Daughters of Democracy : The Post-Suffrage Women's Movement, Youth Activism, and American Campuses Between the Wars

After the 19th Amendment was ratified, the women's suffrage movement continued to organize on college campuses. Kelly Marino argues against perceptions that the women's movement entered a downturn between first and second wave feminism, revealing the continuity of the 'interwave' years and the roots of the movement's later fragmentation.

In the years leading up to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, women's organizations recognized colleges and universities as potential protest spaces and students as essential recruits in engaging young people's support for gender equality. How these movements continued to organize on campuses in the following decades is told for the first time in this important book. While youth activism in the 1960s and 1970s has been examined in detail, Kelly Marino fills a gap in the scholarship by focusing on the understudied 'interwave' years. She analyzes the legacy of the suffrage movement in modern America and shows why greater fragmentation emerged among women's rights activists later in the century. For scholars and students of women's history, education history, modern American history, gender studies, and political science, Marino offers a fuller understanding of women's suffrage and its impact on higher education, society, government, and culture.