative for the House of Rothschild, in the records as the first upper-class New Yorker to import a French chef. Cleverly, he sought publicity for both accomplishments, ensuring his reputation for a lavish lifestyle.50 In marrying Caroline Slidell Perry, daughter of the famous admiral, he had cemented his wealth to her American cachet.51 The reinvented August Belmont—born in Germany as August Schonberg—thus blunted the social stigma of his Jewish heritage and ensured his children, raised as Episcopalians, entrée to society.
Perhaps it was Oliver’s willingness to brace the winds of adverse public and even parental opinion—as evidenced by his refusal to pay the hush money demanded by publisher Colonel William d’Alton Mann to keep salacious articles about him out of the gossipy weekly Town Topics—that first drew Alva to him.52 The two met aboard William Vanderbilt’s yacht, on trips meant to mend the Vanderbilt marriage. Whispers about Oliver’s attentiveness toward Alva circulated in Newport, and nine months after her divorce, they married. Given the Jewish roots of his money and Oliver’s willingness to flaunt decorum, the marriage had just the whiff of danger that may have appealed to her.53 As one writer put it, “One begins to suspect that the setting up of hurdles in order to jump them was her way of adding a bit of zest to the sameness of a social game that was already showing itself a drag to her lively spirit. And were not the Belmonts partly Jewish? Better and better.”54
Twelve years after their wedding, Oliver Belmont died suddenly from peritonitis and Alva found herself adrift—a fifty-six-year-old socialite with homes in Manhattan, Long Island, and Newport, looking for a challenge. Feeling “worn out with social gain,” she attended an Equal Franchise Society lecture, at Mackay’s invitation, at Madison Garden Theatre.55 There she listened as suffrage activist Ida Husted Harper delivered her appeal. Alva Belmont said that she felt “this striking at the root,” an instinct that the ballot could liberate her from the tyranny of men.56 She met leaders of the mainstream groups, including Anna Howard Shaw, one of the first female ordained Methodist ministers in the country. Viewed as a brilliant orator but weak administrator, Shaw headed the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1904 to 1915. Despite conflicts in leadership circles and defections to Alice Paul’s more radical Congressional Union, membership on her watch grew from 17,000 to 200,000.57
At Shaw’s invitation, Belmont traveled to London in April 1908 to attend a convention of the International Suffrage Alliance. There she found delegates “very serious, very respectable, very placid,” much like their American counterparts. But on the streets of London and in the booming rhetoric of Hyde Park, Belmont found a cause. Captivated by the “lively and picturesque” tactics of the militants, she was moved “to a determined resolve that American women must not lag behind this stupendous march of women toward the glory of liberty.”58 Back in the United States, she sought to upend the preaching-to-the-choir insularity of the American campaign and the exclusivity of Mackay’s gilded activism.
Her debut could not have been more of a spectacle. Six months after Mackay’s first speech, Belmont opened one of the jewels of Gilded Age architecture to public view. For the first time in the fabled history of Newport’s great mansions, the public was invited inside. She and architect Richard Morris Hunt had designed Marble House as a “temple to the arts.”59 Modeled after the Petit Trianon at Versailles, the estate was finished in 1892 at a cost reported to exceed $11 million ($300 million in contemporary terms).
No American interior had ever boasted so much gold on the walls and so much marble, “meant to flaunt the wealth and power of the young Midases of the New World.”60 For decades, museum patrons had pined to see its treasures. Having closed the house after her divorce, Alva Belmont now threw open its doors to raise funds for suffrage. The cost was $5 (about $135 today) to tour the first floor, or $1 (some $27) to walk the grounds and hear the speeches, proceeds to benefit the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Despite the steep price—Ida Husted Harper, the association’s press agent, thought five dollars just the right amount to attract respectable visitors while weeding out “mere curiosity seekers”—applications came in “from points all the way from Maine to Michigan.”61 Well in advance of the event, Bellevue Avenue “was lined on both sides for a distance of over a mile with all sorts of vehicles.”62
Newport was shaken, and tried to take the unprecedented public opening in its stride, as if the sight of hundreds of people who were not listed in the Social Register crawling over the private “cottages” in the sanctuary of America’s wealth was but one of many festive events of a delightful, event-packed ten-week summer season.63 “Busy Week for Newport,” headlined Philadelphia’s Public Ledger. “Tennis, Polo and Suffragette Meetings the Features.”64 Many of the Four Hundred attended, if only to avoid engendering Belmont’s fury and with it the social humiliation of being dropped from her invitation list.
