5 The Gilded Face of Modernity

Never in the history of the country have women of wealth and high social position taken so prominent a part in the active life of the metropolis.

San Francisco Examiner1

BURSTING on the scene as a new generation of Americans came of age in the 1890s, the Gibson Girl was America’s first sex symbol. Her eyes half-closed in seductive allure, her figure slim at the waist but full at the bosom, this magazine illustration of white beauty represented a defiant farewell to the economic dislocations of the Civil War and a cheeky rebuttal to the sexual prudery of the Victorian era. Sometimes she wore tennis clothes, or rode a bicycle, or played the violin, but always she flirted with an audience of men, without benefit of chaperone. Amid a mania for the new art of advertising, the image of her dark upswept hair and luscious lips soon adorned every consumer product from the handkerchiefs in men’s suit pockets to the wallpaper plastered to one bon vivant’s bathroom walls.2 When famed illustrator Charles Dana Gibson married Irene Langhorne, “fair in feature, bright in intellect and winsome in manner,” from one of the FFVs (First Families of Virginia), commentators saw in the bride the muse for the artist’s future renderings.3

Gibson had never envisioned his “it girl” as a figure of politics, seeing her more as a flirt than a feminist. But when Irene Langhorne Gibson—whose sister Lady Nancy Astor would become the first female member of Parliament in Britain—took an interest in the causes of her day, it became clear that even the wealthy had been captivated by the swirl of social change moving through the culture.4 In 1913 she made her maiden speech for New York reform mayoral candidate John Purroy Mitchel under the banner of the Women’s Fusion League for Good Government.5 Wearing “a trim tailor suit with a very modern skirt,” Irene Gibson at first resisted Daisy Harriman’s entreaties to scale a cart to address a noontime crowd on the docks. The Times at once saw the problem, noting that “if women are going into cart-tail oratory either the carts will have to be changed or the new skirts.” But climb she did—“someone gave her a hand from the cart, someone helped from the ground and, with a brave little jump, she was there”—and from new heights she praised Mitchel, citing his campaign to preserve parks and to fund milk sanitation for immigrant and poor mothers. Whether because of her words or her skirt, by session’s end, according to the Times, she had “won the hearts of the goodly gathering of longshoremen gathered around a big truck at the corner of South and Fulton Streets.”6

Exploiting her new status as a public personality, she also embraced suffrage, belting out its virtues in song at an event sponsored by the Federation of Women’s Clubs, affecting the look of Raphael’s Madonna at a fundraiser for suffrage at the Maxine Elliott Theatre.7 In 1917, for the first time, she marched for suffrage in a parade up Fifth Avenue with, as the Sun put it, “a lot of other women whose names are frequently seen in society columns.”8

For a generation (and sometimes for a single individual) to move from the exclusive costume balls of the nineteenth century to the public political parades of the twentieth suggests a breathtaking change in the atmosphere. In New York, the excitement over suffrage was palpable, “unparalleled anywhere else in the country.” Trade unions, the working class, racial minorities, socialists, the middle class, and now the upper class clamored for the vote, as actresses who stocked Broadway’s stages openly embraced the cause and a small cadre of progressive men, some husbands of gilded suffragists, joined the battle.9

Amid an unprecedented influx of immigrants, conservatives talked of social Darwinism, which held that biology’s natural selection was evident in mental as well as physical attributes, and liberals spoke of the great reform needs of the day, from improving sanitation for tenement residents on the Lower East Side to ending the lynching of black men in the Jim Crow South. In the Village, Max Eastman, editor of the Masses, advocated for socialism and free love, while Robert Henri led a rebellion against “art for art’s sake” in favor of “art for life’s sake,” and founded the Ashcan School, painters who rejected Impressionism in favor of a gritty urban realism. With such large questions in the balance, the cocoon spun by denizens of Newport’s gilded mansions seemed irrelevant. “Great movements were stirring,” wrote Inez Haynes Irwin, cofounder of the College Equal Suffrage League. “Everyone was for something and everyone was sure of victory.”10

