Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/701

which contributed to the victory for the suffrage amendment in November.

The gaining of the franchise in this influential State made a Federal Amendment a certainty of the not distant future and in December the following official notice was sent to the branches of the National League:

At the meeting of the annual council of the National College Equal Suffrage League, held at the New Ebbitt Hotel in Washington, D. C., on Dec. 15, 1917, it was unanimously voted on recommendation of the president and executive secretary to close its work and go out of existence. The delegates present, the officers, and many other suffragists who had been consulted were of the opinion that the objects for which the league was originally organized had been fully attained and that there was no reason for it to continue its work as a separate suffrage organization....

At the time when the league began its work the subject of suffrage could scarcely be mentioned in gatherings of college students and college faculties and was forbidden even as a topic for discussion in the annual conventions of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, but in the nine years that have elapsed since then an overwhelming change of opinion has taken place. Many colleges in which it was planned to organize chapters have stated that there is no need for them, as practically all the members of their faculties and most of their students are already suffragists. At the last biennial convention of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ held in Washington, D. C., in April, 1917, by a unanimous vote it not only reaffirmed its belief in woman suffrage but urged its members to win it for all American women by working for the Federal Amendment. In bringing about this revolution in educated opinion we are happy to believe that the National College Equal Suffrage League has played an important part....

There are belonging to the National League 5,000 members enrolled in over fifty State leagues and chapters and it suggests that they become "Federal Amendment Suffrage Clubs" and arrange for speakers and student debates on the amendment.... Its officers wish to make an urgent appeal to all its leagues and chapters and to every one of its individual members to put their whole force behind the drive for this amendment.... We can perform no more patriotic service for our country or for the world than to win woman suffrage while we are working with all our might to win the war.^[1]

1. The following were the officers of the National College Equal Suffrage League at the time it disbanded: President, M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College; First vice-president, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, honorary president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association; vice-presidents: Mary E. Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College; Ellen F. Pendleton, president of Wellesley College; Lucy M. Salmon, professor of history in Vassar College; Lillian Welch, professor of physiology and hygiene in Goucher College (Baltimore); Virginia C. Gildersleeve, dean of Barnard