In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women around the world demanded and (eventually) secured the franchise. Recent scholarship has uncovered significant electoral and policy consequences of women’s suffrage, providing a valuable corrective to historical accounts that downplayed its importance. However, while suffrage confers a right to have a voice in choosing representatives, little research has examined the impact of suffrage on actual policymaking by those representatives. In this paper, we interrogate how the addition of women voters to the electorate impacted legislative behavior and dyadic representation in American state legislatures, providing a clearer picture of suffrage effects. We generate new data on both state legislators and state legislation from a sample of American states that allow us to exploit both temporal and geographic variation in women’s suffrage as well as other variables, including women’s organizing capacity and party competition. With these data, we explore how women’s enfranchisement affected overall legislative productivity and attention to stereotypical “women’s issues” in the legislative agenda.