Belmont had persuaded several friends to show their well-known faces as a lure to the press, including Mamie Fish, the acerbic hostess who once said of her husband’s holdings, “We are only moderately well off; we have but a few million dollars.”65 A month after the events at Marble House, Fish conceded that she had attended only out of loyalty. “I went to Mrs. Belmont’s house because she is a friend and asked me to come. I did not go because I have any leaning toward the cause,” she said. As for reports that she planned to host a suffrage lunch at her Newport mansion, Crossways, Fish added, “I am not a suffragist and I don’t in the least want to be. To tell the truth, I’m altogether too busy as it is.”66
Crowds were huge—according to the papers, more than five hundred showed up on Tuesday, August 24, and even more the following Sunday. “Bailey’s Beach and the Casino were deserted,” wrote one admirer. “Everybody was here—debutante and dowager and the latest divorcee. Women, the jewels at whose throats would have financed a reform, trailed carelessly over the lawn in gowns representing in the aggregate hundreds of thousands in money.”67
As always, attuned to the glories of what modern political strategists would call the “optics,” Belmont arranged for a keynote speech by one of the remaining titans of the first generation—Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” contemporary of Stanton, Anthony, and Stone, “at ninety years old . . . the last survivor who pioneered the reform.” During Howe’s brief and some said inaudible remarks, Belmont stood at her side, “with reverently inclined head. And in the fluttering closing gesture of the aged hands, something like a benediction seemed to fall on the other woman with the paradise-plumed hat and the necklace of priceless pearls.”68
On the lawn meanwhile, souvenir seekers could buy photographs of the recently deceased Susan B. Anthony, at two dollars each.69 It was an odd pairing of political cause and artistic bounty, of social hierarchy with hawked kitsch. In the eyes of the New York World, “It was a great day for suffrage, with such an awesome proximity to the Social Register.”70 Others were less charitable, seeing in Belmont’s extravaganza a cause born not from commitment but from boredom. Cartoonist Harold Heaton captured this sentiment in the Chicago Inter Ocean in late August 1909. His cartoon showed Alva Belmont distributing “The Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont Woman Suffrage Tonic.” Below, the caption read, “The New Cure for Newport Ennui.”71
Despite this evident mockery, the Marble House events marked a turning point in suffrage and journalism history, leaving a pile of dated clippings on the pressroom floor. The Herald, an anti-suffragist paper that in 1853 first coined the term “rampant women” to describe female activists, now changed its tune.72 Clever as always about press management, Belmont gave the paper exclusive rights to photograph the treasures at Marble House before the rallies—as long as copyrights for all the photos were taken out in her name. She also placed $200 worth of ads in the Herald to promote the events.73 Perhaps as a result, on Sunday, August 22, the newspaper devoted an entire keepsake section to the rallies, headlining, “Woman’s Cause Gives Public Entrance to Marble House Wonderland of Art.”74
It was not as if publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., a yachtsman whose father had instilled in him the prejudices of their class, had changed his view of suffrage, “particularly in this city,” as he put it, “with its incessant influx of illiterate immigrant women.”75 But he conceded that the event had been conducted “on a high plane and very beautiful.” And in Belmont’s view, Bennett arranged for fair-minded coverage. “We are now being given courteous consideration by the press,” she told the Morning Telegraph two months later. Bennett “instructed the men who were sent out from his paper to see that the affair was reported in its right light.” Ever since, she said, “the question of woman’s suffrage has been treated with serious and courteous consideration by the press . . . throughout the country.”76
Before the Marble House events, Belmont invited Shaw to dinner. The two talked about suffrage “until nearly one o’clock,” Shaw reported to her board. “We talked so late that I missed my train and had to stay over at the hotel another night, but I got her for a life member. . . . I think she will help us financially by and by.”77 It did not take long for this prediction to prove an understatement of historic and consequential proportions.
