University Place

Before and After Women’s Suffrage

– Barry Burden: Welcome. Thank you so much for coming out to this event, which we’re titling “Before and After Women’s Suffrage: “the History and Effects of the 19th amendment. ” I think we have a terrific program this evening and you’re gonna be glad you made it. My name is Barry Burden. I’m a professor in the Department of Political Science here at UW-Madison, and director of the Elections Research Center, which is the primary sponsor of this event. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. You can follow the activities of the Elections Research Center online. We have a website, elections. wisc. edu, as well as Facebook and Twitter pages if you wanna keep up with our activities.

As you know, if you’re here in the room, this is the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote in federal elections around the country. Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the first presidential election in which women were eligible to vote across the country. There is some dispute about Wisconsin’s role in all of that. We believe that we were the first state to ratify the 19th amendment. Although our delivery person arrived second, Illinois was first and its papers were not entirely in order. So our papers were apparently the first official ones, even though we were second to arrive. The ratification of that amendment led in very short order to the founding of the League of Women Voters just the next year. So there are lots of things to celebrate in this centennial year. We have just come off what has been called the Year of the Woman in the 2018 elections. I’ve had some friends ask whether women only get one year, and we’ve assured them that that’s not the case.

There have been two.

– Woman: 1992 was. . .

– Yes, there was one, one back in 1992 and again, last year. I think we’re gonna hear a couple of really fascinating portrayals of the fight for women’s suffrage leading up to 1919, and then the development of the women’s vote in the period since then, I think my mic is cutting in and out.

– Woman: Yeah.

– But I’m gonna keep talking ’cause that’s what professors do. These, I think you’ll see, are complicated stories, not simple ones. And so I’m looking forward to learning all with the rest of you about how all of this came to be.

I do wanna thank the Elections Research Center for sponsoring the event. I also wanna thank Wisconsin Public Television for being in the room to record the event. This will be available to watch online soon afterwards. And also to Levi Bankston who’s here taking photos and supporting the event. So who’s here on the stage with us? First, you’ll hear from Professor Genevieve McBride, who’s on my far left. Gen is a Professor Emerita of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She was also previously in the Department of Mass Communication there, and has experience in journalism and other fields before that. Most importantly, she earned her PhD at this university in 1989. She is the author of a couple of books I wanna mention.

One is that she’s coauthor of Dear Mrs. Griggs: Women Readers Pour Out Their Hearts in the Heartland. If you don’t know who Mrs. Griggs is, you’re gonna wanna pick up that book and find out. She’s also the author of another book I think she’ll be talking about a little bit tonight, On Wisconsin Women: Working for Their Rights from Settlement to Suffrage. She has spoken extensively to community groups around the state, and to journalist and others about Wisconsin’s role in the ratification of the 19th amendment. Just to her right is Professor Christina Wolbrecht. Christina is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She’s also director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy. She’s the author or coauthor or coeditor of many books and articles. I’ll mention a couple.

She’s the coauthor of Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage Through the New Deal. She is coauthor of A Century of Votes for Women. She’s also coeditor of the journal Politics & Gender. So the format again is two presentations followed by Q&A. Then your questions as part of that, and reception to follow. So with that, let me turn it over to Genevieve.

– Thank you for inviting me in this centennial year here in the first state to ratify the 19th amendment for me to talk about the Century of Struggle, as it was known by woman suffragists, especially in the East. However, the story of the struggle here started with statehood for us in 1848. That was a significant year in the histories of women and of Wisconsin when women here could– thank you, still recall that their foremothers had more rights under tribal law and then under French law, until the loss of their lands to Americans whose Declaration of Independence asserted only that all men were created equal. By 1848, women had waited 72 years since that document to win their own independence, and they would wait 72 years more.

At first, they hoped that courts would rule for their rights under the Constitution, which made no mention of gender then. But our state constitution was a different story in 1848. Two years before, the voters here, the men, had rejected a first attempt at statehood after a divisive debate when woman’s suffrage was raised, but only for comic relief. And so our state constitution in 1848 included no rights for women. A few months later and a few Great Lakes to the east, the world’s first women’s rights convention adopted a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence, but for a new revolution for women. In her historic Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, and I quote, “Women anticipated no small amount of misconception, “misrepresentation, and ridicule in the struggle “for suffrage ahead. ” But from Seneca Falls through the Civil War, women deferred their own cause for the urgency of ending slavery through their abolition societies, and then the urgent needs of men in wartime in their soldiers’ aid societies. Women actually cared for war widows and orphans as well as the wounded men, and funded the first federal hospital and soldiers’ home in the country. They had deferred their cause here and elsewhere, as men in reform promised to work for women’s suffrage once the 13th amendment was won; that’s the one for abolition.

So in 1866 in the East, men in a new equal rights association welcomed Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and a newcomer named the Reverend Olympia Brown. She soon would move here, and half a century later, she would be the only survivor of those early suffrage leaders to live to vote in 1920. The struggle took so long because the men then wrote women out of the Constitution with, for the first time, the inclusion of gender with the word male in the 14th and 15th amendments. That ended women’s hope for resort to the courts. Now they needed a new constitutional amendment. So in 1869, Anthony and Cady Stanton went on tour and came to a suffrage convention here, called by women in Milwaukee, including the first woman physician in this state, where men in the medical society had denied her admission for a decade, but Dr. Laura Ross soon would become a member by marrying its president. [audience laughing] First, she became the first president of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association, founded in Milwaukee City Hall. It would survive by that name for 50 years, and it survives today, as you heard and we will see. Now, Cady Stanton and Anthony, I had to keep this in for you.

