Records of the College Equal Suffrage League in the Woman's Rights Collection, 1904-1920

In 1900, suffragists Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes (later Irwin) founded the first College Equal Suffrage League in Boston. During the following decade, Park traveled across Massachusetts and then the United States founding branches, intending to persuade recent college alumnae to take an interest in suffrage work. The hope was that the alumnae would provide the suffrage ranks with younger members and interest current college women in the cause. Park believed that college women belonged in the suffrage movement because they were indebted to early woman's rights advocates, whose activities enabled many more women to attend college.

The league documented in this series apparently first called itself merely "CESL"; it later became the College Equal Suffrage League of Massachusetts and finally, the College Equal Suffrage League of Boston. It counted a number of prominent Boston suffragists among its members and devoted a large part of its time to educating high school and college students about woman suffrage and involving them in suffrage work. For further historical information, see Lois Bannister Merk, Massachusetts and the Woman Suffrage Movement (Ph.D. thesis, 1961), Schlesinger Library microfilm (M-19), or Sharon Strom, "Leadership and Tactics in the American Woman Suffrage Movement: A New Perspective from Massachusetts," Journal of American History 62 (September 1975): 296-315.