Within a year, Belmont had forced the National American Woman Suffrage Association to relocate its headquarters to New York from Warren, Ohio, where treasurer Harriet Taylor Upton lived. Paying the association’s first-year rent on the seventeenth floor of 505 Fifth Avenue and underwriting the salary of Ida Husted Harper to run its press bureau, some $60,000 a year ($1.5 million in contemporary terms), Belmont headquartered her own suffrage organization down the hall.78 A bitter Laura Clay of Kentucky tried to rewrite the organization’s rules to prevent this takeover by one of society’s Four Hundred. “The chief impression we are making on the uninformed public is that we are a protégé of Mrs. Belmont,” she charged. “The public are amused in calculating how long she will be pleased with her toy.”79 Resentments soon broke into print. “National suffragists fear they’ll lose their identity,” noted the World.80 Belmont, said the Washington Times, “is attracting so much attention by her work in the cause that others who do as much feel they get no credit.”81
Belmont ignored the critics and launched her Political Equality Association, setting up twelve chapters that reflected the city’s polyglot culture. There was the Harlem club at 260 Lenox Avenue, the Wage Earners League at 196 E. Broadway, the Bronx branch at 830 Westchester Avenue, the Physicians and Surgeons League at 1720 Broadway, the Artists League at 140 East 34th Street, and the Negro Men and Women League at 83 West 134th Street. Like Blatch, she hoped to extend the appeal of the suffrage campaign across the city. And the group’s typed statement of purpose implicitly understood the controversy that still attached to the cause: “Names of members who for reasons of their own may not wish it known that they are actively identified or connected with the movement . . . will not be divulged under any circumstances. The association to this extent is a secret one.”82
With Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Belmont now reached out to women of color. As Edith Wharton captured so vividly in The Old Maids, wealthy New Yorkers had long worried about protecting the pedigree of their white skin.83 But Belmont’s suffrage campaign was an act of rebellion. Eager to upset the strict social codes of a class that often snubbed her, in early 1910 she persuaded Irene Moorman, president of the Negro Women’s Business League, that white progressives were interested in extending the female franchise to all women. Moorman dutifully organized a suffrage meeting at the Mount Olivet Baptist Church on West 53rd Street, where Belmont spoke of “that bond of humanity and equality which alone the woman suffrage movement can create.” Two hundred African American women attended the meeting, and to them she promised that if more than half of them joined her Political Equality Association, she would provide them a headquarters building. “I know that unless this cause means freedom and equal rights to all women, of every race, or every creed, rich or poor, its doctrines are worthless and it must fail in its achievement,” she said. Sign up they did.84
Her efforts to include blacks within the folds of the movement soon ran afoul of the ardent racism in suffrage circles.85 In 1911 Belmont withdrew an invitation to black suffragists to attend a suffrage ball after white supporters—“girls uptown and downtown”—balked, announcing their unhappiness by deciding to “stop work on their dancing frocks.”86 When, later that year, eight black activists attempted to dine in a suffrage lunchroom Belmont had opened downtown, they were turned away, offered box lunches and asked to eat elsewhere.87 This endemic racism also stymied Alice Dewey, whose husband, Columbia professor John Dewey, served on Mackay’s board. After she invited black suffragists to their home at 49 St. Nicholas Place, lawyers for the St. Cecilia Apartments threatened her with eviction, prompting her to cancel the meeting.88 Perhaps as a result, when Belmont’s Political Equality Association opened its new Harlem headquarters, only twenty black suffragists showed up, leading Belmont to tell reporters “how disappointed she was.”89 Membership across the city peaked at three thousand, and by 1911 Belmont had closed chapters in the Bronx and Harlem and on East Broadway and the Upper East Side, consolidating in headquarters downtown.90 In fact, black women had their own platforms within the temperance movement and the National Association of Colored Women Clubs, formed in 1896. An alliance of women along the lines of gender could not blunt the primacy of race, not at a time of lynching in the South and discrimination in the North.
Mackay with her exclusive circle of influence and Belmont with her inclusive attempt to supplant national organizations had joined the movement. They represented the extremes of suffrage ideology. Mackay, as a mother and school board member, reasoned that women needed the vote to protect the public health and safety, extending the maternal purview of the home to the public square. Belmont, seeking to avenge the grievance of male betrayals, sought the ballot to claim the rights of her class, denied her as a woman. In the years to come, the ladylike suffragist, earnest and patient, and the battle-scarred activist, angry and insistent, would differ over tactics. For now, the battle between them was joined.