Though there was no question at this stage of a split with the National American, Alva was now finally able to concentrate much of her vision in one highly visible theatre of activity and to give free reign to her idiosyncratic views. In a widely reported speech at the opening ceremony of the new PEA building, she declared that women’s suffrage was merely the first step towards a complete re-alignment of gender relations, which required nothing less than a full-scale remodelling of the male brain. ‘Our work … is to remodel man’s past ideas of what is safe for women. To make him know us as we are, not as we were; to ask him to believe we are just as good, though perhaps more advanced, certainly more desirous of assuming responsibilities now existing in the business and political world, where once we found them in the home only.’24
The new PEA headquarters became a hive of activity. It ran its own orchestra,* a musical school for anyone over sixteen, a PEA women’s chorus, monthly National American meetings, meetings of the PEA ‘Lawyers’ League’, free dance classes, an Artist’s League for sculptors and painters and a new and improved lunchroom. Once again Alva played off all social classes against her celebrity persona. Once again there was a striking parallel between the new headquarters and her ‘society’ houses, for the building was magnificently furnished with a trellised garden, a hall of white marble and a liveried servant who opened the door to visitors. Here, the lower social orders were given a chance to brush with a social celebrity in an ersatz society setting. Alva played the role to perfection, arriving each morning in a large motor car, attended by a footman who descended from the outside box, held open the door and stood to attention while she entered the building. She then conducted a detailed tour of inspection, tasting the food and ordering the waitresses to behave like ladies. At the same time, she corralled her society friends onto the premises to endorse the cause by eating in the self-service lunchroom. This was regarded as a hilarious novelty, for few of them had ever helped themselves to food before let alone carried a tray.
What really grabbed the headlines, however, was a maverick Alva initiative on the first floor. This was the ‘Department of Hygiene’ which dispensed health advice to women and sold the PEA’s own brand of ‘Victory’ beauty products including ‘Satin Skin Cream’, ‘Glycerine Jelly with Rose’, ‘Camphor Ice’ and ‘Violette Water’, and its own brand of toothpaste. Like Emmeline Pankhurst, Alva was firmly of the view that women were much more effective if they looked attractive, and felt strongly that the suffrage movement should harness the power of the emerging cosmetics industry spearheaded by women such as Elizabeth Arden. Beauty, she insisted, was an instrument of female power. The product which caused the greatest stir, however, was the PEA ‘Victory’ laxative. Alva sometimes sold these ‘liver pills’ herself and a visit by one lady journalist suggests that in addition to her other qualities, Alva had some of the characteristics of a snake-oil salesperson.
‘I have taken them every night since last February and wouldn’t be without them,’ Alva is alleged to have said, reporting that they were also taken by other PEA workers including Miss Donnelly and remarking that ‘no doctor will prescribe them for you, they’re so good’, before ratcheting up the sales pitch with: ‘You know, when a person gets to be over thirty, and has to have a clear brain when they have to do lots of thinking, as I do, they need something for the liver.’ But when the intimidated lady journalist enquired how many pills she ought to take each night, Alva suddenly had a lapse of memory and was forced to ask Miss Donnelly.25
It was all too much for Mary Donnelly, who resigned a month later. ‘Not that I don’t believe in suffragists using these creams and hair restorers,’ she said. ‘Every woman ought to try to be as beautiful as she can. I do myself. But I’m for suffrage first, last and all the time, and when it comes to suffrage being swamped in face creams I’m done.’26
One of the complexities of Alva’s position during these years was that she derived much of her power within the suffrage movement not simply from her wealth but from her position as a society figure and Mother of a Duchess. One visitor to the new headquarters, noticed that the driver of the Fifth Avenue bus told passengers where to alight by shouting: ‘This is the Newest Hall of Fame! It is the Victory home of the suffragettes and was built by its commander-in-chief, Mrs O. H. P. Belmont, Mother of our own Duchess of Marlborough.’27 Doris Stevens, a young fellow suffragist who came to know Alva well after 1914, maintained that: ‘She was always in conflict between living sumptuously and selfishly and being amused by a court jester and her marked identification with the purposeful life of Joan d’Arc. It is my belief she never reconciled these conflicts.’28
This assessment overlooked the fact, however, that it was in the interests of the suffrage movement that Alva maintained her status as a social celebrity and it was sometimes a difficult balancing act. During the Newport summer season of 1912, for example, she simultaneously opened a local suffrage office, introduced her beautiful suffragist protégée Inez Milholland into society, and enlisted the support of the social elite with a large open-air party on Easton Beach (causing much hilarity in Town Topics as its spies watched Mrs Fish and Mrs Oelrichs pick their way across the boardwalk). In her desire to win over rich people to the suffrage cause she was careful to avoid criticising them, telling The New York Times in a much misquoted article: ‘I know of no profession, art or trade that women are working in to-day as taxing in mental resources as being a leader of society.’ She then added that she was no longer sure the result was worth the effort ‘because humanity at large is so little helped, and I would not consider now the putting forth of such energy in that way as intelligent service’. But she flattered her old friends – and herself – by declaring: ‘But there is no doubt of the essential quality of sheer brain power being a sine qua non to the social leader.’29
At the beginning of 1912, Alva’s relationship with the National American snagged on another disagreement. The National American campaign had continued to focus on winning women’s suffrage state-by-state across the USA, and had made some progress. Washington had been won in 1910, California in 1911, and by 1912 women had secured voting rights in a total of ten states. By 1912, however, Alva had come to believe that state-by-state progress was too slow and that if the campaign continued in this vein it would make very little headway. In her opinion, the debate needed to move on to a national level and the National American should try to engage the support of at least one of the national political parties. When the National American showed limited enthusiasm for this tactic, Alva took matters into her own hands once again.