They also came to Madison, but it was not welcoming to women, as Dr. Ross Wolcott would report. UW women students were relegated to a separate and inferior and less funded female college by regents and legislators, whom she called “narrow, bigoted men entrusted with a little brief authority. ” However, in 1869, women did see progress to the West, when Wyoming was the first state with full woman’s suffrage, all elections, all the time. And there were smaller victories with limited suffrage, as it was called, until a decade later, a resurgence of suffragism arose here. So Cady Stanton and Anthony returned to Wisconsin to lobby here in Madison for a law allowing women to run for school superintendent. Women won, but lost at the same time a law that would have allowed them to vote for themselves. As Barry said, it’s complicated. Then in 1886 came our state’s first woman suffrage referendum, when women actually won the majority of voters, the men here. Had that referendum’s results stood, Wisconsin would’ve been one of the first suffrage states, instead of tied for last decades later.

But our state supreme court overturned it, ruling that legislators had to fix a flaw in the referendum law that they had caused when revising women’s careful wording. Somehow, our legislators would not find time to fix that flaw for 15 years, and the costly court battle set back the suffrage movement and organization here. However, in the 1890s, another movement took leadership of the cause here and nationwide. The new women’s clubs led to this second generation of suffragists, who were motivated not as much by a sense of injustice as by frustration with small town men’s intransigence. Club woman Jessie Jack Hooper said that she became a suffragist because without the vote, as she wrote and I quote, “Women had but a teaspoon “to move men to act when only a steam shovel would do. ” Club women with their motto of municipal housekeeping, formed a state federation led by women like Belle Case La Follette. She was, as you may know, her spouse’s speechwriter, and I found her speech to the state club’s first convention. It seemed familiar because her spouse repeated it in his famous speech that set forth the progressive agenda four years later, the years that he called “when we were governor. ” Now in a new century, the state club women’s president, Theodora Winton Youmans, was a pioneering journalist here. She led lobbying for at least part of the law lost after the referendum.

And the women did win limited school suffrage only in 1902. A decade later, she joined club woman Ada James in a new state suffrage organization for another state referendum. But the referendum results made Wisconsin infamous among women in 1912 when state after state went for suffrage. The men here voted against this time, two to one. Reasons for the resounding failure included the liquor lobby. Their bribery was rampant. That lobby was organized by the original Milwaukee brewers in the 1870s, and there was also the state attorney general’s last minute order for separate pink ballots for the referendum. But above all, as a suffragist here wrote, and I quote, “The last thing a man becomes progressive “about in Wisconsin is the activities of his own wife. ” [audience chuckling] However, women had won headlines, awareness, with new tactics or “suffrage stunts” as they were called, from parading in colorful regalia to dropping flyers from the new flying machines, to motor touring in the new automobiles. Case La Follette came back to the state to speak from a backseat, and Winton Youmans wrote after her own motor tour that, and I quote, “The native Badger experienced “the destructive shock of seeing a woman stand up “in an auto on a street corner and plead “for her political freedom.”

But then after the loss, as state suffragists looked for new leadership, they elected Winton Youmans as their last president. Fortunately for historians, she continued her reportage in chronicling the conflict in the movement and in the country to come, and nowhere more than in this, the most Germanic state in the country. Some suffragists were immigrants, many had German heritage, such as Meta Schlichting Berger, whose husband was prosecuted for their Milwaukee socialist newspaper’s neutrality, and was denied his seat in Congress. And Case La Follette’s spouse faced impeachment in the Senate for his anti-war stance. Then the national suffrage movement itself faced internal conflict. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns had trained in the militant British movement, and came back to start the National Woman’s Party here in 1915, just as the older organization resurged under Anthony’s choice as successor. Wisconsin’s own Carrie Lane Chapman Catt had won suffrage in the most populous state just then, New York, in time for the 1916 election. And then, to win president Wilson’s support of suffrage, Catt enlisted suffragists nationwide in support of Wilson’s war. That lost the support of anti-war woman suffragists, especially in Wisconsin. Several of the leaders left the state organization.

Suffragists nationwide also split over Alice Paul’s tactics, such as picketing the White House for suffrage, especially when the president claimed that they were protesting against the war. So Wilson had women jailed and tortured in an overreach that only won sympathy for the suffragists. So that forced Wilson to finally meet with Catt as the more moderate leader. She reminded him in the White House that millions of women in suffrage states had voted in the 1916 election. They’d even elected, in one state, the first woman in Congress. And as most suffragists across the country continued with Catt’s plan to prove their patriotism, women won more and more states, and finally became a constituency in the electoral college, sufficient to put political pressure on the president and Congress, where many men faced midterm elections. So in ’19 at last, the House passed the Susan B. Anthony amendment, as it long was known for its author, a woman who helped to write the Constitution. It was known as the Susan B. Anthony amendment for half a century by then.

It had been introduced half a century before, but somehow the bill had never come out of committee in Congress until then, in 1918, when Catt called women to Washington to lobby their congressmen, while others stayed home to lobby in their home states. So Winton Youmans went to Washington while Jack Hooper stayed here in wintery Wisconsin. In their correspondence, which is cited in a classic history of the movement, Hooper wrote, and I quote, of “traveling across the state “to lobby politically prominent men, “working up until the last moment “until nothing more could reach Washington. ” And then she wrote of her exhaustion. However, Hooper also wrote that “I would do it all again “to get the results even if I were in bed for six months. ” They had won 8 of the 11 House votes from this state toward the total that passed in the House by one vote. The tally was so close that four congressmen had come from sick beds, whether their own or their wives’, and one would actually return home for his wife’s funeral. But first from the House galleries, he already had heard a familiar hymn as Winton Youmans wrote, she and others, seated at the sign in the galleries that said “Mrs. Catt’s Ladies,” celebrated with a spontaneous hymn sing of the doxology. However, the House vote was only the first hurdle.