Thanks to the railroads and the automobile, the country was on the move. Mark Twain began a popular lecture series to pay off debts.11 Isadora Duncan toured the country to demonstrate the joys of rhythm.12 In the West, the American cowboy first opened and then, in Frederick Jackson Turner’s memorable phrase, closed the American frontier.13 In Cuba, Teddy Roosevelt, that apostle for male vigor, led a charge of Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, prompting debate about imperialism and America’s place in the world. As one student wrote to her parents, “Politics, religion, art, music, society, everything is being revolutionized.”14

Women in the gilded set were hardly immune to this call of modernity. In politics as in fashion, they resonated to trends. Like Irene Gibson, many came to view the reforms of their times as an invitation for relevance, and they eagerly expanded the charities of noblesse oblige to the causes of the day—support for black colleges, for environmental protections, for labor union reforms. Their lives echoed with the clamor of generational ambition. They were rebels to their own class and kin, carving out new directions in education, career, marriage, and parenting.

Born after the Civil War, spared by wealth and generation from the worst of that wrenching conflict, they came of age as one century glimpsed the next, seeing not limits but opportunities. Many pursued university education, attending newly opened women’s colleges at Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, or Vassar. In an earlier era, privileged women had been taught by private tutors, their education refined by summers spent traveling through Europe, absorbing the art, language, and lifestyle of other cultures. Education was meant to attract a man of position, and to convey the perquisites of class to succeeding generations. For a woman of wealth to attend college risked her class status and, critics worried, might imperil her ability to extend the bloodline. Family arguments and social ostracism often ensued.

On hearing that their daughter, Elsie, wanted to pursue a university education, Lucy and Henry Clews were aghast. A southern belle eighteen years younger than her husband, Lucy Madison Worthington Clews was “Newport’s best-dressed lady of her era,” a fashion plate who set aside $10,000 each summer for “mistakes in her clothes.” Eager to inculcate Elsie into the glories of fashion, Lucy Clews had warned her only child that shabby clothes could provoke a common cold and corsets would benefit her figure.15 Henry Clews, a Wall Street financier, feared that college would compromise Elsie’s ability to procreate and that women were unfit for intellectual endeavors, an assertion he defended by citing the Bible, the Magna Carta, and the U.S. Constitution. In a paper he wrote for the National Society of New England Women in 1910, he declared that a woman is “endowed and equipped by nature for a higher and more important sphere of action, and her activities should centre in her home life.”16

For the headstrong Elsie Clews, who had defied the gods of Bailey’s Beach by dipping her bare toes into the Atlantic Ocean, and who observed that a swim and a trek helped her cope with the “grotesqueries” of Newport society, choosing college over cotillion was but the latest sign of rebellion. “When I wanted to go to college, I was called selfish,” she later recalled. “I should stay home, I was told, and be companionable to my mother. I had never noticed that my mother found me companionable. In those years we were not at all congenial.”17 On becoming an anthropologist, she advanced views on chastity, premarital sex, and planned pregnancies that provoked thunder from many a pulpit. “The idea of men and women living like animals, separating at will, and contracting new alliances, leaving the children to be nobody’s children, and to be cared for by the State, is barbarous,” said Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, which tethered the wealthy to religious observance.18

Alice Duer—a cousin of Katherine Duer Mackay and descendent of Rufus King, signatory to the U.S. Constitution, and William Alexander Duer, president of Columbia University—provoked a different kind of controversy when she vowed to attend college. The collapse of the Barings Bank of Britain in 1890 had decimated her father’s New York bank, precipitating a fall in family fortunes.19 Alice insisted on enrolling in Barnard even if she had to pay her own expenses by tutoring other students. As the news spread, it “shocked society and alienated her friends.” Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the doyen of high society, paid a call on Alice’s mother to say, “What a pity, that lovely girl going to college.”20

That Alice Duer Miller later achieved success as a writer—contributing to the social memory of two continents in two wars with a World War I poem that inspired the 1944 film The White Cliffs of Dover—was a rejoinder to the naysayers. Unlike her father, with his “great authority of manner without a trace of self-assertiveness,” she became a nonconformist, welcomed at the Algonquin Club’s Round Table, haven for wit, where Dorothy Parker traded barbs with Alexander Woollcott, and at Heterodoxy, a club for a woman “not . . . orthodox in her opinions,” including pacifists, socialists, African Americans, and lesbians.21

