A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage

by Christina Wolbrecht, J. Kevin Corder

Overview

How have American women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? In A Century of Votes for Women, Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder offer an unprecedented account of women voters in American politics over the last ten decades. Bringing together new and existing data, the book provides unique insight into women's (and men's) voting behavior, and traces how women's turnout and vote choice evolved across a century of enormous transformation overall and for women in particular. Wolbrecht and Corder show that there is no such thing as 'the woman voter'; instead they reveal considerable variation in how different groups of women voted in response to changing political, social, and economic realities. The book also demonstrates how assumptions about women as voters influenced politicians, the press, and scholars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316638071
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/30/2020
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Christina Wolbrecht is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She is author of the award-winning books Counting Women's Ballots (with J. Kevin Corder, Cambridge, 2016) and The Politics of Women's Rights (2000).

J. Kevin Corder is Professor of Political Science at Western Michigan University. His books include Counting Women's Ballots (with Christina Wolbrecht, Cambridge, 2016), which received the 2017 Victoria Schuck Award, and The Fed and the Credit Crisis (2012).

Table of Contents

1. Women at the polls; 2. Women without the vote; 3. Explaining women voters; 4. Enter the women voters; 5. Feminine mystique and the American voter; 6. Feminism resurgent; 7. The discovery of the gender gap; 8. Women voters in the new millennium; 9. A century of votes for women.

Editorial Reviews

'Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder have provided a remarkable and fitting tribute to mark the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States. Their unprecedented, comprehensive, analytic overview of women's voting behavior is an indispensable resource for scholars, practitioners, and citizens interested in understanding the important and changing roles women voters have played in our elections over time.' Susan Carroll, Rutgers University, New Jersey

'Wolbrecht and Corder offer an examination of the consequences of Women's Suffrage that fundamentally changes how we think about this question. The hallmarks of their approach to scholarship - deep and thoughtful embedding in existing literature on voting and vote choice, constant and careful engagement with context, continual and detailed and precise attention to what data of what quality were available for previous analyses - give this book the powerful counterfactuals that drive their fascinating analyzes.' Nancy Burns, University of Michigan

'A Century of Votes for Women will be the touchstone for understanding the political history of US women and the vote for years to come. Accessible and highly readable, the book is informed by political and social history and employs the best social science data available to explore the factors that explain US women’s voting behavior across five time periods, chronicling the post-suffrage transformations of women into voters. Incorporating meaningful critiques of essentialism, gender norms, and assumptions about women, the authors decenter men’s voting behavior as a universal standard and analyze conventional explanations for women’s voting behavior that do not stand the test of time but that nonetheless persist.' Karen Beckwith, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

'A sturdy scholarly contribution to women’s studies and political analysis.' Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-09-25
What influences women's votes?

Following their well-researched study of women voters immediately after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1919 (Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters From Suffrage Through the New Deal, 2016), Wolbrecht (Political Science/Univ. of Notre Dame) and Corder (Political Science/Western Michigan Univ.) extend their inquiry to the present, offering an authoritative academic analysis of how women voted in presidential elections over the last 100 years. After an overview chronicling the fight for suffrage, the authors organize their investigation by historical period: the 1920s and '30s, marked by a world war and Great Depression; the 1940s and '50s, when traditional gender roles seemed entrenched; the late 1960s and '70s, when second wave feminism "challenged and transformed" assumptions about women's interests and the Voting Rights Act brought African American women to the voting booth; the 1980s, when pollsters discovered the gender gap; and 21st-century elections, ending with the defeat of the first woman presidential candidate. The authors assert that two factors traditionally have been thought to shape women's voting behavior: distinctive gender (women have "distinctive traits, values, and capacities") and resource inequality (women have less access to political information than men). Although until the 1960s, women were less inclined than men to vote, in the '60s and '70s, the turnout gap "narrowed to nothing," and women became "more supportive than men of social welfare programs." In the '80s and '90s, women were more likely to vote than men and also more likely than men to support Democratic presidential candidates, whom they deemed more progressive than Republicans. Drawing on abundant research data, the authors reveal that a consistent theme among candidates is that "women's interests are fundamentally tied to motherhood and the home," but they argue convincingly—and often densely—that "women are not just one kind of voter and are not mobilized only by their gender per se." Rather, distinctive gender traits and access to resources intersect with race, employment, education, social class, and religion. "Gender matters," they write. "It is just not the only thing that matters."

A sturdy scholarly contribution to women's studies and political analysis.

Kirkus Reviews