Suffrage states, with more than 15 million women voters by then, now neared a majority in the electoral college. So Wilson finally was forced to go to the Senate to appeal for suffrage, but the Senate refused to act, so the bill had to go back to the House for a new biennium and then back to the Senate again, which again defeated the bill twice as late as February 1919, again by one vote. While in Wisconsin, our state legislators here rejected a bill for full suffrage– 1919– and backslid to only presidential suffrage. Why? So that they would not face women voters in their own races. But our legislators’ cowardice became moot anyway by May. Wilson called Congress back to a special session, and Catt called women back to the Capitol, where Winton Youmans watched from the House galleries again as the bill passed a year before, passed yet again. But this time, she reported to readers, “Women held their hallelujahs. ” She wrote, and I quote, “There was no excitement, no jubilee. “The fight had been so long. “The victory had come so gradually “that it was difficult to grasp.

“We smiled quietly at each other, and filed out, “And that was all. ” And I gotta tell you, that’s one of the saddest of the thousands of accounts that I read by women who were so weary from the long fight for their rights. Two weeks later in June 1919, at last suffragists were exultant when the Senate passed the 19th amendment by two votes. Two votes. And sent the amendment to the states. This time, Hooper stayed in Washington to lobby up to the last minute while Winton Youmans raced back– was already in Wisconsin. And she was back to work on the third step for ratification: the House, the Senate, and then state ratification. Because our state legislators could not complete their tasks on time, so they were still in session in the summer of 1919. And so that Wisconsin, for so long the despair of suffragists, would become the envy of the movement at the end, owed in part to luck, but primarily to women’s planning. Now admittedly, a yen for glory was a factor.

As Winton Youmans wrote, and I quote, “We have been extremely ambitious to secure the honor “of first to ratify, but other states have similar ambitions. ” “And Illinois,” she wrote to her readers, “Illinois has set her heart on being first. ” Those were guaranteed fighting words to raise the competitive spirit of the men in Madison. And to give them their due, the historic ratification here also was owing to our legislators, or actually to their cynical political posturing. In one of the worst states for women’s suffrage, the men here in Madison now rushed to ratify. And to an astonished press, a few of the men would admit that they only voted for ratification here in case it won elsewhere, ’cause then they’d have to look good for women voters. [audience chuckling] But they had delayed for an hour while debating about maybe we should instead have another referendum and for only limited suffrage, while legislatures were in session elsewhere. And that state, as Barry mentioned, that state to our south acted first, but Illinois erred in its wording so it was rejected in Washington and sent back to be redone. However, women here had anticipated every detail, down to a courier to carry the ratification document to Washington, the father of Ada James. He was retired from the legislature, where he had sponsored the 1912 referendum bill.

He was in Madison only for a reunion of the GAR, the Civil War veterans, and only for a day. So he had to borrow his daughter’s carpet bag to race by train, on cart, on foot to Washington, where he delivered the document to the State Department. But then women here had to wait weeks for word, until Winton Youmans reported to her readers that she had received official word from the State Department in Washington that Wisconsin, at last, had earned first place in women’s history. However, that the 19th amendment was ratified first here was not a coup for progressivism, as too many state histories claim. And so reviewers ignored my evidence and my argument that Wisconsin was not and is not a progressive state for women, for whom that was a myth even then. Because when progressivism began here, women here began to fall behind women elsewhere in the 1890s. And at the peak of the progressive movement, in 1912, men here voted down woman suffrage two to one. Instead, the struggle lasted so long in this state that at the end, women still were organized here, while women in suffrage states had disbanded and had to reorganize for ratification. So that we made history here at last was owing to both the women who remained organized here and the men who were so backward here. After all, other states had what women called suffrage hymns.

While Wisconsin was the only state with a suffrage fight song, as its author wrote and I quote, Winton Youmans, “full suffrage was won in this state “only when it was taken out of the hands “of the male voters of Wisconsin “by the federal government. ” But that was more than a year away, as women wondered when or whether the last ratification would be won. The campaign stalled for months, even when the last state ratified, it won by only one vote from a young legislator, who found a note in his pocket from his mother who wrote, and I quote, “Be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt. ” So he changed his vote. But even when the amendment became law with barely two months to the 1920 election, suffragists still had to disprove the clich that women didn’t want the vote. As Winton Youmans wrote and I quote, “Legislation had done for us all that it could do. ” And she did not hold with an argument that woman’s suffrage would immediately effect change. Instead, she wrote, and I quote, that “Women too often will vote ignorantly or angrily “or selfishly, just as men do. “And women have the same right as men “to commit these errors and to learn by them.

” So suffragists took a crucial step in any opinion campaign, which is to maintain support once won. As women long had witnessed their laws won and lost again, and campaigns to repeal the 19th amendment already were underway. So suffrage organizations continued their work. If the older organization founded in 1869 did so under a new name. At its 1920 convention in Chicago, on the centennial of Susan B. Anthony’s birthday, Catt renamed the organization as the League of Women Voters. And a week later in Milwaukee, where women had founded our state organization in 1869, Winton Youmans renamed it as the Wisconsin League of Women Voters. And so at last, as she wrote in her column, and I quote, “The woman’s suffrage movement “in its truest meaning now commenced. ” After 1920, while she continued to manage the League’s campaign for women to use the vote, she took on a last task of state leaders, which was to leave us a legacy of their lessons learned that are collected in the six volumes called the History of Woman Suffrage. They wrote with the hope that we would learn from our past, but Winton Youmans knew that the world would not.