Formed in 1912, Heterodoxy met every two weeks on Saturdays in Greenwich Village, except in summer, when New York’s moneyed classes departed for cooler climes. Club members debated homosexuality and birth control, socialism, racism, and pacifism—subjects that would have horrified the guests at their parents’ banquets. Unlike the clubwomen of the nineteenth century, who observed strict protocol in organization and agenda, these trailblazers thrived on unscripted, uncensored conversation. Grace Nail Johnson, whose husband, James Weldon Johnson, was an official with the NAACP, ensured that unlike most women’s clubs, Heterodoxy held racially integrated meetings.22 Heterodoxy held as its greatest value diversity of opinion, and as its greatest sin, conformity. Aside from Miller, Elsie Clews Parsons was a regular, as were Vira Whitehouse, a banker’s wife who would later lead the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, and Fola La Follette, daughter of Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette, and like him a pacifist.

Like the others, Gertrude Vanderbilt was raised with a keen awareness of the notoriety that attended wealth. Born in 1875 to a Gilded Age built on her great-grandfather’s railroad empire, she was “the eldest daughter of the eldest son of the richest American family.” At four, she longed to be a boy, and infuriated her mother by using scissors to cut off the curls atop her head. At eleven, as she recorded in her diary, “I knew perfectly that my father was talked of all over, that his name was known throughout the world, that I, simply because I was his daughter, would be talked about when I grew up, and that there were lots of things I could not do simply because I was Miss Vanderbilt.”23 There were summers in Newport, where the family home, the Breakers, was a breathtaking example of the colossal mansions that turned Bellevue Avenue into a national landmark.24 And there were month-long visits to the churches and art museums of Europe, where Gertrude was much taken with the monuments, though not with Rubens, whose paintings she declared “too clumsy, . . . not ideal enough.”25

When, at the age of twenty-one, Gertrude married the “great sportsman” Harry Payne Whitney, a scion of Standard Oil, one newspaper described theirs as a “wedding of gold,” explaining that the marriage “united two colossal fortunes.”26 For the bride, the union promised a partner who understood the toll of gilded fame on personal privacy, someone who promised to be candid and who assuredly did not love Miss Vanderbilt for her money or her name, as his glittered as brightly. Within a decade, after three children and a whirlwind of travel and entertainment, the marriage devolved into what one biographer described as a “trial compartmentalization of interests.” There was between them a shared tolerance for “foolish flirtations,” as long as they were discreet.27 Harry was preoccupied with his horses, business affairs, and, after the death of his father, the need to protect the family’s $25 million inheritance. Gertrude returned to an early interest in drawing and enrolled at the Art Students League, located two blocks from her home at 2 West 57th Street. Setting up studios in Greenwich Village and Paris, she reinvented herself from socialite to sculptor, years later founding the New York museum that bears the Whitney name.

This search for meaning in body and soul owed something to popular novels of the day. In 1899 Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening had shocked polite society with its depiction of Edna Pontellier, a wealthy New Orleans woman who found sexual liberation outside her marriage.28 Banned by some libraries, the book was much read in elite circles, influencing several wealthy women to join Margaret Sanger’s controversial movement to research methods of birth control.29 Another popular book within their circle was Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, published in 1905, about Lily Bart, clinging to the accoutrements of wealth by searching for a husband of standing to rescue her from her impoverished lifestyle. Edith Newbold Jones Wharton grew up in a wealthy home in what she called Old New York. It was her family, in fact, that inspired the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.”30 Chronicling the wealthy, she brought a wry wisdom to the portrait of high society.31 And when, after the Civil War, new money replaced old gentry in the city’s social hierarchy, Wharton observed with her customary irony, “The decent people fell back on sport and culture.”32

These depictions of societal tension helped spark an interest in writing. Critics may have disdained the book boom for its “commercialization of literature,” but many of the elite became published authors, confessing candid amorous feelings—or heretical beliefs—that would have felled earlier society leaders.33 Katherine Duer Mackay, a married woman with three children, wrote in The Stone of Destiny (1904) about unrequited love. Gertrude Atherton, wife of a blueblood, indulged in Darwinian ruminations against religion in Ancestors (1907).

