Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

By the time of their conversation, Alva’s involvement with women’s suffrage had brought her in contact with some women who actually knew something about poverty. In 1917, as part of her political work, she had established a soup kitchen in New York City that catered to desperate women and streetwalkers, and had been shocked when some of them came with newspapers for petticoats, their dirt-blackened toes sticking out of battered shoes, owning nothing but their coat and a dented straw hat, complaining that the war had robbed them of all their work. “But I also know that Spiritual Poverty produces as great evils even among the rich. The idle useless lonely woman of the leisure class is a thing spiritually dead.”