She wrote, “A careless world will think “that woman’s suffrage just happened, “that it was in the air, “but changes in the opinions of society “which made it possible “are the result only of ceaseless, unremitting toil. ” Yet as she feared, their histories were not rediscovered until the modern women’s movement. When my generation had to relearn that the vote was only a first step toward winning fully equal rights. Suffragists in 1920 knew this, as they continued to work for all of the rights delineated in the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. Yet not all are ours even today, without another constitutional amendment, the ERA. So I look forward too to Dr. Wolbrecht’s discussion of the post-1920 period. First I’ll end with a note of a little-known postscript of our state suffrage movement, because in 1921, Wisconsin again made history as the first state with a state ERA. It made headlines nationwide as the first bill of rights for women, but too few of us know of that law now, still on the books, nor of how our state legislators’ attacks on our state ERA rewrote the federal ERA that suffragists introduced in 1923. But that is another story that I found for another book, another day.

For today, thank you again as we all look forward to celebrations of the centennial of the federal amendment in the forthcoming year. [audience applauding]

– So it is really just a pleasure to be here at the University of Wisconsin as we sort of note this moment and this coming centennial for women’s suffrage. And so what I’m gonna talk about and what my work is focused on is what did women do with that right? What happened after 1920? Now, the first thing to say is that’s a little bit too late, because again, as Dr. McBride has discussed, lots of women had the right to vote before 1920, but it was only in 1920 of course that we had a federal amendment granting the right to vote to all women in the United States, although I’ll come back to that as well. As if the cards weren’t enough promo, I do wanna say this comes from a forthcoming book and an earlier project, and to be sure to give credit to my collaborator Kevin Corder, who’s a full collaborator on this. And it’s important not to erase men from our discussions. So since women entered polling places, we have wanted to understand who they are. And so what I’m gonna talk about today is a couple of important, long-standing assumptions about women, where they came from, and what they might mean for how we think about women voters today as we go into another presidential election. A lot of the attitudes that Dr. McBride talked about did not disappear the day that suffrage had been ratified.

But this idea that women are inherently not political, that they’re not actually that interested in politics. All these sorts of ideas are going to persist over time, and we’re gonna see that in the press, we’re gonna see that in scholarship, et cetera. And I wanna argue to you that we’re gonna see that in the coverage of women voters to this day. So these are headlines, the last one is from ’16, the first one is from ’28. And I’ll have more fun headlines to show you. So I’m gonna focus on two myths in particular. Both of them are a little earlier, so they’re gonna be early 20th and middle of the 20th century. But I’m happy to talk about other myths, including soccer moms as, as we go forward. But let me talk about the first myth, and this is again, where our two presentations are so complementary. Even once women had the right to vote, this idea that women again, that the nature of being female was to not be political, remained an important idea in American culture.

And I should, in Western culture in general. And so almost immediately after women got the right to vote, all of these headlines are from 1923 or 1924. It became conventional wisdom. Someone said to me once that these look like Twitter hot takes. That women’s suffrage was a failure, and that was the language that was used. This is also perhaps the only presentation, political science presentation you’re gonna see with a Good Housekeeping headline. I’ve got all the, all the sources here. So what was the evidence that women’s suffrage had been a failure? It turns out there was very little, but that did not stop scholars and journalists from making grand pronouncements about women’s use of the vote. This article was based on voting records from Chicago. I’d be happy to talk about that.

Published by sociologists almost immediately after 1920. If you read textbooks through to the ’70s and the ’80s, and they will all tell you that after women got the right to vote, they, for the most part did not turn out, weren’t really interested in using it, just voted like their husbands. If you follow those cites back and back and back, you will probably get to this one article, based on one election in one American city. We have some other data, et cetera, and I’m gonna talk about some newer data that my collaborator and I were able to put together. But this idea really became the conventional wisdom and why, because it fit so perfectly with already our assumptions about who women are and their relationship to politics. So when they said women suffrage was a failure, they meant a couple of things, but in particular, they meant that women didn’t vote. And again, that idea that women’s brains were full of other things, like men with mustaches, was very prevalent, and an easy sort of thing to believe. So what was the evidence? And again, I’m so interested, I had not heard the pink ballot story before, which is great, because in general, we do not put pink and blue ballots– and this has been my line forever– into ballot boxes, which means that there’s actually no way from the voting record to tell how women voted or whether they voted. The modern solution to that problem as you’re thinking, “But we know how women vote,” is the mass survey. There was virtually no, virtually no, I can tell you all the exceptions, good surveys being done in the 1920s; that revolution had not happened yet.

And so we had very little good information. That didn’t stop anyone from assuming they knew. But we didn’t have a lot. So the data I have here is based on a study we did of 10 states; I’m sorry it doesn’t include Wisconsin. ‘Cause the Minnesota data was easier to get. And I’d be happy to talk more about that if people have questions. And so the first thing to say is that women, immediately after suffrage, turned out at rates much lower than did men. There’s absolutely no question about that. Long being denied the right to vote, being told that voting was not an appropriate thing for women, that’s not going to go away. It has since gone away, and we’ll talk about that in a second as well.

But the story gets a lot more complicated when you look at the states. And so what this graph is showing you in 1920 was the rates of turnout of men in yellow and women in purple in 10 different American states. And what I want you to notice is, there were places where a lot of women turned out in the very first election in which they have the opportunity. It was just said, it was just two months before the 1920 election when the 19th amendment was ratified. So these are states, which I’m sure you can’t read. That’s Missouri and Kentucky, where more than half of women in Kentucky, almost 60% of women, turned out to vote in 1920. There were also places where very few women turned out to vote. In this graph, that’s Virginia, with of course oppressively low voting, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. And so the obvious question is, what makes those states different? How can we explain the variation? In general, the bars go in the same direction, not a lot of men turning out to vote in Virginia as well, right? So this is the 1920s, when Virginia is really not a democratic state. It’s a authoritarian white supremacist state, discouraging the vote among everyone.

