Abstract
Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes (soon to be Gilmore), Radcliffe class of 1898, asked Alice Stone Blackwell to speak on campus toward the end of their college careers. Both young women became interested in the “woman question” as college students and were dismayed when woman’s suffrage was defeated in an 1895 mock vote in Massachusetts.2 Concerned that their classmates were apathetic or even antagonistic, the young women wondered about student reaction, but Blackwell’s talk was a resounding success. Convinced that college women should not only be educated about suffrage, but that they could and should become important members of the suffrage movement—adding youthful energy and enthusiasm to established suffrage organizations that were “in the doldrums”3—Park and Haynes decided to organize students and recent alumnae around the Boston area. The group they started in 1900 became the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL).4
What [could be] more proper than for this body of young women to gather together and discuss woman suffrage with older women. I believed in putting the young to work.
—Harriot Stanton Blatch1
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Notes
Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 108.
The literature on the American women’s suffrage movement is vast. I found four volumes that provided an overview of the entire movement especially helpful: Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisite, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);
Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959);
Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981);
and Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott, One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
For an overview of patterns of enrollment and general issues for women in higher education, see Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women (Washington, DC: Zenger Publishing Co., 1959);
Jana Nidiffer, “Crumbs from the Boy’s Table: The First Century of Coeducation,” in Women Administrators in Higher Education: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Jana Nidiffer and Carolyn Bashaw (Albany: State University New York Press, 2001), 13–36;
and Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
Two books chronicle the history of African American women and suffrage: African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997)
and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women and the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Leila J. Rupp, “Is Feminism the Province of Old (or Middle-Aged) Women?” Journal of Women’s History 12 (Winter 2001): 164–73.
Harry Burns Hutchins, “The Individual Responsibility of College Women,” Journal of Association of Collegiate Alumnae 7 (April 1914): 45, 48.
Annie R Ramsey, “Women Suffrage in America,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazinein July 1908, Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA.
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
See Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940).
See Inez Haynes Gillmore, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s, 1977)
and Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
See Gillmore, The Story of Alice Paul; and Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom: The Story of the Militant American Suffragist Movement (New York: Schocken Books, 1976).
See, among others, David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980);
Murray Levin, Political Hysteria in America (New York: Basic Books, 1971);
Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W. W Norton, 1979);
and Robert D. Ward, “The Origins and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–1919,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 1 (1960): 51–65.
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© 2008 Anne Meis Knupfer and Christine Woyshner, eds.
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Nidiffer, J. (2008). The National College Equal Suffrage League. In: The Educational Work of Women’s Organizations, 1890–1960. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610125_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610125_5
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