Alva Erskine Belmont, née Smith was a multi-millionaire American socialite and a major funder of the women's suffrage movement. Born in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of a cotton trader, the American Civil War ruined her family, who decamped, like many other high-society Southerners, to Paris. Her family returned to America, this time to New York, after France's defeat by Prussia in 1871. Wikipedia
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