Women’s Political Behavior in History

Abstract

In the field of political science little attention has been paid to the drivers of women’s political activity and the implications of women’s political rights prior to the 1960s. This panel considers these issues from a comparative lens. The first paper examines women’s political organization, showing that urban political networks, industrialization, and income equality facilitated Norwegian women’s attempts to petition the government for independence from Sweden in 1905. The second paper re-visits the issue of the “traditional” gender voting gap in the first wave of women’s enfranchisement, arguing that the political economy of the early twentieth century actually pushed women’s votes leftward. The third paper examines the transition to the modern gender gap in the United States using newly available polling data from the 1940s and 1950s. And the fourth paper traces the counter-intuitive demobilization of women in India after they are given property rights in the mid 1950s. Together these works give us insights into the political economy of gender and women's political behavior in an historical moment in which women were quite politically active in spite of having fewer social and economic rights than in the contemporary period. The fourth author is Rachel Brule (India paper) reb11@nyu.edu. Her email is not working currently.

Title	Details
The Consequences of Educational Expansion for the Gender Vote Gap: A Comparative Study of Western Countries	View Paper Details
Petitioning and the Mass Mobilization of Women in Norway	View Paper Details
Re-examining the Gender Gap in the Era of Women’s Suffrage	View Paper Details
Feminine Mystique and the American Woman Voter in the 1940s and 1950s	View Paper Details