Amid these explorations in education and career, young women of wealth also experimented with new forms of marriage and parenting. When she agreed to wed Herbert Parsons in 1900, Elsie Clews had no intention of enduring a traditional Newport wedding. She would agree to only one fitting for the wedding gown, so a “double” had to be brought in for intricate work. Elsie’s father thought that the train should be longer, but, as her mother, Lucy Clews, wrote to the groom, “Elsie gave orders.” Soon she was pregnant, eager to demonstrate that she could juggle both parenthood and her academic work, without jeopardizing either.34 Herbert, by his own admission “the pettifogger who cannot see the big side,” suggested that she discontinue her teaching at Barnard during her pregnancy. Instead, she worked continuously and delivered a healthy baby, the first of four. Two others died in childhood. They negotiated a social compact in which parenting was shared—she assumed responsibility until the children were twelve years old, when he became the primary parent.35

The unusual understanding between them was not without political consequence. On his arrival in Washington in 1905, Herbert Parsons was asked whether he thought his wife’s views would be a liability. “If my wife were to advocate such principles as does Congressman Parsons’ wife,” a World reporter explained to his readers, “she would have to choose another place to live pretty quickly.”36 There is no record of Parsons’s reply, but his wife was not unmindful of political difficulties created by her unusual views. During her husband’s three terms, Elsie joined the Congressional Woman’s Club (likely the only member of Heterodoxy to do so) and used the pen name John Main for her sociological books, including The Old-Fashioned Woman, which one reviewer described as a “sharp and witty analysis of the genesis of traditional sex roles and behavior and the cultural codes that sustain them.”37

Often these exemplars of modernity shared the suffrage campaign with their own children. Actress Katharine Hepburn recalled that her mother, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association, often took her along to parades and asked her to distribute pamphlets.38 Edith Bailey, who had contributed her automobile to a soapbox speech during the 1894 parlor campaign, now lent her twin babies to a suffrage pageant in 1911. For the tableaux, Irene Langhorne Gibson was to pose as the Madonna. The effect was ruined when one of the twins let out a tear-stained cry for “Ma-a-a-a-a—a!” and, as the Evening Journal put it, “the house roared.”39

Relations with their own mothers were often strained. Aside from summers in Newport and winters at Fifth Avenue’s toniest addresses, what Elsie Clews Parsons and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney shared was a desire not to become their mothers. They did not run from wealth, but they did shun the ladder of social acceptance that had defined their mothers’ lives. On seeing one of Gertrude’s early works of sculpture, Alice Vanderbilt urged her to hide the image from her own daughter, lest the child become wild. “The fig leaf is so little!” she exclaimed. For Gertrude, by contrast, the “unprudish attitude [in working with live nude models] and the manual labor involved in shaping plaster and clay represented . . . an explosive defiance of the entirely ladylike existence she had known.”40

Gertrude and Elsie saw that it was their mothers, not their fathers, who dictated the terms of society. “There are no kings in American Society, . . . only queens,” wrote Elsie Clews Parsons. The “onerous and endless business” of social calling, the ordeal of climbing into and staying atop society, required “a kind of self-devotion which verges on asceticism.”41 As a child Gertrude “longed to be someone else, to be liked only for myself, to live quietly and happily without the burden that goes with riches.”42 She was a teenager when she concluded, “The only way to enjoy [life] most is to have other interests besides the social ones.”43

To the earlier generation, society had been a fortress, a warren of insular exclusivity where the gates were patrolled with constant vigilance. The whole point of restricting her guest list to four hundred families deemed worthy to feast in Caroline Schermerhorn Astor’s ballroom was to define those left outside the doors. As Oscar Wilde observed, to be in society was “merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.”44

No longer. In 1910, on returning to New York City after a long sojourn in Paris, social critic Frederick Townsend Martin observed a new individualism among the elite, as if the rules that once bound society to rituals of etiquette were now fluid. “It is now the individual, not the list, and hostesses ask the people whom they wish,” he noted in his groundbreaking book The Passing of the Idle Rich. The younger set seemed as interested in work as they were in play, more aligned with the reforms of their day than with the predictable philanthropies of their circle. “The fashionable young women of the day . . . follow fads madly,” he wrote. “I could name a dozen young women of the finest families in New York who in the past twelve months have thrown themselves into this sort of function.”

