Webster Ave & E 233rd St
Bronx, NY 10470
USA
After society leader, and suffrage patron, Alva Belmont died in France in 1933, her funeral was conducted in New York according to directions she left. Though no female priest officiated, otherwise the procession was everything that lady of social reinvention had envisioned — twenty honorary pallbearers including Christabel Pankhurst, Harriot Stanton Blatch and Margaret Sanger, fifteen hundred mourners watching as the purple, gold and white flag of the National Woman’s Party proceeded down the aisle of St. Thomas Episcopal Church.
Alva had also requested that a banner carried by the White House picketers accompany her to the Belmont family mausoleum. And so it did, a torn faded yellow banner inscribed with Susan B. Anthony’s quote, “Failure is Impossible.” And today, at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York, it hangs there still, a fitting if faded tribute to a woman who used her money, her brains and her social standing to help win the vote for women.
This lecture will explore the suffrage career of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, followed by a book signing.