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.

‘Kelly Marino’s meticulous research and rich analysis reveal the ways in which women’s organizations engaged with higher education to reshape the nature of college activism. This must-read study establishes that despite the Nineteenth Amendment’s many shortcomings, it did produce transformative undercurrents in how Americans envisioned gender equity, higher education, and the future of women’s activism.’

Rebecca DeWolf - author of Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict of the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963

‘Kelly Marino challenges us to rethink what we thought we knew about women’s and youth activism in the interwave period and to see organizations like the LWV, NWP, NACWC, and the NACG in a new light. She shows how women’s activism on college campuses changed higher education, integrated women more fully into society, and was the precursor to the more recognized civil rights movements at mid-century and the Women’s Liberation Movement that followed. If you can’t answer the question ‘what did women’s suffrage accomplish?’ you need to read this book.’

Rachel Gunter - author and host of Forgotten America: Rediscovering Events that Changed the Nation

‘Daughters of Democracy is essential reading. Kelly Marino persuasively shows that college campuses were important sites of women’s grassroots political activism, upending common critiques that women’s activism stalled after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Marino’s research on how the LWV, NWP and NACWC each worked to encourage a new generation of women to be active citizens and participants in civic life offers a fresh interpretation of this period.’

Joan M. Johnson - author of The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States

‘Daughters of Democracy is an important reframing of the history of women’s activism moving us beyond a narrow definition of activism as protest to examine the ways that young college women organized to foster civic engagement in the decades between the first and second-wave feminist movement.’

Wendy Rouse - author of Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement