After 100 years, there's still no "woman voter"

Politically, it doesn't matter as much who women voters really are and what they really care about. What matters is what politicians think they care about and who they are because that's going to shape the appeals that they make, the policy concessions that they put forward, things that they prioritize on their agenda. If politicians think boy, the important swing voters are these soccer moms and these are the things that they care about, right? Charter schools and health care and all this sort of that thing, they're going to design policies that way. Hello and welcome to Democracy Works. I'm your host, Jenna Spinelli. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which as I'm sure you know, gave women the right to vote. Last week we heard about the early days of women's suffrage and Susan B. Anthony from the Shevots Podcast. This week we are going to approach this movement from a different angle and look at how women have voted over the past 100 years. Our guest is Christina Walbrecht, professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy. Christina and Kevin Corpter are authors of the new book, A Century of Votes for Women, American Elections Since Suffrage. Christina Walbrecht, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. So excited to talk with you as we reach the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, all about your latest book, A Century of Votes for Women, which is not a century of women voters. You make the distinction in the book. I think this is a good place to start that there is really no such thing as a woman voter, even though the media and pandits and all kinds of folks have been trying really hard. It seems like to create this image over over the past 100 years, but doesn't quite line up that way if you look at the data, right? Yeah, it turns out that women are as diverse as men are and that many, well, let's put it this way, that while there are certainly aspects of women's turnout in vote choice, that is distinct. They are also just as affected by all the things that men are affected by, their economic situation, where they live in the country, their religious identities, their other values. And so to speak, as if there is the woman voter is really impossible. And unfortunately, when it has been used, usually been used to put forward the idea of one particular kind of woman voter, usually sort of white middle class, suburban mom. And we know that that that's certainly not representative of women voters as a group. Your book kind of traces the history of this past 100 years, but toward the end, you do talk about the 21st century phenomenon of momism and the different ways that has has manifested itself. Can you talk a little bit more about that about how that came about and how it shaped our thoughts about women's votes and the more recent era? So when you try to think about women's voters, right, kept out of the polling places for so long. And once they were in franchise, so to what's going to make them distinct? And this idea of motherhood as being really central to what makes a woman a woman, right? And what might be their particular take on politics? We see throughout this 100 year period and before, right? So in the 20s, that's passing bills on maternity health and child safety. That's in the 40s when candidate Truman gets asked, what do you think about women voters? And he says, as mother goes, so goes the nation, right? And so, immediately, the concept comes to motherhood. And so one of the things that struck us in writing this book is how consistent that language and that assumption is. It is true. We get a little bit of a break from that. And here we're in part drawing on the great work of Brandeis political scientist Joe Greenley, who's written about these things. And in the 80s, sort of in the wake of the second wave of the women's movement, we get a little more sort of talking about women and other such terms. But really, the mom is then raged back again by the mid to late 90s. So it's 1996 when we first get the term soccer mom. And of course, since then, we've had security moms and talking moms, waitress moms. And so, what would that sort of consistent expectation that motherhood concern about children, which means education or health care or safety against, you know, bad lyrics in rock music, I say, as a teenager from the 1980s. Right, but these are the things that women care about and that motivate their political voices. But at the same time, you know, looking forward, we've also seen that fewer and fewer women are becoming mothers. And so, you know, where do you think this this motherhood narrative might go? Do you think it will kind of transcend actual childbirth like you're, you know, to what extent is it actually dependence on that? This is, I think, a really important point and something we try to emphasize in our book, which is in some sense politically, it doesn't matter as much who women voters really are and what they really care about. And so, if politicians think boy, the important swing voters are these soccer moms, they're white, they're middle class, they live in the suburbs, they have children at home. And these are the things that they care about, right, charter schools and health care and all this sort of that thing, they're going to design policies that way. And as you mentioned, and as we argue in the book, the percentage of women who have those any of those sort of characteristics was never a majority and is only declined over time. And so, when we do that, we're missing out on women of color, we're missing out on appeals to older women, to women who don't have children, to single moms, to the interests of professional women or women on welfare or, you know, you name it. So, this framing of who women