There’s really two things that are gonna distinguish these sets of states. One has to do with competition. When a state has really close competition, lots of things happen. The voters perceive that their vote may matter. The parties know they’ve got to give it their all if they’re gonna win that election, right? As opposed to if you’re in a state where everyone knows, like I’m from Indiana, gonna go Republican. No question, right? No presidential ads will be aired in Indiana in 2020. There’s not a lot of activity. The election, you know, it’s hard to avoid, but will not be as salient, et cetera. Missouri, while most of the United States in the 1920s was dominated by one party or the others. So the South was solidly blue and most of the North and the West was very, very, very red.

There were a few sort of places that were more competitive, including in fact, the only two states in this set of 10 states that were competitive were Missouri and Kentucky. And in fact, the Kentucky election in 1920 was decided by 0. 05% of the vote. So when there was a reason to vote, when civic society, like organizations, churches, parties, whatever, had a real incentive to get out the vote from literally anybody. Women again still turned out at lower rates than men, but to a much lesser extent. The other thing that separates these states is the kind of electoral laws and particularly voting rights laws that they had on their books. Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are the three states in our sample that had the most oppressive voting laws, some combination of long registration times, poll taxes, literacy tests, et cetera. We know, and it showed in our research that those sorts of barriers to voting work against all voters. So where there were those sorts of barriers, men were also less likely to turn out to vote, but the impact was much greater on women, already not encouraged to vote. Putting up a couple of barriers seemed to have a particularly dampening effect on women voters.

But what does this mean for how we think about this idea that women, women’s vote was a failure, that suffrage was a failure, and that women simply didn’t want to vote at all. I wanna point out that really what seemed to matter for women is where they were enfranchised, more than the fact that they were women. So in Connecticut, which had I believe a literacy test and a very long registration period, and I should say in terms of those barriers, there were four Southern states that required six months’ advance registration. And in those states, they said at the end of August, “Well, that’s nice, but you guys missed “the registration period. ” So women didn’t actually vote in 1920 in those four states. Lots of other states had that as well. They just called special sessions of Congress and found a work-around. But these four Southern states did not. So in Connecticut, which had lots of barriers, we have a really large gender gap in turnout. In places like Missouri, which had no barriers and was highly competitive, we had a much smaller.

The more important thing I wanna point out is that the variation in women’s turnout against women in different places was enormous. There’s a 50 point gap between women in Virginia and women in Kentucky. Compare that to a just 32 point gap between men in general and women in general. Where you were enfranchised mattered a great deal. I will put the addendum on, that this is of course all changed. This is turnout in presidential elections beginning in 1980, women in purple, men in yellow. Women have turned out to vote at a higher rate than men since 1980. There were more women in the electorate from 1964, even though they didn’t turn out at a higher rate, there are simply more adult women. And so numbers and time seemed to have solved a lot of that problem. Let me talk about another popular idea.

And this was part of the, women’s suffrage is a failure narrative, but it’s something that persisted actually for quite a long time. So that first headline is from The Boston Globe in 1920. The second one is from the Detroit Free Press in either 1952 or 1956. And as a nod to the political scientists in the room, they’re citing Michigan political scientists using the American National Election Study. So this idea that women would simply be directed by what their husbands told them to do was exceedingly popular in the press. And also, I’m gonna show you, in most scholarly work on this period as well. This is again very consistent with dominant ideas about gender roles in American society. That the man is the authority in the house, that men care more about politics, that their job is to direct women to what they’re going to do, and that men are simply going to take that advice on those sorts of issues. I wanna point out that this, this turns out to be important and one of the themes that we try to make in our forthcoming book is that what really matters is what people believe about women voters because their decisions on how to campaign and how to appeal to women are based on those assumptions. If you think all the important women voters are soccer moms, you’re going to put forward certain kinds of policies to try to appeal to them.

That would be different if you recognized greater diversity among women voters. And the same is true in this case. One consequence was the way that early polling happened. So Gallup starts some of the first national polling in the 1930s and 1940s. Originally, instead of doing a random sample of the United States, he did something called quota polling. So what Gallup wanted to do was not so much get a sort of sense of the public as a whole. He wanted to know how the elections were going to come out, right? He wanted to know who was going to win so he could predict election outcomes. And so that meant really focusing on voters. And so Gallup, on purpose, under-sampled women because as he said, “I don’t need to ask them “how they’ll vote on election day. “They’ll do just exactly as they were told “the night before,” right? That by asking men, we’re gonna find out what opinion is.

Women are just gonna double the man’s vote. Now, this is a lot of words. If you are so lucky as to go to graduate school in political science, these would all be authors that are very well-known to you. The first sort of modern studies of voting happened in the 1940s and the 1950s. They’re either in-depth studies of particular communities in the United States, or the invention of sort of large national random samples of the United States. And they’re reported in books called The American Voter and Voting that are read by generations of graduate students through time immemorial, as far as I can tell, and I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that those books really shaped the study and the understanding that scholars have of voting in the United States. And what you’ll see in these quotes, if you can read them is they sort of repeatedly say, the men discuss politics with their wives, that is they tell them, the husband– she leaves the sifting of information up to her husband, abides by his ultimate decision. The wife is very likely to follow her husband’s opinions. All of these statements may be true, but as I stand, there are hypotheses, and these weren’t really social scientists who are gonna bring data to bear to sort of understand, is that actually what’s happening in these households? Let me be clear, they weren’t stated as hypotheses, they were stated as fact. But I’m gonna suggest that perhaps they were.