More striking still, the young seemed obsessed with sexuality, indulging “a sort of fetish . . . [to] study hygiene, biology and the mystery of life.”45 This shift in sensibility—from a Victorian ethos of separate bedrooms to a fin-de-siècle experimentation in sexuality, homosexuality, and birth control—had the further effect of changing standards of beauty. Women once prized for being round—to connote maternal talents—now slimmed down. Dieting, first embraced by men, became a female fetish among those who wanted to shed both pounds and the corset.46 Opera gowns soon reflected the trend, featuring skin of the leg, arm, and neck. As one scholar noted, “Not even the rumor that Mrs. John Jacob Astor had developed a chest cold as a result of wearing deep décolleté deterred their wearers.” The aptly named Unpopular Review saw in the new attire a cultural peril of historic dimensions. “At no time and place under Christianity, . . . certainly never before in America, has woman’s form been so freely displayed in society and on the street,” harrumphed the editors.47

When Newport was in its glory, women of society were known to change clothes eight times a day. The after-lunch parade along Ocean Drive—in the 1890s by horse-drawn carriage and in the new century by automobiles—was a sartorial highlight. Like beauties on floats at Carnival, they preened in “their lacy dresses and feathery hats,” giving Newport its imprimatur as the “unrivalled playground of fashion.”48 One observer marveled, “How they swished and rustled in petticoats of satin, of lace, of taffeta . . . embellished with elaborate designs of plump cupids playing gilded lyres, true love knots interspersed with doves embroidered in seed pearls, parasols to match every dress, enormous flopping feather hats assorted to every costume, white gloves to the elbow, three or four new pairs every day.”49

At the turn of the century, observed writer Henry Wise Miller, “to be in society meant something. The inner circle was a closed and organized entity. Money counted as it always does, but wealth alone did not let you in. You had to be well bred, but more important you had to be acceptable to a few social autocrats who would make or mar you.” So clear were the rules that “a lady could call the doorman at the Knickerbocker Club to say: ‘William, is there anybody in the club I’d like to have for lunch?’”50

Within a decade, the “strenuous life” promoted by Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Louis Stevenson, and magazines such as Outing had captivated quite a few of Newport’s debutantes, and even some of their parents.51 Some took up bicycling, that great craze of the day, with enthusiasm so widespread that streets had to be widened and so popular that 120,000 spectators crowded Madison Square Garden in 1896 to see the Great Bicycle Exhibition.52 Lillian Russell had a custom bike made by Tiffany, “a gold-plated machine that displayed the jeweler’s art at its most opulent and unconventional,” complete with mother-of-pearl handles and “wheel spokes featuring her initials set in diamonds.”53

With its patented Dunlop tire that rode smoothly on pavement and its implicit invitation to tour the vast country, the bicycle became a metaphor for the raw individualism of the day, seen as a triumph of the physical fitness movement over the corset. As Susan B. Anthony told journalist Nellie Bly, bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”54 So clear was the threat to the social hierarchy that Town Topics railed against the bicycle’s pernicious ability to undercut female morals. “Woman is in a progressive mood nowadays and will not remain content with half measures,” rued the weekly. “Youthful and beauteous womanhood is going to emancipate itself by means of the bicycle.” Alas, said Town Topics, “Women bicyclists will be wearing tights within a year.”55

They rebelled too at arranged marriages consummated for family bloodlines rather than individual happiness. Once the scourge of society, divorce became, if not common, at least familiar. In 1895, when Alva Vanderbilt announced to her lawyer that she wanted to divorce her husband for his rather public philandering, Joseph Choate urged her to reconsider, saying, “No member of [the upper class] must expose another member to criticism lest the whole foundation of wealth be undermined.”56 The subsequent orgy of titillating press coverage—as the World put it rather brashly, the case had something for everyone, “the rich as well as the poor who want to be rich”—proved him right.57 News about Willie K.’s mistress in Paris, Nellie Neustretter of San Francisco, spilled out, with details of “expensive apartments [and] a retinue of servants” he kept for her in France.58

After the divorce, Alva Vanderbilt said she felt the sting of public reprimand most intensely at church, where fawning was replaced by ostracism. “When I walked into the Trinity Church in Newport on a Sunday soon after obtaining my divorce, not a single one of my old friends would recognize me,” she recalled later. “They gathered in little groups and made it evident they were speaking of their disapprobation of my conduct.”59