are is really politically important and politically powerful. Looking forward. I think the image of women as primarily mothers is going to be hard to shake. I think women's experience as mothers varies enormously. And we're going to be very interested to see what I expect to be the very long term consequences of this pandemic, which as many people have rightfully noted impacts women, women voters differently than it does men. Over, over represented as health care workers, they're dramatically over represented as school teachers. They're more likely to have lost their jobs. And as we all know, are bearing much more of the weight of, you know, schools being closed, etc. And so, it will be interesting to see how women themselves, how the press and how politicians think about who women are voters are in the next decade. So, where, if you've said that this kind of perception has been largely driven by what politicians or who politicians think women are, what they think their priorities are. So, where are they getting these impressions from and has that changed at all over the course of the past 100 years? So, the reasons we wrote this book is that our first one was about how women voters, how women voted in the 1920s and 30s. And one of the observations in that book is that there's a lot of conventional wisdom about these first women voters and it seems very sure of itself. When you go and look, there's almost no good data about how women voted in the 20s and 30s. We use some statistical methods to model that, but there were no good surveys, etc. And then what's happening is we started thinking about the 100 years was even as the data gets so much better. We start to have Gallup polls in the mid 1930s. The American National Election Study comes on board in 1948 and 52, you know, by the 70s, there's a million polls, you know, you name it, right. But still, these stereotypes show up in how academics, how the press, how political consultants view these data, right. In the 1950s, the assumptions that are coming out from scholars, you know, who just see, "Oh, women say they discuss politics more in their families than men do." And what they conclude from that finding, which is literally, "Who do you talk to about politics?" Well, this is because women don't really care about politics and men are telling their wives how to vote. And trust their husbands, men see it as their role to guide and tell women what to do. There's no actual survey data to support those claims. There's no questions about trust. There's no questions about who tells who. But our basic understandings of what a household looks like, what are proper gender roles come into that. Now, it's easy to say those were the madman days and what can you do, right? These male-plocal scientists were just biased. But I would leap up to 2016. And I would say, "All these people saying there's going to be this giant gender gap. No way women are going to vote for this Republican candidate who has said these terrible things about women and has been incredibly accused of doing terrible things to women. The women will recoil against that, right? And the underlying assumption there is that women's womanhood will be more important than anything else. The gender gap in 2016 was not exceptional. It really wasn't. And the truth is there was a bigger swing among less well-educated white women than there was among the less well-educated white men who have gotten all the credit for electing Donald Trump. And so definitely a takeaway is always check your biases that how we even see good data that's available to us now. Well done, scientific polls is going to be shaped by a lot of unspoken assumptions that we have. Yeah. And I think that that even goes all the way back to when the 19th Amendment passed. I mean, you were saying before how hard it was to even count women voters or to have any data on them. But there was also, despite that, that lack of data, this notion that because women didn't meet some expected threshold of how quickly they turned out to vote or their behavior didn't change quickly enough that the whole movement was kind of deemed a failure, right? Or just at least not meeting expectations. So it seems like women have kind of been, have had like the dex stacked against them from the very beginning. Yeah. And actually failure is the exact right word. We talked about it in the book. And when I present on this work, I always show all these headlines from good housekeeping, from the watching and post, from Harper's. All asking the question as early as 1923 and 1924. So women have had, you know, the 19th Amendment just covered one presidential election so far was women's suffrage of failure. And they met really two things. One is not enough women turned out, right? So the size of the electorate, even though we don't have good polls of asking people about turnout, we can tell that the number of people who turned out has not doubled. And the assumption is that whatever downturn that is is all caused by women who aren't turning out as we expect them to do. And then the other is the vote like their husband's conventional wisdom, which is incredibly popular, really dominant in the 20s and 30s. And even through the 40s and the 50s, by the early 60s, you start to get people like Gallup saying, maybe it's no, we can no longer assume women vote like their husbands. But when you challenge the, when you have to challenge a conventional wisdom, you've sort of established that it is the conventional wisdom. And so, because I say two things about that, one on vote choice is I also vote the way that my husband votes. And we actually know that that's quite common. Whether or not that means that my husband tells me how to vote or that we have similar experiences, similar values. In many cases, married couples, of