So let’s look at just one of those quotes. This is Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, Voting. “The men discuss politics with their wives, “that is, they tell them, “but they do not particularly respect them. “On the side of the wives “there is trust; on the side of the husbands, “there is the need to reply or guide. ” So there’s a lot of claims in that quote. This is the actual chart with that data from their famous book. And what it’s showing on the left is June, and on the right is October. So they’re also trying to make a point that, you’ll be surprised to hear, people talk a lot more about politics right before an election than they talk about it in June, and they basically ask people how, “Who do you talk politics with?” And the percentages that are being shown you for women on the left and men on the right, are the percentage who, when asked, “Who did you talk politics with,” said a family member. And so what you can see is, especially in the summer, but also in the days leading up to the election in October, women were more likely, considerably more likely, to say that they spoke about politics with a family member. They tell them.

So let me be clear about what was actually asked. “Have you talked politics with anyone recently? “Who was the last person you discussed the election “or the candidates with?” There’s nothing in that question asked, “Did you tell someone how to vote? “Did someone else tell you how to vote?” We also might think about how we would expect most men’s and women’s lives to be organized in the 1940s and 1950s. So if you leave the house often to go to work outside of the home, the probability that the last person who talked, you talked politics about was someone other than a family member is probably higher than someone who is less likely to leave the home or engage in those sorts of discussions. And so the last person that they talked about with politics, it’s more likely to have been a family member, but of course that’s only one of the claims in this sentence. There’s also the claim that men do not respect their wives, that women trust their husbands, and that husbands feel the need to reply or guide. These questions were not actually asked, right? And so this is social scientists looking at the data and trying to understand the patterns that they’re seeing. And for them, the most natural explanation for this pattern was the patriarchal family, the relationships that we expect to happen in those families, it must just be that the women are following what their husbands told them. And it is in fact the case that in the ’40s and the ’50s, men and women on average, across the United States, voted very similarly. And that was the puzzle they were trying to explain. And the answer was, they do as their husbands tell them.

Now, that’s not the only possible explanation. I will point out that I also vote as my husband votes. As many do, and again, I’ll apologize, this is a 1956 article talking about this idea that women vote as their husbands tell them. And the part that’s highlighted, “If married couples tend to vote the same way– “and they do– it is because their environment “gives them the same orientation, rather than because the woman rubber-stamps the man’s choice. ” Now, let me be clear, because I’m not actually allowed to be that critical of these social scientists because of their position in our discipline. It is entirely possible, even likely, that lots of women took direction from their husbands in voting in the 1940s and 1950s. We just don’t have the data here from these particular studies to tell us how widespread that was and whether or not it happened. Now, of course, we are no longer trying to explain why women vote exactly like their husbands. Over time, women have become increasingly different in their vote choice from men. Again, the purple is women, the yellow is men.

This is percent voting Democratic from the presidential election of 1952 through until 2016. Women were slightly more Republican, which was attributed to their greater religiosity and conservativism for the most part in the ’40s and ’50s; they’re virtually indistinguishable in the ’60s and the ’70s. And then starting in 1980, we get this big gap, well, not big gap. We start to get a gap, and actually, compared to other gaps, a quite small gap in the voting behavior on average of women and men. And I’d be happy to talk more about the gender gap. And so could Professor Burden as we go forward. So it’s really fun to look at old headlines and make fun of how silly scholars and journalists were in the past because they just were not as enlightened as we were, and we now know and understand everything. We have other examples in the book about the extent to which we continue to examine and look at women voters in ways that are not always tied to the data, but may be more of a function of beliefs and assumptions, et cetera. I’ll finish up by talking a little bit about what we saw in 2016. Given the uniqueness of that election, the first ever woman major party candidate, the person of Donald Trump, there was lots of talk about how there would be this enormous gender gap; that women would just flock to the Democratic candidates and it would only be men voting for the Republican candidate.

So this is gonna show you the gender gap in different racial and ethnic groups. So this is percent voting Democratic, white women, white men, black women, black men, Latino women, Latino men in 2016. And I want you to see a couple of things. The first is that the racial and ethnic gaps far, far outpace any gap between men and women in any of those sorts of groups. And so if you wanna predict how someone’s vote choice, probably the first question you don’t wanna ask is, “Is that person a man or a woman?” There’s lots of other questions you ought to ask first. It’s also striking that there is in fact a gender gap across the different racial and ethnic categories. They differ somewhat, but not dramatically. And that is also pretty consistent. While there’s a lot to go with the dynamics of the gender gap, those gaps tend to be fairly consistent across different groups. So it’s possible to look at this and say, “Well my gosh, there it is.”

Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 “and across every group, women were more likely to vote “for Hillary Clinton than they were– than men were. ” And let me be clear about that, than men were. So for example, white women, only about 43% of them voted for Clinton in 2016. That’s just more than white men did, right? This is adding in the data from 2012. 2012, you had Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, and yet the gender gap was really not that different in 2016 than it was in 2012. Again, we see these consistent gaps across groups, so about 12 points among whites in 2016, 14 among African-American voters, and about six points, a smaller gap among Latinos. And in fact, I would argue that trying to understand these combined dynamics ought to call for and be worth a great deal more of our time and attention than these sort of general presumptions about all women in general that end up being quite problematic. So how should we describe women voters, since I just said everybody else did it wrong? We should recognize that women have lots of interests and identities in addition to their gender, that they have attitudes and political beliefs and values, and those vary and shape their voting behavior. We should recognize that women are diverse. They are across every social class, every racial group, every occupation, every region of the country.

