Advanced Lecturer Pens Book on College Students’ Role in Women’s Suffrage

Kelly Marino focuses on Maud Wood Park and others who rallied for 19th Amendment

Kelly Marino, Sacred Heart University history advanced lecturer, explores the role college students and alumni played in the fight for female voting rights in her first book, Votes for College Women: Alumni, Students, and the Woman Suffrage Campaign, which will be released next month.

Marino is a 20th-century historian who focuses on issues relating to women and sexuality. In addition to her position in SHU’s history department, she also coordinates the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program. She has written numerous journal articles, chapters, reviews and editorials on women’s suffrage.

Votes for College Women explores archives from the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), established in 1900 as a National American Woman Suffrage Association affiliate, to illustrate the dynamic role young women played in the equal franchise movement. The book also follows the exploits of Maud Wood Park, the first president of the National League of Women Voters and founding contributor of the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, MA. She is the suffragist who formed the CESL and traveled to colleges and cities around the nation raising awareness for women’s voting rights within higher education.

With the help of research grants from Harvard University, Tulane University, Smith College and Binghamton University, Marino collected information from college yearbooks, club minutes, newspapers, student records and other sources. She learned that early research had been wrong about college students in the early 1900s being apolitical. In reality, they cared about issues like women’s suffrage, although their activism has been unexamined because of its grassroots nature, and their work set the stage for women’s activism on campuses to come.

Her book proves that college women played a pivotal role in the crusade. “It’s important for young people to see how others like them participated in a political movement and were able to create change,” Marino said.

Because of the CESL and other groups, women’s suffrage became a mainstream issue that opposing political parties and people of all backgrounds supported. When the 19th Amendment passed, granting women the right to vote, it changed higher education in many ways. It meant previously male-dominated political science and other programs had to accept women, and these departments had to hire women as faculty members often for the first time, Marino said. Women were granted institutional franchise rights on college campuses.

She explored the role of college women in the suffrage movement for her dissertation in 2013, which she received a contract for in 2022. “I really hope Votes for College Women is in every academic library as part of the suffrage collection,” Marino said. “I think it will appeal to a lot of people. The book is both funny and entertaining.”

David Thomson, associate history professor at Sacred Heart, said the department is thrilled for Marino. “For scholars in the humanities, there’s no greater challenge or academic achievement than the publication of a scholarly monograph,” he said. “But perhaps most important, such works are of great benefit to our students. They not only get to see another component of what our faculty does day in and day out, but also how our scholarship informs our teaching. Given Votes for College Women is a story of women much like our own students, it undoubtedly will resonate with them.”

To learn more about Marino’s book or to purchase it, visit the nyupress.org webpage.