Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters After Suffrage in the U.S.

With the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, American women secured the right to vote. Yet, almost 100 years later, we know surprisingly little about how women first cast ballots. Scholars have been hampered by a dearth of appropriate data: Election records do not distinguish between women’s and men’s ballots, and public opinion surveys are unavailable or unreliable in this period. This paper employs unique data and cutting-edge methodological techniques to provide reliable estimates of how women and men turned out to vote and for whom in ten states during the first five presidential elections after suffrage (1920-1936). Our innovative estimates track the political participation of newly-enfranchised women for a larger and more diverse set of places, over a longer period of time, than previous research. With these estimates we examine a number of theoretically and substantively important questions about the electoral incorporation of American women. One conventional wisdom portrays women’s suffrage as a failure: Few women voted, and those who did, voted just as men did. Other scholars, however, claim that in some elections and in some places, women voted in ways that were distinctive and consequential. We place these claims within scholarship on voting and elections more generally, such as work on how habit and experience (both denied the first female voters) influence turnout and party loyalty, and research on the ways in which less politically-engaged voters (a common characterization of women) respond to both encouragement and barriers to the exercise of their suffrage rights. As women’s political rights and status continue to be contested and transformed, our analysis speaks to fundamental issues regarding gender and the political incorporation and participation of women, not only in the U.S. historically, but around the world today.