And those experiences and characteristics are gonna shape them as well. They’re also really mobilized. I didn’t show the data here, but as I said, women in general have been more likely to vote than men since 1980. In the last elections, the– only white women have outvoted everybody, but only very slightly African-American women, who now turn out at a higher rate than white men, which is also really interesting; if we think that it’s just resources that get people to turn out to vote, we have to ask serious questions about how African-American women, who are still of course face bias and fewer resources, are so very heavily mobilized. And I think it’s fair to say that they’re consequential. And if I can predict anything about 2020, and I predict nothing after 2016, it’s that they’re gonna be consequential again; thank you. [audience applauding]

– All right, thanks to both Gen and Christina for fascinating presentations. And I’m going to filibuster with a question I think both of you can say something about, and that’s the relationship between alcohol and the women’s votes. Gen mentioned that the temperance movement was tied up in the adoption of the 19th amendment, and there was sort of a bargain struck where the income tax got created, liquor was going to be dealt with separately, and women were gonna get the right to vote. Men feared that women were gonna take the liquor away.

How much was temperance part of the story, and, Christina, were the men right that the women were gonna take their alcohol away once they got the right to vote in 1920?

– Oh, I’ll give a little historical thing first. I had to cut out so much from this. I would mention this is part of a longer take that I– a speech I gave to the statewide League of Women Voters convention this year. You can find it on YouTube. Just Google for my name or look for LWVWI. And you’ll get to see lots more slides, and hear lots more fun stuff like the women’s temperance crusade. This is huge, 1873-74, more than 150,000 women in every state and territory reacting to the considerable rise in alcoholism after the Civil War. After every war, we see a considerable rise in alcoholism, generally among men. And of course, the linkage to domestic violence is huge. It was fascinating in the research for this to find, despite what other books say, the first women’s temperance crusade actually was in this state, not Ohio, et cetera as Easterners like to claim; in Janesville, ’cause I could track how it was publicized and emulated elsewhere.

But when you think about it, where else but in Wisconsin would you start a temperance crusade? So the women’s temperance crusade, it leads to, in ’74, the founding of the largest women’s organization in the world, the WCTU, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Its famous president, of course, from 1880 on, is Frances Willard, also of Wisconsin, Janesville. And she was the one who made a very direct linkage to domestic violence. The WCTU opened up battered women’s shelters and all kinds of things. We thought we were new and cool within the ’60s. They were– we have really got to learn our past, ’cause we keep reinventing the damn wheel and wasting so much time. Read the History of Woman Suffrage, six volumes. It’s online now and it’s in every library, and just be stunned that we all said in the ’60s, “But let’s try this. ” They did it, and women did amazing things in the late 19th century, but that’s when the Milwaukee brewers, Schlitz, Pabst, et cetera, started the American Brewing Congress to fight off the temperance crusade in this state. And of course it was a huge problem here, by the way.

John Bascom, whom I know you all adore in this campus, was run out of the UW by the UW regents, who included some of the brewers, because he was a temperance man and he published temperance pamphlets begging the students on State Street to stop being so inebriated. As we head into the Halloween weekend, think of John Bascom, if you would. And it was, and it was also because of his wife. Mrs. Bascom was the head of the WCTU in this state. So the brewers were not gonna have anything of that. So it’s a long-standing thing. It goes back at least to the 1870s. And yes, it continues on, and you will see very peculiar turning points and things happening in the suffrage campaigns in the state that has Milwaukee, the state that has Cleveland, the state that has St. Louis.

We’re talking about German beer, right? And they poured money in to, they were deathly afraid of women getting the vote. They were right. Again, Willard’s last speech, she came back to Janesville to give it from Chicago, and her last speech was on domestic violence. The stories that I came across that in this state alone, the letters women wrote, begging families to help ’cause women had no rights. They didn’t even own the clothes on their backs if they opposed a man who was battering them. And so yes, it’s a huge, complicated story, but it really centers here, and it continues today.

– So I think, well obviously Genevieve’s exactly right. There was huge money coming from the liquor industry. More generally, this idea that women were natural progressives was a really popular idea. And some of that came from the fact that people like Frances Willard were so prominent in the Women’s Temperance Christian Union.

It was also very consistent with, again, our expectations for women’s behavior. The idea of municipal housekeeping as was mentioned, the idea of these social purity campaigns. So remember, the progressive woman’s doing a whole bunch of stuff. It’s doing temperance, it’s doing social purity. It’s building libraries, it’s rooting out political parties, political party machines, and party machines really did not like the idea of women voters. So I’ve got great articles about Tammany Hall just like, “Oh my God, this is gonna be terrible, right? “‘Cause we can’t buy them off in the same ways, et cetera. ” And in general, there’s that undercurrent of, in a very party-centered system that we had in the late 19th century, of disrupting this sort of regularized relationships. That women would, maybe they couldn’t be controlled in the same ways. And those were really sort of the concerns. Again, I’m now apologizing ’cause I came to Wisconsin and I didn’t bring my slides about La Follette.

So we looked very closely at the election of 1924, when of course La Follette ran, a very successful third party candidate gets, I wanna say 19% of the votes, something like that, nationwide and of course a lot up here. And we actually found that there’s no evidence that women were more likely to vote for progressives than were men. And in fact, in two of the states in our sample, men were slightly more likely to vote for progressives, which is actually consistent with data we have from other elections that suggest that, when it comes to defecting from the two major parties for a third party movement, in a lot of those instances, men are slightly more likely to do that. So this fear that women would be the flighty ones that you couldn’t count on, turned out to not quite work out that way. I think this is another– [coughing] excuse me– a great example of how, when we make generalizations from the behavior of elites, people who head up social movements, to the mass. So certainly there were lots of women very active in the progressive movement as leaders and as activists. That didn’t mean all women were. That didn’t mean that the Irish women in Boston or whatever it was, were out there voting for La Follette in 1924.

– Right, so I have another question I think both of you can comment on in different ways, and that’s having to do with the difference between married and unmarried women. And I wonder for the suffrage movement, Gen, these women who were on the front lines who you’re quoting and telling us about, to what degree they were in kind of traditional married couplehoods at the time, or you know, who was at the front of that movement and why? And then as you think about the gender gap in turnout or in vote choice in modern elections, how much of that is driven by marriage? Gen.

