>> [Peter Holland] Good afternoon, everybody.
I’m Peter Holland, I’m Associate Dean
for the Arts here at Notre Dame, and every
year I organize the Saturday Scholar series.
Christina Wolbrecht is Professor of Political
Science and she’s the director of the Rooney
Center for the Study of American Democracy
and the Mr. and Mrs. C. Robert Hanley Director
of the Notre Dame Washington Program.
I’ve still not quite gathered from her how
you direct a program in Washington from here,
but I’m sure she spends a lot of time in
the air toing and froing.
She studied her PhD at Washington in St. Louis,
and came straight from there to Notre Dame,
rising through the ranks until in 2017 she
reached the rank of full professor, and we’re
very, very proud of her career here and looking
forward toward the future.
She is an expert on American political parties,
on gender and politics, and political development.
She’s the co-author with Kevin Corder of
“Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters
from Suffrage to the New Deal” published
by Cambridge University Press in 2017, which
received the American Political Science Association’s
Victoria Schuck prize for the best book on
women and politics.
And somewhat earlier, in 2002, she published
“The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties,
Positions, and Change” with the University
of Princeton Press, as well as numerous journal
articles and chapters in book collections
on topics including women as political role
models and the partisan politics of education
policy.
She’s currently co-authoring a book on the
first century of women as voters in the United
States.
We deliberately times having a talk connected
with the midterms until after the midterms,
in order that we could look back rather than
forward, and given the tensions surrounding
the midterms, I think it was a wise decision.
So I’m very pleased to invite Christine
Wolbrecht to come up and talk about “Was
Women’s Suffrage a Failure?”
[applause]
Saturday Scholar 11-10-18: Christina Wolbrecht
>> [Peter Holland] Good afternoon, everybody.
I’m Peter Holland, I’m Associate Dean
for the Arts here at Notre Dame, and every
year I organize the Saturday Scholar series.
Christina Wolbrecht is Professor of Political
Science and she’s the director of the Rooney
Center for the Study of American Democracy
and the Mr. and Mrs. C. Robert Hanley Director
of the Notre Dame Washington Program.
I’ve still not quite gathered from her how
you direct a program in Washington from here,
but I’m sure she spends a lot of time in
the air toing and froing.
She studied her PhD at Washington in St. Louis,
and came straight from there to Notre Dame,
rising through the ranks until in 2017 she
reached the rank of full professor, and we’re
very, very proud of her career here and looking
forward toward the future.
She is an expert on American political parties,
on gender and politics, and political development.
She’s the co-author with Kevin Corder of
“Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters
from Suffrage to the New Deal” published
by Cambridge University Press in 2017, which
received the American Political Science Association’s
Victoria Schuck prize for the best book on
women and politics.
And somewhat earlier, in 2002, she published
“The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties,
Positions, and Change” with the University
of Princeton Press, as well as numerous journal
articles and chapters in book collections
on topics including women as political role
models and the partisan politics of education
policy.
She’s currently co-authoring a book on the
first century of women as voters in the United
States.
We deliberately times having a talk connected
with the midterms until after the midterms,
in order that we could look back rather than
forward, and given the tensions surrounding
the midterms, I think it was a wise decision.
So I’m very pleased to invite Christine
Wolbrecht to come up and talk about “Was
Women’s Suffrage a Failure?”
[applause]
>> [Wolbrecht] Thank you very much.
The real reason for the schedule like this
was, I knew that you want to come on the last
home football game when it’s so cold that
people just think “I’m willing to listen
to a college professor for a little bit of
time to warm up before I go outside for this
game.”
So I am thrilled to be here, and thank you
for taking some time out of your football
Saturday to come and listen to me talk a little
bit about this research.
I am going to mostly be telling about some
of the research I and my collaborator have
done on women voters immediately after suffrage,
but I have already given at least two talks
about women in the midterms and I tossed those
slides in at the end so if you have any questions,
I’d be happy to talk about that as well.
So as Professor Holland kindly said, the research
I’m going to talk about today was published
in a book two years ago called “Counting
Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage
to the New Deal,” in which my co-author
and I were trying to understand how women
voted immediately after suffrage.
And I’ll talk in a few minutes about why
a hundred years after this we actually still
don’t know much about how women voted after
suffrage, and I will of course give full credit
to my collaborator Kevin Corder, who is, you
know, my full partner on this research and
on the book that we are finishing this weekend.
So I have to get out of here and get back
to my computer!
As you’re probably aware, a struggle for
women’s suffrage took more than seventy
years in the United States.
A number of states passed amendments to their
constitutions or laws that allowed women to
vote.
I have this picture up of Oregon because that’s
my home state.
But yet it was really sort of a long struggle
and I’d be happy to talk later about why
it took so long and why there was so much
opposition to the idea of women voting.
The success at the national level and therefore
across most of the United States takes place
in 1920 when Congress passes and the President
signs the 19th Amendment to the United States
Constitution.
That amendment, in case you can’t read it,
says the right of citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any state on account
of sex.
In theory, then, enfranchising all women.
Now the reality of that is going to be very
different.
In the same way that Jim Crow in the South
kept African American men who’d been enfranchised
by the 15th Amendment unable to vote there,
we’re going to see that same sort of dynamic,
and so it really won’t be until 1965 that
most African American women are able to enjoy
the rights provided them in the 19th Amendment.
So my gosh, we just enfranchised half the
population!
This is one of the biggest extensions of voting
rights certainly in American history, but
in around the world as well as part of sort
of a wave of extensions of suffrage.
What are women going to do, right?
What is going to happen?
So this is a Normal Rockwell picture—you
can’t see, but the woman is holding a picture
of Harding and the man has a newspaper of
Cox.
So Harding was the Republican and Cox was
the Democrat in 1920.
So lots of talk about this, right?
Anticipation and preparation.
One of the big issues was how women would
actually be registered to vote.
So you’ve got “women will aid registrars,
state obstacles to women’s vote loom.”
The problem was during this period a lot of
states had pretty restrictive voting rules,
including very long periods for voter registration.
