| Following the American Civil War, women's opportunities in higher education increased nationwide. Between 1870 and 1910 alone, the proportion of women within the student body at colleges and universities rose from 21 to 40%. By 1880, there were 155 private colleges in the Northeast and the South that only accepted female students, and numerous coeducational public institutions in the West that admitted both genders. The widespread extension of academic training to women had many implications for modern American society, including spurring a vigorous campaign for female voting rights on college campuses by the turn of the twentieth century, where suffragists found new audiences and stages to generate respectability and support.;As this study shows, the primary organization responsible for university activism was the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), a group formed in 1900 with city, campus, and national branches to rally students and graduates to the women's rights cause. A small organization compared to other state and national groups, the CESL's significance lay not in membership size, but in the precedents that it set. Exploring the records of state and national suffragists, women's organizations, and academic institutions associated with the CESL shows that the group's campaigns not only bolstered equal franchise activism by reinvigorating the suffrage cause at a crucial moment, but they also changed the culture of women's organizing and higher education. In particular, the CESL's campus campaigns laid the groundwork for later college protests against gender inequality in the 1960s and 1970s and started an often-overlooked trend of youth mobilization for women's rights. As the CESL politicized more students and graduates, the college league's university campaigns also had other effects beyond advancing the equal franchise agenda. The CESL's campaigns, for instance, spurred broader movements against sexism, censorship, and age discrimination and helped to make civic education the important issue it still is today. This dissertation contends that scholars too long have focused on national and state government when determining the influence of women's suffrage, and points out that perhaps the movement's most significant legacies have not been political, but instead, social and cultural. |
