Votes for College Women

Marino looks beyond the northeast’s famous Seven Sisters to reveal that female college students defined the suffrage movement by increasing its credibility, developing innovative tactics, and connecting women across class lines. Her new research on historically Black and co-ed schools across the United States positions women’s voting rights reformers as precursors to more well-known campus activists later in the 20th century. Marino’s marvelous book demonstrates that the suffrage movement not only affected women, but also transformed the development of social movements, higher education, and American political life. ~Allison K. Lange, author of Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement

Votes for College Women offers a grassroots view of the expansion of the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the emergence of the College Equal Suffrage League, Kelly Marino explores the crucial contributions of a new generation of college women to the expansion of support for the Nineteenth Amendment and the subsequent emergence of women as political players in American society. ~Thomas Dublin, editor of The Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States

Marino convincingly challenges the argument that women collegians and graduates were indifferent to efforts to secure female suffrage. Rather, by looking across racial, regional, and generational differences, she demonstrates that the suffrage fight politicized female students, introducing keen political activism and civic participation to American campuses long before the antiwar and free speech movements. ~Linda Eisenmann, author of Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965