So in many states you had to be registered
to vote a full six months’ advance of the
election.
The 19th Amendment was signed by President
Wilson on August 26, 1920, which meant there
were only about five to six weeks before that
first presidential election in 1920.
A number of states found easy ways to do this:
the state legislature passed a quick little
law that said we’re going to have these
open days for women to register, but actually
in four southern states women did not vote
in the 1920 presidential election because
their state legislatures basically said the
deadline was back in the Spring and you missed
it, sorry.
We’ll see you in 1924.
Alright.
So there’s efforts to register women, and
then groups that wanted to make sure women
could vote, in particular a suffrage organization
that had transformed themselves into the League
of Women Voters.
They would hold practice elections at state
fairs.
There was one in a department store in New
York City.
All to sort of give women the opportunity
to see what it is you do behind that curtain
when you go and vote, how do you fill out
a ballot, etc.
So this article here is about the Minnesota
State Fair, “Women Learn how to Vote at
Fair.”
The Bridgeport Connecticut Sunday Post had
a whole ongoing series trying to teach women
how to vote.
This is one of my favorites, it’s a joke
but not really.
“You can’t drag your husband into the
booth when you vote Tuesday,” and “there
are no mirrors inside, your friend or hubby
cannot legally offer you a new hat to vote
for his candidate.”
Well, I think your husband could probably
buy you a new hat, but….
And of course the parties organize around
this as well, right?
So there’s this new group in the electorate,
there’s a lot of uncertainty about how they’re
going to vote.
And so Democrats laid plans to snare women’s
votes, that’s the Chicago Tribune.
This is a button, Harding-Coolidge, the straight
Republican ticket.
“Under the 19th Amendment I cast my first
vote.”
So everyone’s trying to sort of figure out
how women are going to vote, how do get them
to the polling places, how do we make sure
they know what to do, etc.
>> But there was also a lot of uncertainty.
So in virtually every election after suffrage
was granted there would always be stories.
This is the year.
Have you seen these long lines of women registering
to vote?
We’re going to have so many women registering
to vote that they’re going to outnumber
men.
Women will not outnumber men as voters until
1964, and at that point they still voted at
a lower rate than men did, but there are more
adult women so the number of women was greater.
It won’t be until 1980, sixty years after
the 19th Amendment, that women will vote at
a higher rate than do men to this day.
So women filled lines, women take the ballot
seriously, but politicians on the other column
here are very worried.
There are all these ideas, right?
Women are more flaky, they’re not as loyal,
they’re all emotional.
Maybe they’ll be swayed by stories about
how good-looking Harding is and that’s going
to sway them one way or the other.
Or, you know, they won’t kind of fall in
line.
This is the period of really strong political
party machines, and the concern was “Who
the heck knows what women are going to do?”
and the whole electoral system as far as parties
are concerned is about knowing what voters
are going to do.
Figuring that out and trying to be successful.
>> So the parties and the press decided pretty
quickly that they knew how women had voted,
so there’s the first presidential election
in 1920 and by the time we roll around to
the second presidential election after the
ratification of the 19th Amendment, this narrative
of failure had become fairly dominant in coverage
of women voters.
This may be the only Saturday Scholar this
semester in which one of the sites is from
Good Housekeeping.
I don’t know, though.
So this is a Good Housekeeping article from
1924, “Is women’s suffrage a failure?
Are women a failure in politics?”
You’re getting the theme.
“Is women’s suffrage a failure?” by
Charles Edward Russell, a major writer at
that time.
As someone said to me at an earlier talk,
this would basically be the Twitter hot takes,
if we had Twitter in 1924.
So everyone’s talking about boy, women fought
so hard to get the right to vote, but the
whole thing didn’t really work.
So what do they mean when they said failure?
They really had two things in mind.
Oh, I’m sorry, back it up a slide: I want
to also say that this not only was in the
press, but became the dominant narrative in
academia as well.
So this is an early article based on the Illinois
data I’m going to talk about later, and
the title kind of says it all.
“American women’s ineffective use of the
vote.”
I can tell you, if you read about how women
voted after suffrage in textbooks, in research
all through the fifties, sixties, and seventies
and you follow the cites back, it will eventually
land on this article and like a New York Times
report from some party leader upstate who
said “those women didn’t vote.”
That’s basically the empirical evidence
we have.
But this really becomes the conventional wisdom.
So when I started this project I would say
to people, well I’m studying how women voted
after suffrage, and they would say well, don’t
we know that already?
They didn’t, and as you’ll see in a second
they voted just, and those who did voted just
as their husbands did.
So I’m going to talk in a few seconds about
why that claim is problematic.
>> So part one: a failure, women didn’t
vote.
That they’d fought so hard but that women’s
turnout was very low so turnout overall drops
in 1920 because of course you expanded the
electorate but a lot of them aren’t voting.
This was a well-known book about the Roaring
Twenties: the American woman won the suffrage
in 1920, she seemed it’s true to be very
little interested in it once she had it.
Why?
Because the ideas of the antisuffragist had
been correct; women are thinking a lot about
marriage and men in moustaches, hats, chocolate,
and letters.
But they really fundamentally don’t think
about politics, right?
So this is a very old idea, women’s place
is in the home.
Literally, that is women’s domain, her arena,
and the public world really belongs to men.
And so most of the people looking at women’s
lower turnout in the twenties thought well
of course, right, that’s not what women
naturally do.
The other piece of that was the presumption
that women mostly voted like their husbands.
Overwhelmingly, right, the idea was women
are basically doing what they’re told.
So this is a headline from the Boston Globe
in 1920: “Men reported to be telling women
how they ought to vote.”
This becomes really important.
So when George Gallup starts his famous surveys
in the 1930s, the earliest survey research
we have in the United States, he doesn’t
actually do a random sample, he does something
called “a control sample” where you’re
trying to get certain groups.
And he on purpose undercounted women, and
when you asked him why he said, I don’t
need to figure out how women are going to
vote.
How will women vote on election day?
Just exactly as they were told the night before.
So they’re just doing what their husbands
tell them.
