Feminine Mystique and the American Woman Voter in the 1940s and 1950s

In the U.S., the years following World War II were characterized by a renewal of conventional femininity, including a limited public role for women. Yet, under this supposed order, important changes were underway. The civil rights movement was challenging racial authoritarianism. The Cold War inspired fear of nuclear war and of the communist next door. Despite expectations, increasing numbers of (white and middle class) women were working outside the home, while many black and working class women were already in the paid work force. Women also challenged stereotypes by their activism and influence in political parties, government agencies, and public life. The postwar period also was a momentous time for the social sciences. Community studies and national public opinion polls were emerging as tools for scholars, offering an unprecedented window into the minds of American voters. The classic voting studies—Voting (1954) and The American Voter (1960)— reinforce a traditional view of women as inherently disinterested in politics, dependent on their husbands for political information and guidance, and undependable and uninformed partisans. In this paper, we bring a fresh eye to the voting behavior of women in the 1940s and 1950s. Employing Gallup data which has only recently become available to modern scholars, we analyze whether, how, and why women of this era cast their ballots. We find women were similar to men in many ways, but distinctive in their electoral behavior in other ways that often went unnoticed or misunderstood by contemporaries. As part of a broader project tracing female voters from enfranchisement to today, this paper offers some of the first insights into how gender shaped voting behavior during this often- idealized period in American history and helps bridge the historic space between what we know about the first female voters and the modern gender gap.