She had discovered in recent years that newspapers welcomed her articles, and that journalism was an excellent means of circumventing her dislike of public speaking. She now exploited this interest – and her own fame – to take the suffrage debate on to a national level by lending her name to a series of articles from the ‘Department of Hygiene’ in the World which ran from 1911 till the middle of 1913 and writing a weekly column in the Chicago Tribune from April to November 1912. The latter series drew directly on her own experience, and many familiar themes emerged: the ‘vices and immoral life’ of the promiscuous husband, whose wives were ‘paid legitimate prostitutes’; the trivial and wasteful lives imposed by rigid convention on society women; and the greater value placed on a boy than a girl. The contrast with her withdrawal from the problems of everyday life in her great gilt palaces at 660 Fifth Avenue and Marble House could hardly have been clearer and she now explicitly rejected her former flight from reality. ‘Beware the Fairy Tales of Life’, she wrote in the Chicago Tribune. ‘It will be only after the castle is entered that the walls may crumble. It is hard to undo what is done. It is far better to face a situation with knowledge than to acquire it a day too late.’30
Her Utopian streak remained intact, however, though it had a very different focus. She was essentially a single-issue politician gripped by a conviction that all would be well if only women could have the vote. Although she became an ad
vocate of higher taxation her political radicalism should not be overstated. When she bailed out Max Eastman’s socialist magazine The Masses, for example, it was because he supported women’s suffrage. Indeed, until 1913 she conceded many debates in the interests of suffrage unity. She even agreed to take part in a suffrage demonstration march up Fifth Avenue organised by the more radical Harriet Stanton Blatch – a surrender partly because she thought Blatch was divisive but mainly because Alva never went anywhere on foot if she could possibly avoid it. So it was a great concession to take part in a demonstration march. Elizabeth Lehr watched from the Hotel St Regis and wrote that Alva ‘looked as serene and unselfconscious as though she had been in her own drawing-room’, although Consuelo wrote later that her mother hated parading in this manner: ‘I did not realise what such a conspicuous public act must have cost her until she later confessed.’31 Before long, however, Alva would become so disenchanted with the National American that festering tensions would erupt into the open.
During this time Consuelo’s own views on the issue of militancy and female suffrage also crystallised. She may have defended militancy while drafting ‘The Position of Women’ during 1908, but that was the last time on record. In October 1908, the Pankhursts attempted to rush the House of Commons, and were arrested. In common with many other supporters of the English women’s suffrage campaign, it seems likely that Consuelo thought this was a militant step too far. Thereafter she aligned her views with the non-militant wing of the English suffrage movement represented by the NUWSS and Millicent Fawcett. In April 1909, when Alva invited her to her box at the WSPU rally in the Albert Hall, it is clear that Consuelo had no wish to endorse the Pankhursts because she already felt their actions were damaging the suffrage cause. The figure to whom Consuelo said her views came closest were those of her friend Lady Frances Balfour, Liberal daughter of the Whig Duke and Duchess of Argyll, sister-in-law of the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and a leading supporter of the NUWSS and of women’s education. ‘She held my views on women’s suffrage,’ wrote Consuelo,’ ‘believing in the more conservative approach rather than in the distressing exhibitions of martyrdom which were shocking society’.32
Unlike Alva, who already saw votes for women in terms of human rights, Consuelo continued to regard female suffrage as an issue of citizenship and a privilege for which women should prepare and educate themselves. It is therefore unsurprising that Consuelo, like Lady Frances Balfour, was drawn to the question of higher education for women. Her own teenage intellectual interests had been short-circuited by Alva’s insistence that a grand European marriage was a faster route to power, though she had apparently proved herself capable of reading for an Oxford degree. She now attached herself to the campaign to develop Bedford College for women (part of London University, the first in Britain to grant degrees to women) which needed to move from cramped conditions in Baker Street in London to a new site in the middle of Regent’s Park.
Consuelo held the first of many fundraising meetings for Bedford College at Sunderland House on 30 June 1910. As soon as she became honorary treasurer of the appeal, the campaign started to attract support. Consuelo was not shy of publicity when she felt she was acting in a good cause. Like Alva (but with rather more success), she set about enlisting society’s help in a manner that led the principal, Dame Margaret Tuke, to comment later that ‘the activities of Bedford College between that year and 1914 were so similar to those practiced by other public beggars as to be easily imagined’.33 Consuelo turned out to be extremely good at fundraising and in her history of Bedford College, Dame Margaret was unstinting in praise of her efforts: ‘It is not possible to say how much the College owes to her able support and influence. She interested her friends … She gave wise advice. She held meetings in Sunderland House. She succeeded in keeping the appeal in the public eye so that the name of the College became known to the outside world, which had never before shown much interest in such causes.’34 Consuelo became president of the college in 1913 and the new building in Regent’s Park was finally opened by Queen Mary on 4 July 1914. As far as Dame Margaret was concerned, Consuelo’s efforts on behalf of Bedford had blown it firmly ‘into port’.