Now, we might think that this is, you know,
polling and this is newspapers.
I’m not going to ask you to read these slides.
If you were lucky enough to be a graduate
student in American Politics, these would
all be very famous sources for you.
So the first one is a book called “Voting,”
one of the very first studies of kind of empirical
studies of voting in the United States.
The second one is even more famous, the names
Campbell, Converse, Miller & Stokes are kind
of like the Four Horsemen of American politics.
And what they’re all basically saying from
their surveys was, women don’t pay attention
to politics, they’re not as interested in
it, and they basically do what their men tell
them to do.
So the wife who votes but otherwise pays little
attention to politics tends to leave not only
the sifting of information to her husband,
but abides by his decision about the direction
of the vote as well.
That may well have been true.
Whether or not these authors using some of
the earliest survey research that we have
were able to show that, is a very different
question.
I won’t go into that in detail, but their
read on, as is always true, of the survey
research they did have was clearly influenced
by their biases.
So when women were more likely to say that
they talked about politics with their family
than men were, which would not surprise us
given that men were more likely to be in the
workforce and have other opportunities, they
read that as women listen to their husbands,
not there’s an equality or dialogue sort
of happening.
And again, that may well have been the case,
but we don’t really have a lot of empirical
evidence to make these sorts of conclusions.
>>So.
Women get the vote in 1920.
Pretty quickly we decide that women, it just
didn’t work, it was a failure, and it’s
going to take a long time for women to really
become active in elections.
So we wanted to look at women voters after
suffrage, and you might be asking yourself,
that was a hundred years ago?
How is it that we don’t already know how
women voted after suffrage?
Well, as many of you who voted in midterm
elections just a few days ago might recall,
your ballots are not pink and blue.
When you send them in or put them in a voting
box, the sex of the voter is not recorded.
We, in some places we have registration information
on who voted, but for the most part election
returns cannot tell us how men and women voted
separately.
For that reason, we really know very little
about women voters during this period.
Now the modern solution to that, when you’re
saying but wait, I know so much about how
women vote today, is of course the modern
political opinion poll.
But we’re not going to see reasonably good
political opinion polls until the late 1930s,
some fifteen to twenty years after women got
the right to vote.
So what do we do?
That’s what we sort of wanted to address
in this project.
This cartoon was on the Dallas morning news
on election day in 1920.
Enter Mr. and Mrs. Voter, they’re both holding
ballots, and it says get out of the way, we’ll
settle this argument, and on the floor are
things like statistics, estimates, figures.
The point is, the idea was, women are going
to vote, we’re going to know how it is women
vote.
But the truth is, we really were not able
to find out immediately after those elections.
This is the most boring slide I’m going
to show today, I promise.
Well, afterwards we’ll have a vote, you
can tell me.
But, so what do we do?
In the statistical sense, this is known as
an ecological inference problem.
We have aggregate data, but we want to know
things in a much finer grain.
So from the election returns, for all sorts
of places, this example is actual numbers
from Chicago Ward 27 in 1920, we know how
many people voted Democratic, Republican,
third party, and didn’t vote.
They abstained, right?
So the election record tells me that for Chicago
Ward 27.
And then I can go to the US census and I can
find out for Ward 27 how many election-aged
women, so 21 or plus, and election-aged men
lived in Ward 27 in 1920.
So I’ve got those two pieces of information.
But what I want to know is how many women
voted Democratic, how many men voted Republican,
how many women didn’t vote, etc.
That turns out to be a much harder thing to
figure out.
Again, as I said, that’s considered in statistical
terms an ecological inference problem, and
we take advantage of the fact that there have
been major advances in that sort of statistical
technique in the last 25 years.
And so we’re able to use basically estimation
approaches that weren’t really available
to scholars until recently to try to go back
and look at a very old problem, very old sort
of puzzle we weren’t able to answer.
Now I could—I already told you this is the
most boring, so you know I’m not going to,
I could show you lots of statistical results
that try to convince you that this estimation
procedure, the thing that we do to figure
out how men and women voted in these places,
works.
But my understanding is that there’s a pretty
strict rule that we have no math before football.
So instead I’m going to give you some much
more intuitive reasons to think about this
research that we did makes sense.
We’re going to take advantage of the, what
we call the Illinois exception.
So remember how I told you that there aren’t
really pink and blue ballots?
That’s true, but there are exceptions.
So in the years before the 19th Amendment
was ratified, a number of states granted women
the right to vote but only for a subsection
of elections.
So for example, as early as 1849 Kentucky
gave women who were widows and had school-aged
children the right to vote in school board
elections, right?
So you get a say over your child’s education,
there’s no man in the house to give you
that say, we will grant you the right to vote.
In Illinois, women got the right to vote in
presidential elections in 1913, but there
was a sort of aspect of the Illinois state
constitution that allowed the state to enfranchise
women for certain offices but not for others.
And what that meant is that they had to print
different ballots for men and for women.
That was actually not that exceptional.
In Connecticut, for example, they had separate
voting machines for men and for women.
But Illinois stands out as the only state,
and pretty close to the only one in American
history, that actually counted and reported
men’s and women’s ballots separately.
They did that in 1916 when women had the right
to vote for president in Illinois, and they
did that in 1920 five weeks after the 19th
Amendment was ratified, and that’s it.
We’ve got some local races in between, right?
And so this is an actual ballot box, ballots
for women as opposed to others.
Because there were in this one exceptional
place separate ballots for men and women.
So most of the conclusions that people have
drawn about how women voted after suffrage
come from Illinois.
And that’s perfectly fine.
Illinois is a very lovely place, as you may
be aware.
But as we’re going to, one of the things
we’re going to show is that the way in which
women voted depended a great deal on their
context.
So knowing how women voted in Illinois actually
doesn’t tell us that much about how women
voted in Virginia or Oklahoma or Massachusetts.
So that’s what we’re going to look at.
So just to give you a sense of what this looks
like, I spent one spring break with my husband
driving around to the counties, there are
101 in case you’re wondering, counties in
Illinois.