– Historically, it’s interesting. Again, you look at, the Civil War created quite a gender imbalance. Remember, we lost more men in that war, when you combine North and South, than in any other war we’ve been in; huge loss of life. And so you see a lot of attention being given and puzzlement. “What do we do with all these single women “who won’t find husbands?” Well, one thing, of course, what you could do is get ’em preggers fast ’cause then they’re gonna bump off and every man can have serial, you know, many wives. That way, every woman gets a chance at marriage for a few years till she dies in childbirth. Again, the rates were horrifying, maternal and infant mortality, until the 1930s is when we finally started paying attention to it. But you do see more and more women living independent lives. Interesting female friendships of course as we saw. You also will see as the Industrial Age had its effect.

Not that farms were safe places, but you do see a lot of, a lot more men dying younger with industrialization towards the end of the 19th century. So widows are particularly interesting. Carrie Lane Chapman Catt went through a couple men on the way, and once she’d buried the second one, she was able to devote her life to the suffrage movement. She had had to step out of it while he was ill. Susan B. Anthony of course, is a marvelous example. The teaming up with Cady Stanton was the thing. Cady Stanton was the philosopher, and she was home having those babies constantly in Seneca Falls. And so she would do a lot of the writing, and Susan B. Anthony could get out and stump the country.

So it’s one of those marvelous partnerships that you see can work. So it is true because of property rights laws and every other law, that women who are single have a tremendous advantage; they are feared. An interesting case in this state, I mentioned earlier to some people, the longest-lasting temperance newspaper in the country’s history also was here in Wisconsin, Fort Atkinson. Again, where else? Would you see this go on for half a century with no success whatsoever? But it was a very interesting battle to see Emma Brown of Fort Atkinson. The men of the temperance movement in the 1870s, her brother died, and they had been allegedly putting the paper out together, had things in his name. The men of the temperance movement also almost got the family paper away from her, except she was single. So because it was her brother who was the man she had been publishing with instead of her husband, she was able to win her case in the courts and retain her newspaper. So it gets very, very complicated. But in general, I think women generally, I’m seeing very rare marriages where the women can devote themselves to the suffrage cause. Also, childbirth has huge effects.

Quite often if a woman is going to have children, don’t expect her to get into the movement till she’s in her 40s or 50s because she’s just too exhausted before that.

– So marriage is a really interesting factor in women’s vote choice. And I think one of the things that we also want to emphasize in the work that we’re doing is that the impacts of these things change over time, right? Because what it means to be a married or unmarried woman in 1937 is different than what it means to be a married or unmarried women in 2019, just to take an example in terms of your opportunities, your stability, et cetera. What I can tell you is that now in certainly in the 21st century, probably the marriage/gender group that is the, not probably, for sure, that is the most loyal to the Democratic party are single women. Now, especially single women with children. Now single men with children are also very, very Democratic, but there’s like six of them in most surveys. So it’s really hard to sort of make a big assumption from that. And so there has been a lot of talk in recent years about a marriage gap, maybe being more important than a gender gap. And this just interacts with a lot of other things with employment, with race and class et cetera. I guess the other thing I would say about that is some of the key arguments about the modern gender gap have to do with this question about women’s autonomy.

So one argument is that we see the gender gap, and we do because with changes in the expansion of social welfare state, more women becoming divorced, more women going to work, many of them in social welfare jobs, nurses, teachers, social workers, et cetera, that women gained all of this independence in the ’60s and the ’70s. And this let them sort of vote more their own interests instead of just the interests of the men in their lives, and that’s why we get a gender gap. The other argument is all that independence also made many women much more economically insecure. If you’re the last hired, you’re probably the first fired, that you encounter sex bias in hiring and firing and sexual harassment and all those other sorts of things. And so the women had been more attracted to the Democratic party because they have come to perceive a more immediate need for a social welfare net. Those explanations assume things about the structures of women’s lives, whether they’re married or not, whether or not they have children. And in every facet of our lives, that those two categories have a larger impact on women than they do on men.

– But the difficulty is, of course, it’s so fluid. I have been a single woman when I started voting. So, and then I was a married woman, and then I was a married woman with children, and I was a married working woman with children, then I was a divorced woman with children and single mom. And then I was married again, easier. So where would you put me at any point in time?

– Well, so in the book I really recommend on this, Ethel Klein, there were these three women that came out of Michigan in the ’60s who wrote these pathbreaking dissertations. And what Klein writes about is exactly these things, that what happens in the 20th century is that women sort of, and I don’t wanna say that motherhood is not a lot of work right now, but that they become unemployed from their traditional work. And so that’s everything from the early 20th century. We get pre-made food and we’re not actually weaving our own clothes anymore or making our own butter, et cetera. We’re gonna get appliances in the 1950s and 1960s. All these things are going to happen. We’re also going to get effective birth control, and we’re gonna deal with infant mortality. So you could have been a woman expecting to live to be 65 at the end of the 19th century, and you’re probably gonna be home with small children for most of your life, right? By the 1950s, even if you have four children, you have them every two years, and the part of your life that is going to be what we would call intensive child rearing, when they’re little and you need to be with them all the time, it’s gonna be a shorter part of your life. So even women who sort of took this traditional path, got to their 40s, were still healthy, their children didn’t need them full time anymore, the microwave was doing the cooking, what are you gonna do? And they start going to work, they start– it’s not that the feminism told women to don’t do housework anymore.

It’s that there wasn’t that much housework left to do. There’s still plenty.

– Let’s thank Christina Wolbrecht and Genevieve McBride for coming.

[audience applauding]