Consuelo’s early involvement with the problems of prisoners’ wives continued, and broadened to include other initiatives designed to help less well-off women earn an independent livelihood. One of these was a campaign to build hostels for single women in large cities where they could live respectably and cheaply, following the exposure of dangerous and degrading conditions in common lodging-houses by Beatrice Webb and Mrs Mary Higgs. ‘The number of women workers is increasing every year,’ wrote Consuelo in an article for The Nineteenth Century and After. ‘The obligation to provide housing accommodation for their needs is bound to become more and more urgent … so that the self-respecting woman worker shall be at least as fairly treated as the self-supporting man.’35 In spite of this feminist slant, Consuelo was successful in persuading George Curzon, a leading exponent of anti-suffragism and ‘separate spheres’, to finance and open such a hostel in 1913, in memory of his wife Mary. Another friend, Sir Edgar Vincent, was similarly helpful in giving her the use of a house at Esher Place to provide holidays for single self-supporting women.
More generally, Consuelo’s philanthropic projects can be best understood as a series of overlapping concerns with the welfare of women and children at the centre. (Her keen interest in maternal and child health inspired sections of the press to nickname her ‘the Baby Duchess’.) Her involvement with organisations such as the National Physical Recreation Society was typically Edwardian in that her interest was also triggered by contemporary debates about National Efficiency, a wide movement that emerged around the turn of the century and embraced Fabian socialists such as Sydney and Beatrice Webb as well as the collectivist conservatives like Milner and Chamberlain. Broadly speaking, all factions within this movement were reacting to the perceived decline of industry and agriculture during the previous twenty years and the corresponding enfeeblement of Britain as a world power, a process that had seemed to contribute to the disasters of the South African War and subsequent revelations about the degeneracy of the British population in the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. The evidence showed that it was among the professional and upper middle classes that this decline was greatest; this in turn gave extra impetus to eugenic worries that the ‘better’ elements of the British population might be swamped by the lower classes.
Apprehension about the physical deterioration of the ‘national stock’ stimulated a variety of remedies such as the improvement of secondary education, initiatives such as those of the National Physical Recreation Society, and a bolder application of state power to create a healthier population and more efficient workforce. To this extent, Consuelo’s interest in social welfare issues was not simply driven by feminism and New Liberal ideas about a larger role for the state but by National Efficiency as well. Her interest in the latter movement also accounted for the occasional eugenic flourish in her writing: ‘White Slave traffic, the degeneracy of the race, and the high rate of infant mortality can be traced to the absence of moral supervision and the impossibility to acquire clean and healthy habits of life in the lodging-houses,’36 she wrote apropos of the need for hostels.
This pattern of overlapping concerns applied equally to her campaigns for improved maternal welfare. Once again this was not simply a feminist issue but was related both to National Efficiency issues and the need for social reform. Consuelo was not alone in this. ‘Scrutiny was directed at the newly urgent problem of the ability of the nation’s working-class mothers, who reared Britain’s foot soldiers, to bring up healthy children. Motherhood was no longer a natural attribute of women but a problem and an achievement,’37 writes Ellen Ross. In May 1913, Consuelo gave a speech in which she said that ‘mothers of the present generation left school with little knowledge of domestic science or hygiene and that in consequence they
were incapable of cooking a wholesome meal or giving proper attention to bringing up their children,’38 and then announced that she was setting up the Marlborough School of Mothercraft to train health visitors who could address such problems. Such views on the education of mothers did not make her universally popular. An angry left-wing newspaper retorted that: ‘Schools for mothers are all very well, but when “slumming” Duchesses talk about the failure of elementary education to turn out better workmen and more competent mothers, they simply disclose the failure of upper-class education to turn out persons who can think.’39
Such interests led Consuelo to become involved in a new initiative proposed by one Mrs Fitzstephen O’Sullivan, that a political party should be formed with the express purpose of getting women elected to municipal councils. Mrs O’Sullivan felt this was necessary in response to a growing perception that women were not taking advantage of their right to vote or stand as candidates in municipal elections which they had won in 1894; that women’s interests were thus not properly represented even at local government level; and that this lack of interest gave opponents of suffrage valuable ammunition since women were not making use of the right to vote they already possessed. Mrs O’Sullivan (rather than Consuelo, as she claims) formed the Women’s Municipal Party in March 1913, and announced its existence in the Daily Mail on 26 March.40 This prompted a favourable response from leading newspapers, all asserting that women did not value sufficiently the vote they already had. After several conversations with Mrs O’Sullivan and some careful thought, Consuelo agreed to become its chairman.
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Page 37