We did not drive to all hundred.
These are the ones where the counties told
me oh sure, we have those old election books
but you’ll have to come here and copy them
yourselves.
So we were in musty basements.
This is from DeKalb county.
There were separate election books for all
of the election districts, so this is the
village hall in Lee, which is election district
#2, and you can tell the difference, this
is men’s and then the one for women has
women at the top, right?
So the default is men and then here’s the
whole book for women.
A different model, this is Burell county in
Illinois for 1916, these are votes for people
who, electors, so back in the day you’d
actually have the electors on your ballot.
These are for Democratic electors and there’s
a column here for men and there’s a column
here for women.
So if you were lucky enough to be a Notre
Dame undergraduate about ten years ago, you
would have the great joy of entering in pencil-written
election returns, sometimes on microfilm,
into a big Xcel spreadsheet so that we would
have this sort of information about how women
voted in these places.
>> So.
Let’s think about what we have in Illinois.
So in Illinois I have that census data I talked
about, about how many men and women were there,
and I have overall how men and women voted.
I want to know the stuff in the middle.
But in Illinois I actually know the stuff
in the middle.
So what we did is, in Illinois we first estimated,
we pretended we didn’t know that stuff in
the middle because we’re not going to know
that in any other states.
And we said okay, when we use this statistical
method what do we find out, what percentage
of women vote in each county or how do women
vote overall in Illinois and men vote overall?
And then we compared our estimates using that
method to what we actually knew about Illinois,
and that’s what’s happening here.
So this is how women voted in 1916, men in
1916, women in 20, men 20, and basically what
you’re supposed to conclude from this graph
is that our estimate, which is right here
in the gray, is very very close to the actual
number.
We’re usually within two or three percentage
points, which is of course about the kind
of confidence interval you’re going to have
around a regular survey or a poll leading
up to elections.
So we’re not perfect.
We underestimate women’s turnout and overestimate
men’s pretty similarly, but all of the estimates
of how men and women actually voted are within
our—it’s not actually a confidence interval
for complicated reasons, Bayesian credible
interval—and so we feel pretty good that
this method can let us get pretty close to
how men and women actually voted in these
elections.
So then the goal is okay, we’ve got a method
that works in Illinois where we can verify
it, let’s go apply that to all the other
states.
So this is a glimpse of American politics
in 1920s.
This was a period of incredible one-partisanship.
So there was really no Republican Party to
speak of in the American South, and Republicans
were really dominant across a great deal of
the Midwest.
And I should say the West as well.
It would have been great to be able to do
this in all, in 1920, in 48 states.
The problem is that out here in places like
Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, they’re
literally still drawing county lines in the
1920s, right?
And so I have election data that’s coming
from election records, I’ve got census data
every ten years.
It’s virtually impossible to match these
things up during this period in these states
that are frankly fairly new as late as 1920.
So we end up being able to do this in about
ten states.
It is not representative of the entire United
States, but we do have some variation in the
Midwest, we’ve got some more Democratic
states in the South and in the border.
We’ve got these sort of Northeastern very
strong Republican places in 1920, etc.
And so while we aren’t able to do this across
every state, and we’re not even able to
do this across a random sample of states,
this is more information about how men and
women voted than we had from Illinois, right?
So Illinois tells me how men and women voted
in 1916 and 1920.
My estimates are going to tell you how men
and women voted in ten states from 1920 to
1936.
So, was women’s suffrage a failure?
You came here out of the cold to find out
if women’s suffrage was a failure.
And yes, women are far less likely to turn
out to vote than are men in these five elections.
So the blue is women, the red is men, this
is percent turnout, 1920 to 1936.
You’ll see that both are increasing over
time, women a little bit sharper, so they’re
slowly closing up but it’s going to be very
slow.
And we’ve got a gap of about 35 points in
that first election.
Women are not taking advantage of their new
right.
That is the obvious conclusion.
But things look a little different when we
actually look at the state level.
So this is the ten states in our study arranged
from the lowest turnout to the highest.
Virginia’s here at the bottom with extremely
low turnout as a result of the fact that this
is of course an authoritarian regime, nondemocratic
authoritarian regime.
In the 20s there’s lots of structures to
keep people from voting, particularly people
of color.
But it’s important to say that those poll
taxes and all the other structures kept a
lot of poor whites from voting as well, through
to Missouri and Kentucky.
So what explains this variation in turnout,
and what does it mean for the conclusions
we’re going to draw about women in the first
elections after suffrage?
Well the first thing to say is, there were
some places where women got the right to vote
and more than half of them showed up at the
first election, right?
So despite all that socialization, despite
all these things, women turned out, more than
half of women turned out to vote in Missouri
and in Kentucky in 1920.
States where women had had no right to vote
before that.
On the other hand, only a little bit more
than 20 percent of women showed up to vote
in Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1920,
and fewer than about 6 percent of women turned
out to vote in Virginia.
So these were also places where women got
the right to vote for the first time, but
they are far less likely to turn out to vote
than were their sisters in Missouri and Kentucky.
So what makes Missouri and Kentucky different
than Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut?
I want to emphasize two things.
One is the level of competition.
Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut were
very uncompetitive places in the 1920 election.
So Democrats completely governed the state
of Virginia, there’s really the actions
in primaries, there’s not a lot happening
in the general election, and so there’s
very little competition for voters in those
states.
So when you know the one party or the other
is going to win, you might think that voters
rightfully think well, it doesn’t matter
how I vote, they’re gonna win anyway.
But you’ve also got to think, and we just
saw this in the midterm elections, when elections
are a blowout people don’t invest a lot
of time in trying to mobilize people, trying
to get out the vote, because even if you got
out, you know, a hundred more people for your
side, you’re very unlikely to change the
outcome.
That’s very different in places like Missouri
and Kentucky.
In Kentucky the presidential election was
decided in 1920 by .01 percent of the vote.
Missouri wasn’t quite that razor-thin, but
was also a place that not only was competitive
in 1920, but had traditionally been more competitive.
So there were built-up organizations so both
parties competed.
