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Votes for College Women: Alumni, Students, and the Woman Suffrage Campaign
Explores the College Equal Suffrage League’s work to advance the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment
The woman suffrage movement is often portrayed as having been led and organized by middle-aged women and mothers in stuffy, formal settings. This dominant account grossly neglects a significant demographic within the movement―college women. Between 1870 and 1910, the proportion of college women in the United States rose from 21 to 40 percent. By 1880, there were 155 private colleges in the Northeast and the South for female students and numerous coeducational institutions in the West. The widespread extension of academic training for women helped spur a well-organized campaign for female voting rights on college campuses, where suffragists found a new audience and stage to earn respect and support.
Votes for College Women examines archives from the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), established in 1900 as an affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, to illustrate the outsize and dynamic role that young women played in the woman suffrage movement. The book vividly illustrates how the CESL’s campaigns served a dual not only did they invigorate the Nineteenth Amendment campaign at a crucial moment, but they also brought about a profound transformation in the culture of women’s organizing and higher education. Furthermore, Kelly L. Marino argues that the CESL’s campaigns set trends in youth activism and helped lay the groundwork for later and more well-known college protests against gender inequality. Fascinating and timely, Votes for College Women shows how these brave women solidified the campus and the classroom as arenas for civic and social activism.
The woman suffrage movement is often portrayed as having been led and organized by middle-aged women and mothers in stuffy, formal settings. This dominant account grossly neglects a significant demographic within the movement―college women. Between 1870 and 1910, the proportion of college women in the United States rose from 21 to 40 percent. By 1880, there were 155 private colleges in the Northeast and the South for female students and numerous coeducational institutions in the West. The widespread extension of academic training for women helped spur a well-organized campaign for female voting rights on college campuses, where suffragists found a new audience and stage to earn respect and support.
Votes for College Women examines archives from the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), established in 1900 as an affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, to illustrate the outsize and dynamic role that young women played in the woman suffrage movement. The book vividly illustrates how the CESL’s campaigns served a dual not only did they invigorate the Nineteenth Amendment campaign at a crucial moment, but they also brought about a profound transformation in the culture of women’s organizing and higher education. Furthermore, Kelly L. Marino argues that the CESL’s campaigns set trends in youth activism and helped lay the groundwork for later and more well-known college protests against gender inequality. Fascinating and timely, Votes for College Women shows how these brave women solidified the campus and the classroom as arenas for civic and social activism.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published April 9, 2024
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February 6, 2026
This book was very informative, honest and interesting. Even though the main focus was the CESL, Marino is honest about the group’s whiteness and discrimination. Thus, to make her project more inclusive and actually reflect her focus, she includes the important work of women of color who contributed to the spread of suffragette thought among college students and alumni of their own race. Overall there was so much I learned from this book as a feminist college organizer myself and I am glad I read it. So much important work to be done and Marino highlights that in this amazing book!
Recommend a chapter or excerpt of any of it for any class on US women’s history.
Recommend a chapter or excerpt of any of it for any class on US women’s history.
Displaying 1 of 1 review