But by 1908, when Elsie French Vanderbilt divorced her husband, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, another great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, society was more challenged than shocked. The divorce set off what the Times described as a “social war at Newport,” making for “an interesting rivalry between the two sets during the Summer here and during the Winter in New York.”60 The notoriety of “the divorcing Frenches,” or as one newspaper headline put it, “The Family Where Marriage Is Always a Failure,” no doubt eased the feud.61 After settlement, Elsie French Vanderbilt became one of Newport’s largest taxpayers. Two years after a federal income tax was enacted, this once avid anti-suffragist endorsed municipal suffrage for women, seeking a voice in issues that affected her pocketbook.62

The first foray into the political world for many was the garment industry strike in 1909, so widespread that it would become known as the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand. With the invention of the shirtwaist—modeled on a man’s shirt, worn tucked into a skirt, “a symbol of newfound female independence”—the industry had boomed.63 By 1909 the city boasted more than five hundred shirtwaist shops, and at least thirty-five thousand employees.64 Conditions were anything but liberating. Jewish and Italian immigrants, many still teenagers, worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, with poor lighting and few safety precautions. “We can’t live our lives without doing something to help them,” said Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan, who with Belmont, inheritor of both Vanderbilt and Belmont family fortunes, joined the board of the Women’s Trade Union League. “Of course the consumer must be protected, but when you hear of a woman who presses forty dozen skirts for $8 a week, something must be very wrong. And fifty-two hours a week seems little enough to ask.”65

The paradox that beneficiaries of capitalism would protest its cutthroat efficiencies was lost on no one, and newspapers quickly dubbed these elite supporters the “mink brigade.” Calling them “fanatical women,” a lawyer for the Association of Waist and Dress Manufacturers charged that they were supporting the strike only as a tool to forward their selfish interest in suffrage, a suspicion shared too by many union leaders.66 But when Inez Milholland, a recent Vassar graduate whose wealthy parents supported her activism, was arrested for joining the picket line, news coverage demonstrated the value of a celebrity endorsement. Daughter of John Milholland, a progressive reformer who helped form the NAACP, Inez Milholland would later become a star in suffrage circles, and later still a martyr for the cause, dying at the age of thirty while campaigning for the vote in the West. For now, she conferred her privilege and her beauty on an ugly strike scene where factory owners had hired prostitutes to beat up the strikers—because “gentlemen” did not want to be seen beating up women in public.67 The tone of coverage shifted. As the Chicago Daily Tribune headline noted, “Vassar Girl Is Arrested: Suffragette and Strike Picket Meets Rude Cop.”68

Interestingly, the New York Times listed the shirtwaist strike in its index for 1909–1910 not under labor but under fashion, suggesting that the product was more valued than the labor, and hinting anew at the import of feminine appearance to the campaign for political rights.69 If gilded activists made suffrage fashionable, they seemed to have had a similar impact on this strike, evidence of the value of their endorsement. No one got more attention than Alva Belmont, who sat in the Jefferson Market Courthouse in Greenwich Village one night, waiting up until 3:00 a.m. to bail out four workers arrested on the picket line. Informed that bail was set at $100 each, Belmont said that all she had to offer as collateral was her home at 477 Madison Avenue, valued, said the Baltimore Sun, at $400,000.70 Newspapers lapped it up, making the story front-page news across the country.71 Belmont rented the Hippodrome Theater for a mass rally, attracting an audience of eight thousand, where factory workers, union organizers, college student sympathizers, and members of the mink brigade watched the proceedings in a massive hall lit by electricity and festooned with banners demanding “Votes for Women,” “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” and “Give Women the Protection of the Vote.”72 The capstone of society involvement came on December 15, 1909, when Anne Morgan and Bessy Marbury arranged for workers to address the Colony Club.