So they had an incentive to try and get every
vote they possibly could.
And it turns out when elections are that close,
parties and groups are even willing to try
to mobilize women voters.
And women voters themselves know that this
is a close election.
There’s going to be lots of coverage in
the press, it’s going to be easy to find
out who’s running for office, where to vote,
etc., etc.
So in general we know that competition has
a positive impact on how people, ooh, I did
that one first, we’ll go this way— but
we’re going to see that it has an even bigger
effect on women during this period.
So this is showing, the blue is one-party
Democratic states, red is one-party Republican,
and then the more competitive states are here
in green.
For both women and men, the more competitive
your states—the South is distinctly un-Democratic
during this period—you know you’re going
to get an increase in turnout.
Always going up.
But the difference for men between, say, one-party
Republican and competitive is only about 12
points.
So it matters, it doesn’t matter a lot.
For women, however, it’s a 21-point gap.
The way to think about that is that places
that weren’t competitive were particularly
demobilizing for women.
That already facing all these other barriers
to their voting and social norms and no experience
and no practice, when places weren’t very
competitive and didn’t try to get them out
to vote, women were more likely to stay home.
Now, the other thing that distinguishes these
states are what their electoral laws look
like.
So I already mentioned that this is a period
in which many states had really restrictive
election laws.
Poll taxes, literacy tests, all the things
that hopefully you’ve heard of and learned
about that were used to discourage particular
groups of people from voting.
In Virginia that was of course people of color.
In Massachusetts and Connecticut it was all
those Irish immigrants that were coming to
the United States during this period.
So Massachusetts and Connecticut are amazingly
more than 60 percent second-generation immigrants
in 1920.
And this was of great concern to the traditional
political leaders in those states, and so
Connecticut has a literacy test, Massachusetts
has a poll tax, etc.
It turns out, and we know this, that everywhere
the more rules you have to discourage voting,
guess what they worked.
And so both men and women are going to be
less likely to turn out in places with lots
of electoral rules.
But again, we’re going to see a bigger impact
on women.
So the red places are places that only have
a requirement that you be a resident, that’s
pretty common.
The blue places are places that have other
rules: poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.
So for men that’s a 20 percent drop-off
between those two kinds of places; for women
that’s a 25 point drop-off.
And so again, things that discourage voting
seem to particularly discourage voting among
women.
What that means is that we have a really big
difference in gender gaps, and our conclusion
about whether or not women were willing to
vote is really going to differ depending on
where we look.
So in Connecticut, for example the biggest
turnout gender gap of 41 points.
You know, women, men in, over 60 percent of
men in Connecticut are voting compared to
just over 20 percent of women.
On the other hand, in Missouri we’re going
to have a gender turnout gap of just about
24 points.
That’s a big gap, not gonna say it isn’t,
and certainly we would expect that to happen
right after a group wins the right to vote.
But that’s a lot different conclusion than
what we might gather from thinking about Connecticut.
Illinois here has a fairly big gap, but not
huge, but doesn’t reflect sort of a huge
variation.
In fact, I’d go even a little farther.
So if we were just to look at the gap between
women across states, moving from Virginia
to Kentucky, it’s more than a 50-point difference,
right?
You were more than 50 points more likely to
vote if you were a woman in Kentucky than
if you were a woman in Virginia.
The gap between men and women is only about
32 points, right?
So my point is: context, where you voted,
was actually a bigger impact on whether or
not you turned out to vote than whether or
not you were a woman.
So there’s absolutely gender gaps in all
these places.
But the gap between women in Virginia and
women in Kentucky is even larger than we see
across men and women in most places.
In fact as you saw, 41 points is the biggest
gender gap in any state, and we’re going
to exceed that between women.
>>How about women vote like their husbands?
Women, all of whom have been socialized to
believe that women do not belong in politics
and politics is the business of men, who had
been sort of denied the opportunity to reinforce
partisanship and party loyalty through repeated
voting, mostly in fact vote a lot like men
in the first five presidential elections after
suffrage.
So again, men in red, women in blue, this
is the percent Republican, this was a very
strong period for Republicans in the 1920s
and both men and women vote very strongly
for Republicans.
We then have the largest political transformation
or electoral transformation in American history
with the Great Depression and the New Deal,
Franklin Roosevelt, and now we’ve got a
population that mostly votes Democratic in
32 and 36, and both men and women make that
change.
There are, however, small differences, quite
small.
Women are slightly more Republican during
this period and slightly more Democratic during
this period.
I have a whole other talk about this, but
I’ll talk a little bit about women being
slightly more Republican in the 1920s.
Again, the story gets more complicated if
we look down at our states.
So this is our same states set up the same
way: women in blue, percent voting Republican,
men in red.
In most places there’s not a very big difference
between men and women.
But in the Midwest—so this is Kansas, Iowa,
Minnesota, and Illinois—places where the
Republican party is really quite strong during
this period, women are actually more likely
to vote Republican than are men.
So the parties have this idea that we won’t
be able to count on women voters, they’ll
flake out, they’ll do things, we see repeatedly
that the first elections after suffrage women
are actually more loyal to local parties than
are men.
They’re the ones that keep flaking out and
going all over the place, I’ll show evidence
of that in just a second.
But women are actually overwhelmingly supporters
of the Republican party where the Republican
party is the strongest.
In Virginia where the Democratic party is
the strongest, and remember this is percent
Republican, women are actually more Democratic
than are men and statistically significant
there as well.
So what we see is not so much that women were
all Republicans or women were all Democrats,
but that if there’s any pattern it’s that
women tended to be more loyal to the parties
nearby.
And I can talk a little bit about why that
is in the Q&A.
And so it’s very difficult, and this should
absolutely be your takeaway, to talk about
women voters.
They’re different across all sorts of demographic
groups and they’re even going to look different
depending on the context.
So where parties are strong, women tend to
be more loyal to those specific political
parties.
>>What about the progressives?
So one of the reasons that many groups mobilized
against women voting was the women as a group
were so closely associated with the Progressive
movement.
