Counting Women's Ballots

Abstract

Counting Women's Ballots On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state in the union to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. After a more than seventy-year battle, women throughout the United States secured the right to vote. The national enfranchisement of women represented the largest expansion of the electorate in American history, nearly doubling the size of the voting age population. 1 Millions of citizens who had never cast a ballot became eligible to do so. This dramatic expansion of the electorate generated a great deal of activity and uncertainty. Newspapers offered advice to new female voters. "You Can't Drag Your Husband Into The Booth When You Vote on Tuesday!" explained the Bridgeport Post (Bridgeport, CT), helpfully adding that "There Are No Mirrors Inside. .. Hubby Cannot Legally Offer You a New Hat to Vote for His Candidate." 2 Political parties and women's organizations designed "play elections" and practice voting booths to teach women how to fulfi ll their new civic obligations. 3 Cities 1 We say "nearly" because eleven states allowed women to vote in the 1916 presidential election. On the other hand, restrictive interpretations of registration rules (ratifi cation occurred after registration deadlines in a number of states) denied women access to the ballot in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina in 1920, delaying women's participation in presidential elections in those states until 1924 (Gosnell 1930). Together with black men, many black women continued to experience systematic exclusion from the franchise until the second half of the twentieth century. 2 "You Can't Drag Your Husband Into The Booth When You Vote Tuesday!" Bridgeport (CT) Post , October 31, 1920. See also: "What the Woman Citizen Should Know" (repeated column).

Direct Democracy and Women's Political Engagement

“…It is, therefore, possible that support for leftist parties is negatively associated with the size of the gender gap in electoral participation. Other studies find that heightened political competition narrowed the gender gap in turnout during this period (Corder and Wolbrecht ; Skorge ) . Finally, to account for potential changes in the gender composition in a given municipality, I include the number of female eligible voters.…”

“…Teele (), for example, argues that heightened political competition and previous suffrage movement in U.S. western states incentivized politicians to mobilize women voters, thereby promoting women's suffrage reform in those states. Similarly, Corder and Wolbrecht () suggest that the level of political competition affected parties' strategy to mobilize new female voters after women's suffrage in the United States. Skorge () contends that proportional representation provided politicians with electoral incentives to mobilize new female voters in Norway.…”

“…As a result, they would be more responsive to electoral incentives shaped by contextual factors than voters who were more experienced and thus more inclined to vote (Kaufmann, Petrocik, and Shaw ; Kleppner ). A study by Corder and Wolbrecht () supports this reasoning by showing that turnout of newly enfranchised women in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s was higher when the election was competitive, and the difference in turnout between competitive and non‐competitive states was much higher among women than men. Studies have also found that previous mobilizational activities, such as the suffrage movement (Carpenter and Moore ) or petition canvassing (Skorge ), increase women's political participation.…”

“…While scholars have examined the effect of cultural (Inglehart and Norris ) and economic factors (Morgan‐Collins and Teele ) on women's political participation, there has been less discussion on how the political environment affects gendered patterns of political behavior. Recently, the historical political economy literature has drawn attention to the role of institutional context by investigating how proportional representation (Skorge ) and heightened party competition (Corder and Wolbrecht ) have increased women's turnout relative to men's in the early twentieth century.…”

“…It builds on an emerging interest in the research on women and politics in utilizing historical data to test previously untestable arguments about women's political behavior. Specifically, these studies have addressed how women's economic status (Morgan‐Collins and Teele ), levels of electoral competition (Corder and Wolbrecht ), or electoral rules (Skorge ) shaped women's voting behavior in the early twentieth century.…”