The National College Equal Suffrage League

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