So we’ve got Housewives’ Alliance for
Proper Inspection of Meat, this is about child
labor, Women Trade Union League, and of course
Women in Prohibition.
And so it’s worth saying that one of the
biggest funders of anti-suffrage activity
were alcohol distributors at the end of the
19th, beginning of the 20th century, because
those people knew where there money came from
and they feared that women would vote for
prohibition.
And so how do we sort of test this?
Does this activism translate into actual votes?
So in 1924 Progressives were so dissatisfied
with the two choices—Republicans had actually
traditionally been the Progressive party,
but both parties were pretty conservative
during this period—that they nominated Robert
Lafollette, a senator and well-known Progressive
as a Party candidate.
Until Ross Perot, he had the highest vote,
like 19 percent, of the vote for Lafollette
in 1924 of any third-party candidate in the
20th century.
So: did women turn out in waves for this Progressive
candidate?
Uh, no.
They did not.
So we don’t have any evidence; the only
place that comes close is Virginia and these
numbers are too small for us to make any sort
of generalization.
I kept the span just to give a sense that
there was a lot of support, especially Minnesota,
but this is still minority party.
So women were not more likely to defect to
Progressives, and in fact in two states, in
Kansas and Illinois, we actually find that
men were more likely to vote for the third-party
option than were women.
So if anybody was abandoning the parties for
some sort of new idea, it at least in this
election and in these states was not women,
and in some cases it was men.
>> So.
Not giving away the end yet.
Was women’s suffrage a failure?
So, it is absolutely true that women’s turnout
was low and would remain lower than men’s.
It surpasses men in the 1980s, the gap had
mostly been closed by the late sixties and
early seventies.
But we see that in places where women didn’t
face strong electoral laws that barred them
from voting or made it more difficult for
them to vote, where competition was high and
so there was a lot of information about elections
and a lot of incentive for other people to
motivate or mobilize women as voters, women
were capable of fairly significant turnout.
We might hit our all-time high or recent high
for turnout in midterm elections this year,
but we’ll be lucky if that’s over 50 percent.
We saw more than 50 percent of women voting
in 1920 in states that were competitive and
didn’t have a lot strict election rules.
And we see that context seems to matter more
than gender.
Where you first voted seemed to be more important
to determining whether or not you were going
to vote, or where you first had the right
to vote, than the fact that you were a woman.
We don’t see many gender differences in
vote choice, and I would point out even today
when there’s so much talk about the gender
gap, those gaps between men and women are
much smaller than gaps between lots of other
groups on the basis of education, on the basis
of race, etc.
That said, there is some evidence that women
were initially more loyal to local parties
and less likely to vote for the Progressive
party.
>>So the last thing I want to talk about is
in some sense this disconnect between the
rhetoric, women’s suffrage is a failure,
and how women actually voted.
You can kind of excuse it in the 1920s.
There’s no polling data, there’s systematic
study of women voters and men voters.
And so all we can do is sort of look around
and make our best guesses and try to understand
what’s happening.
Of course today we have a gazillion polls,
I think there’s nothing but polls sometimes,
right, in your news feeds, etc.
And so we would think that we must be much
better in our narratives and in the way we
think about women as voters now than we were
a hundred years ago.
But that’s not so true, either.
So when we talk about women voters today we
like to talk about moms, and this is I think,
so the book I’m finishing is on this first
hundred years, this is one of the most consistent
themes across a hundred years.
The first appeals to women were all about
motherhood and education, so the laws that
were passed were about maternity care and
these sorts of things.
And we are still talking about moms.
So since 1996 we’ve been really interested
in this idea of soccer moms, by which we pretty
much mean white suburban women with children
at home, okay?
But we have more moms, we have security moms,
since 9/11 in particular and we’re still
talking about these, so this is, these are
all headlines from 2016.
I did not mean to do that.
Why Donald Trump is targeting the security
moms, how candidates can capture the security
moms.
These are again mostly white suburban women
who are very concerned about terrorism and
safety.
Then we got waitress moms, this started particularly
in 2000.
This is sort of less upper middle-class women
who work hard to take care of their families
and are also seen as an important swing vote.
And then of course we’ve even got hockey
moms, right?
So we just, every woman in politics is a mom
of some sort.
So what’s the problem with that narrative?
The problem with that narrative is it really
narrows the perceived political interests
of women.
It’s also not particularly accurate.
So from 1980 to 2016 this is the percent of
all women voters who are white, married, and
have children at home.
Okay.
As late as 1980, which is the first year of
the modern gender gap, there’s still about
30 percent of women voters.
By 2016 fewer than 20 percent of women who
vote fall into exactly those categories.
And there’s a lot going on there, right?
There’s the racial and ethnic diversification
in the United States, there’s changes in
marital status and marital patterns and fertility
patterns.
A lot of things that are happening that make
the modal woman no longer look like these
stereotypes that still remain so very popular.
And we are hearing, and this is again happening
in the midterms and I’d be happy to talk
about that as well, about certain groups of
women.
So we, after 2016 election when a majority
of women cast their vote for the Republican
nominee for President, Donald Trump, there
were all sorts of expressions of shock and
dismay.
How could women, any woman, and white women
in particular, vote for a candidate who’d
been, you know, said such terrible things
about women, accused of such terrible things
about women, caught on tape saying terrible
things about women, etc.
Again, I think it’s important to fall back
on the “not all women are the same” and
that women’s gender is not the number one
thing determining their vote any more than
their gender is the number one thing determining
men’s vote.
So if you think it’s shocking that a majority
of white women voted for the Republican candidate
in 2016, I have news for you.
White women have voted a majority for the
Republican candidate for President in every
presidential election since we started having
really good academic polls in 1952.
The exceptions are 1964 when everybody voted
for Lyndon Johnson.
You of course know they were voting against
a Republican whose Vice President was the
only Domer ever on a major party ticket, “Bombs
Away” Lemay.
And in 1996, when a slight majority of white
women voted for Bill Clinton’s reelection.
Partisanship, as we like to say using technical
terms from political science, is a helluva
drug.
