From 1905–1920, American college and university students carried on active and understudied campaigns to gain legitimacy and support for women’s suffrage at institutions of higher education across the United States. The primary organization responsible for initiating and directing campus activism was the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), formed in 1900 by Massachusetts teachers Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes Gillmore to recruit more upper- and middle-class, well-educated, students and alumni to the women’s rights movement. Exploring the records of state and national suffragists, women’s organizations, and academic institutions associated with the CESL shows that the league’s campaigns helped to reinvigorate the suffrage cause at an important moment in the early twentieth century by using educational tactics as powerful tools to cultivate a scholarly voice for the campaign, appeal to the upper classes, and fit within the contexts of higher education and larger movement for progressive reform. In addition to influencing the suffrage cause, campus organizing for equal voting rights changed the culture of female political activism and higher education by ushering a younger generation of articulate and well-trained activists into the women’s rights campaign and starting in a trend of organized youth mobilization for women’s rights at colleges and universities.

Progressive Era school officials transformed public education in American cities by teaching male students trades like foundry, carpentry, and mechanics in classrooms outfitted like factories. Historians have demonstrated how this “vocational education movement” was championed by male administrators and business leaders anxious to train the next generation of expert tradesmen. But women also hoped vocational education could prepare female students for industrial careers. In the early twentieth century, members of the National Women’s Trade Union League demanded that public schools open trade programs to female students and teach future working women the history of capitalism and the philosophy of collective bargaining. Their ambitious goals were tempered by some middle-class reformers and club women who argued vocational programs should also prepare female students for homemaking and motherhood. This article uses Chicago as a case study to explore how Progressive Era women competed and collaborated to reform vocational education for girls, and how female students responded to new school programs designed to prepare them for work both in and outside the home.

In September 1893, Catholic laypeople, clergy, and prelates met at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as the Columbian Catholic Congress to discuss their church's history and chart its course into the future. The leadership of Catholic laywomen in shaping the course of the Congress has been virtually absent in scholarship, much as it was hidden from contemporaries in the past. The act of a Catholic woman speaking among both men and women in a public space was significant, as it demonstrated an increasing assertiveness on the part of Catholic women, including those holding to a conception of gendered, separate spheres, that women had key roles to play in shaping public Catholicity and Catholics’ ideas about their own community of faith. A core group of Catholic women played a hitherto underappreciated part in bringing the Congress to life. This study therefore centers women in the history of, more narrowly, Catholicism's place at the World's Columbian Exposition and, more broadly, the Catholic public of the early Progressive Era, and demonstrates the often-invisible labor in which women engaged to develop their church's intellectual life in the early Progressive Era.