The event was rife with irony. Young Italian and Jewish workers invited to tell their stories would not have been eligible for membership, nor welcome as guests. Yet 150 of New York’s most elite women sat and listened as the aggrieved told their stories. One Italian worker said that a priest was sent to tell her that she should not be in the same union with Jews. “I hope you will excuse me for this language, ladies, but the priest, he tell us that if we keep up the strike we all go to hell.” A fifteen-year-old Jewish worker, “a round-eyed chubby little person,” explained that she had to support “my sick mother and two little sisters on $3.50 a week.” A third worker said, “Why just think, we lose a penny for every minute we are late and I once had to pay $8 for a machine that I broke.”73 At presentation’s end, Margaret Chanler Aldrich, known as one of the “Astor orphans” for her parents’ early death, asked what the strikers most needed. Mary Dreier, a labor organizer and herself a woman of means whose arrest on the picket line had galvanized protests, answered, “Money to fight with.”74 Aldrich promptly called for a collection, and de Wolfe passed a hat, as did Rita Lydig, the club’s most fashionable member. They raised $1,300 (about $35,000 in contemporary terms).75 Then tea was served.76

Some union officials deeply resented the society suffragists’ involvement and suspected their motives, seeing their reform instincts as little more than penance for their wealth. “I shouldn’t wonder their conscience pricks them a bit—they must be ashamed of being fortune’s children while so many of the girls have never known what a good day means,” Theresa S. Malkiel wrote in her Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker.77 Socialists within the union leadership were horrified by the economic and class ironies that separated struggling speakers from an audience of capitalism’s most favored. “A remarkable meeting, one that was as peculiar as it was interesting,” opined the Call. The “bejeweled, be-furred, be-laced and be-gowned audience” were a stark contrast with the “ten wage slaves, some of them mere children,” said the socialist newspaper, adding acidly, “Seldom, if ever, have [elite women] listened with such interest to the tales of the war between capital and labor, to the incidents of pain, of misery, of grief in the great struggle between the classes.”78 At a five-hour meeting to discuss whether to continue cooperating with wealthy suffragists—which ended in a “no” vote—Malkiel accused Belmont of “political crimes against the working class.”79 Some historians have also faulted the wealthy, arguing that they defused the movement’s intent. In this view, the mink brigade’s support for a negotiated settlement left unchanged brutal conditions that led to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911. One of the deadliest industrial accidents in New York history, the fire left 146 garment workers dead, many leaping to their deaths from a building where the exits had been sealed.80

Their own class was, if possible, even more biting. Vogue’s “As Seen by Him” column mocked their efforts as little more than the meddling of bored socialites. “In order to get into the best society in New York this season a woman should join the Shirtwaist Makers’ Union, or some other striking labor organization, and thus help to gain votes for women,” wrote the authors, in evident sarcasm. “The suffrage question is the fad of the hour.”81

Pondering the question of why these women of wealth would act against their class interests, why they would work to reform the system that was the very taproot of their gilded existence, one arrives at the essence of social change. These society reformers sought not to diminish their own power but to reform industry from within, to protect their own status by easing the plight of capitalism’s most exploited victims. As Daisy Harriman explained on launching one such campaign, “We will go to employers direct with such influence as we may command. All of us have influence, and some of us are the wives or sisters of employers of a large number of factory operatives or perhaps are ourselves owners and stockholders in companies. . . . There is perhaps no better antidote for radical attacks upon present institutions than intelligent, genuine and wisely directed welfare work.”82

In 1909 Harriman stunned her husband’s banking associates by hosting members of the International Brotherhood of Stationary Firemen at their summer home in Mount Kisco, New York, overlooking the Hudson River.83 Eager to make a difference in a wider world beyond their circle, she and two hundred other wealthy women had joined the Votes for Women campaign. Much like Colony Club decorator Elsie de Wolfe as she “cleared out the Victoriana and let in the twentieth century,” they were newly awakened to modernity.84 On opening her home at Marble House in Newport to the public for suffrage, Alva Belmont was asked why she was going through the bother. Why not just donate to the cause? Sipping tea, she told a reporter for the New York World, “To give money is like throwing a bone to a dog.” The cause needed warriors, she said. “Besides,” she added, “tickets are only $5.”85

Acknowledging years later that she got involved in civic life because it was “fun,” Irene Gibson exploited her looks for the causes that moved her, none more than that of disadvantaged children. Her husband took a benevolent view of her activism, seeing her as too feminine to be sullied by political power. “If you have a canary,” he was fond of saying, “you have to let it sing.”86 For other men, these changes in gender behavior were far more traumatic, if only because the newspapers kept referring to them, mockingly, as “mere men.”87