And we are in a time period, and again you
might not have perceived this, but we’re
in a time period of really extreme partisanship
at the individual level.
So in 2016 over 90 percent of women who identity
as Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton, and
over 90 percent of women who identify as Republicans
voted for Donald Trump, which is pretty much
the same rate at which men did the same.
And so there are lots of reasons why there
are some differences in the partisanship of
men and women, but at the end of the day those
sorts of loyalties that are tied to all sorts
of other forms of identity—racial, economic,
education, regional, etc.—really kick in.
And seem to, whatever we might think women
should vote, and I think it’s always problematic
to tell people how they should vote, based
on their gender there are lots of other characteristics
that are coming into play.
>>So I will finish then and be pleased to
take your questions.
Thank you very much!
[applause]
>>[questioner] …. Deep South and the West
coast?
>>[Wolbrecht] In our twenties data?
So no.
As I was explaining, the kind of data that
we need from that period, they’re still
drawing county borders during that period
so trying to match up election data with county,
with census data, is nearly impossible.
There’s also not that, so you know, you’re
going into your 21st century point of view,
so it’s like well we have to get California.
There are so few people in California even
as late as 1920.
In Wyoming there’s like literally less than
500,000 people.
So it just becomes an estimation problem.
There’s more people living in most of the
Chicago wards than in some of these states.
Now we’ve really been pushed on the western
part because of course women got the vote
earliest in those western states.
And so if we are able to finish this other
book without killing each other, we might
try to go back and really—I spent a whole
week in the archives in Oregon trying to find
more of this sort of data, and it just wasn’t
possible.
Yeah.
>>[questioner] If I remember the slides correctly,
it looked like there was a big jump in turnout
in 1928.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
>>[Wolbrecht] I would love to.
That is such a great question, and a great
question on this campus.
So 1928 is the Rum and Religion election.
So it’s the first election in which Democrats
nominate a Catholic for President, Al Smith,
and there was a lot of controversy over Prohibition
which of course had been made the law of the
land with the 18th Amendment.
And Smith, who had been governor of New York
and sort of fulfilled every sort of ethnic
New York stereotype, was believed to be in
favor of repealing the 18th Amendment, right?
So lots of concern about the role of alcohol
and lots of concern about religion, all of
which are also tied up in all sorts of ethnic
and power relationships as well.
And so 1928, we have a whole section of the
book on this as well, is, everybody is like
there’s gonna be so many women turning out.
This is gonna be the year that women turn
out, because there’s general expectation
and the evidence suggests this is true, that
immigrant women, so women in Boston and those
sorts of places, had been less likely to vote
previously, that for social norm reasons and
ethnic reasons, etc., that most of the turnout
of women had been amongst sort of native-born
white Protestant women in the Midwest.
Again, there’s some evidence that that’s
true.
But everyone thought my God, you’ve got
Al Smith, he’s gonna motivate all these
immigrant voters, they’re gonna turn up
like they never have before.
And then other people said oh my God, those
white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women who fought
so hard for temperance and prohibition are
gonna turn out like crazy as well.
The expansion of the electorate in 1928 is
one of the largest in American history.
There are 25 percent more voters in 1928 than
in 1924.
It was massive.
And those jumps were just where you’d think
they were.
Massachusetts and Connecticut, huge numbers.
The truth is, we don’t find any evidence
that that was a particularly big jump amongst
women compared to men.
So yes, 1928 was very mobilizing for a lot
of people, again particularly European immigrants
on the east coast and places like Chicago,
but it seemed to be equally mobilizing for
both men and women.
Yeah, and I’ll just leave it at that.
>>[questioner] Can you speak to the 21st century,
some of the trends in [inaudible]?
>>[Wolbrecht] In what?
Crossover?
Oh, sure.
So I thought people might be interested.
Most of the data I have is on midterms, I
mean I have the presidential stuff but I’m
gonna show you—well, I mean this is to simply
show, this is the percent of women voting
for Donald Trump, this is the percent of men,
that’s in 1916.
That’s what it looked like in 2012.
You know, and the most scandalous thing Mitt
Romney said about women was something about
binders.
This is to make the point that of course race
is a much bigger determinant, although there
are gender gaps across all groups.
So this is white women and white men in 12
and 16; black women and black men, Latino
women and Latino men, but what I really want
to show you, this is U.S. House by gender
in midterm elections from, and I should give
a shoutout to a political scientist by the
name of Brian Schaffner who I don’t think
slept last week, and really dug into the data
as quickly as possible.
So what you’re seeing is considered the
modern gender gap, which is women more in
favor of Left parties, we see that around
the world.
From 2008 to 2018.
And this is a two-party Democratic share of
House votes, so it’s not presidential, we’re
just trying to look at what’s happening
in the House.
So there’s consistently a gender gap where
women are more likely to vote Democratic.
And of course both men and women moved Democratic
on Tuesday but our initial evidence is that
women moved more.
So why might that be?
We see it across each group, so this is 18
to 39, 40 to 49, there’s a reason for this,
50 to 64 and 65 plus showing the vote, and
of course younger voters are [inaudible],
younger voters are always more Democratic;
in general the older you get the more likely
you are to vote Republican.
We see that dramatically so here in 2018.
But you’re gonna see that women sort of
pop up a bit, I mean dramatically so here,
more than men do, maybe not amongst the oldest
voters, maybe not amongst here, but we do
see that, right?
So still driven a lot by young women, became
much more Democratic in this election.
What we’ve definitely seen in recent years
is a growing and a different gap based on
education.
So traditionally, when I was in graduate school
25 years ago, it like, the idea that more
education leads to more Republican voting
was like one of the Ten Commandments.
If you ran your data and that result didn’t
come up, and I’m being completely serious,
my advisor would say well, you did something
wrong.
You coded it wrong, go back, there’s no
control, there’s nothing you can do to shake
more education, more Republican voting.
That, however, has not been true in the last
ten years.
So this is the House vote amongst white voters.
Education works a little bit different in
other groups.
And again, here’s college-educated women
at the top voting Democratic in House elections.
