... documenting the history of the University of Delaware
Pestalozzi Literary Society No-Name, January 1882
Delawareans at the Epicenter
Should Women Vote
University of Delaware Archives and Records Management
Student political voices normally touch upon the topics that concern them most closely. During Delaware’s first brief period of co education beginning in the 1870s, female students formed their own literary society, named after Swiss educational reformer Johnann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and used it to give voice to their own political desires. Women whose world was expanded by college education longed for a stronger voice in the national arena as well, as noted in this anonymous 1882 poem calling for women’s suffrage. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited state and federal government from gender based voting restrictions, was not ratified until 1920.