This is college-educated men, this is non-college-educated
women and this is non-college-educated men.
So yes, non-college-educated women went a
bit towards the Democrats in 2018, but this
is where the action is and we see the biggest
change.
College-educated women, while still voting,
you know, more Democratic like other college-educated
men, are, I mean this gap amongst college-educated
is much bigger, and that’s also traditionally
different.
It used to be that the bigger gender gaps
were amongst those with less education.
That’s become the gap in the last 20 or
30 years.
And they were already way more Democratic
than men, and they became much more Democratic
than men in 2018.
I’m gonna answer your question and then
I’m gonna show one more piece of data.
>>[questioner] … that flipped women from
voting primarily Republican into voting primarily
Democratic?
>>[Wolbrecht] That’s a great question.
So the discovery of the gender gap, literally
the name, came after the election of 1980.
And because that was the first election in
which we saw—not first, it was the first
election where we saw and made a big deal
about—a higher percentage of women voting
Democratic than men.
It was also the first election in which the
Republican and Democratic parties pushed themselves
away on women’s rights issues.
So my first book that was about sort of how
that happened.
So Republicans had been for the ERA since
the 1940s.
You know, had not really taken an official
position on abortion which was a fairly new
issue as late as 1980.
Democrats had opposed the ERA, they blocked
it in the Senate, they had also not taken
a position on abortion.
1980 changes all that.
So the platforms from then on out are Republicans
very strongly pro-life, boot the Equal Rights
Amendment out, are don’t like affirmative
action, don’t like government support for
child care, etc.
While of course Democrats moved in a different
way.
That was a new thing in 1980.
And because those two things came at the same
time, there’s this popular idea that that’s
what did it, right?
So women care about these things, except for
that’s not at all supported by the empirical
evidence.
So men’s and women’s preferences on those
sorts of issues are really not that different,
and there’s not a lot of evidence that women
care about those issues more or prioritize
them more in their voting.
The other thing of course that happened in
the 1980s is that the parties’ general distinction
on social welfare issues, how big the government
should be, what the safety, social safety
net should look like, had expanded obviously
since the New Deal, particularly under Johnson
with the Great Society and then of course
that’s really what Ronald Reagan’s whole
brand was smaller government, etc.
And women generally tend to be more in support
of a stronger social welfare state.
Some people would say that’s because women
are naturally more compassionate.
Some people would say we’ve also racialized
our social safety net and women are more egalitarian.
Both of those things are true, again on average.
It’s also the case that particularly beginning
in the late seventies, women not only were
more likely of course to take advantage of
social welfare policies, but changes in the
economy and women’s role in the economy
had made women more vulnerable.
So if all these women who move into the work
force in the sixties and seventies, if you’re
the first in, you’re the first out.
You know, we’re not going to invent the
term sexual harassment until the seventies,
right?
So women yes become more economically independent,
and that’s useful, but they also become
in some ways economically more vulnerable,
especially right away.
And so the better explanations, I think, of
that, well let me say one more thing.
And, as the social welfare state had expanded
in the sixties and seventies, women take a
lot of those jobs.
So who depends on the state for employment?
School teachers, nurses, social workers, all
of which are occupations where there are a
lot of women in them.
So their sort of view of whether or not we
should cut government programs probably looks
a little bit different on average.
Does that answer the question?
I do want to show sort of one more thing.
So one of the things I try to help my students
understand is that when we talk about gender,
of course we don’t just mean men and women,
we mean ideas about gender, about appropriate
gender roles, etc.
So one of the things that we learned in analysis
of the 2016 election is that while dissatisfaction
with the economy did have an effect on Trump
votes, so the more dissatisfied you were the
more likely you were to vote for Donald Trump.
But much more strongly were the impact of
racism and sexism, and again that is not to
say that everyone who voted for Donald Trump
was racist or sexist.
It is to say that if you expressed racist
views you were much more likely to vote for
Donald Trump than if you did not.
So let me be 100 percent clear about what
I’m saying.
Lots of non-racist, non-sexist people voted
for Donald Trump, but if you did hold those
views, you were more likely to do so.
The question is whether or not Donald Trump’s
particular politics then affects the party
as a whole.
So what this is showing is from the least
racist to the most racist, to the least sexist
to the most sexist, the dark one is the effect
on the Donald Trump vote and you really can’t
even see the gray one here which is the impact
on House vote in 2016 because they really
run together.
So both parties, both vote for House candidate,
Republican House candidates and Donald Trump
became more likely as you became more racist,
and I can talk about how that’s measured.
We didn’t see that with sexism.
So going from least sexist to most sexist
made you more likely to vote for Donald Trump,
but it did not affect whether or not you voted
for a Republican House candidate.
That’s gonna change in 2018.
So in, this is the impact of racism from least
to most on, red is gonna be the House vote
in 2018, grey or blue is gonna be the House
vote in 2016, they look exactly the same.
So the effect of racism on voting for Republicans
in the House in 2016 and 2018 is the same.
This is the effect of sexism on voting for
Republican House candidates in 2016, this
is the effect of sexism in voting on Republican
House candidates in 2018.
And I’m saying this because someone asked
about women and why we see that big jump in
2018.
What’s important to see here, well let me
say two things, their important here.
One is, women are perfectly able to express
sexist views.
So the idea that this is just all men is absolutely
not true.
So the kinds of questions that we now ask
to measure either what we would call hostile
or benevolent sexism are women complain too
much, women get advantages, women falsely
accuse men, etc.
And lots of women are willing to agree with
those statements.
The problem for the Republican party is, the
most sexist voters are equally likely to vote
for Republican House candidates in both 2016
and 2018.
The least sexist voters have become much less
likely to vote for Republican House candidates.
And so the problem for the Republican party
is Donald Trump’s brand, this is always
what happens with Presidents, is coming to
affect his party as a whole, and voters who
are the least sexist are becoming increasingly
uncomfortable with voting for Republican House
candidates.
And I’ll leave it with that.
Any other questions?
I know we’re getting to the end of time.
Thank you so much.
[applause]