course, share a religious identity, a class identity, et cetera, is, of course, probably more important to explaining the fact that married couples vote similarly than men telling their husbands how to vote. And on turnout, you know, one of the things we try to emphasize in the book in the 20s and the 30s is in some places, women's turnout was really low. In Virginia, less than 10% of women turned out to vote in 1920. Women, Missouri and Kentucky, actually, it was more than half of women in the very first election in which they were able to participate. More than half of women showed up to vote. And what that tells us is we act as if women's turnout must just be a function of whether or not women are political. They care about politics if they want the vote. But actually, what's the differences between those places are the electoral laws, women in Virginia faced poll taxes and literacy tests and the competition. You know, Virginia wasn't very competitive. These were the solid democratic south, whereas, Missouri and Kentucky were very competitive. It turns out parties and candidates will try to get women to turn out if they need every single vote. Part of women's kind of pivot from this, okay, like they've been working for 70 years to get the vote, 1920 comes, they get it. But now there's this issue of actually getting women to the polls. You know, were there new groups that were more voter turnout focused or was it some of the same mix of people or what did that kind of progression look like? So this is some of my favorite stuff to talk about. And as relevant, I think for thinking about democracy today, in that it still takes effort to turn the 19th Amendment into actual ballots for women. And that effort mostly happened in sort of civil society because the government does not actually have, there's no affirmative right to vote. The government doesn't have to make it easy for or ensure that you were able to vote. And so the National American Women's Suffrage, excuse me, Women's Suffrage Association, the largest and oldest suffrage organization in the United States, before ratification, a few months before ratification, disbanded themselves to form the League of Women Voters for exactly this purpose, right, to help with voter education, voter mobilization, and voter registration. This played out in lots of ways in different communities. And so we have examples, newspaper examples, where the day of ratification, the local suffrage group reaches out to the mayor or the election board and says, we want to help. Like we'll be going to your registrar's, we'll reach out and go out to groups. We see it state fares that the League and other groups are putting up like pretend voting booths so that women can go in and see, how do you pull a lever, right, how do you fill out a ballot, whatever that might be, newspapers have ongoing columns, again, just about the practical aspects of voting. The states themselves varied a great deal in how they responded to this task of dramatically expanding the eligible electorate. And so we have some great examples from Massachusetts and Connecticut, where I always like to quote the Boston Board of Electors report for 1920 is pretty passive aggressive. We had to open these extra days. We did special nights. We hired more registrar's, right? We really need you to see how hard we work to make it possible for women to vote. Lots of places, again, I'm thinking of stories in Connecticut, where polling places were given more voting booths, or where they'd only voted in wards, now they were going to vote in precincts, so there'd be more places, right, given the demand, the more people coming to the ballot box. On the other hand, there were at least four southern states that had, among other things, registration requirements that said you have to be registered to vote six months or longer before the election. Which is a common way again to try to hold down voter turnout. And those four southern states said yes, it's the end of August, and the 19th amendment has been ratified, but you guys missed the registration deadline. So you can't, women can't vote here in 1920. They'll have to wait until 1924 to vote in a presidential election, right? So political will makes a big deal. There are mostly northern states that also had long registration deadlines called special sessions of their state legislatures and said we're going to expand women's registration into the middle of September or early October, whatever it was. And I think we're seeing that again today, right, that voting is really a state level function. States very dramatically in their interest in opening up polling places to everybody. You also talk about some of the issues that have motivated women voters. And one thing that has been consistent pretty much from the beginning is this notion of equal pay. It was a part of the platform back in the 20s. And it's still something that's talked about today. It's a great argument, right? Who is against equality? Who is against the idea that if two people do the same job, they should be given the same pay. And the reality of sort of unequal economic standing in the United States is that it's certainly unequal pay, but it's also more complicated than that in lots of different ways. And indeed, the irony is that while candidates often raise these sorts of issues, whether it's position on the ERA in the 1980s or position on abortion in the 1990s, whatever it is, we don't have a lot of evidence that this either mobilizes women or explains their vote choice. And the reason is that on most of these sorts of women's issues, there's actually women on both sides of abortion being a key example. And more generally, it turns out that the dominant issues for women voters, the things that they vote on, vote that kind of affect their vote choice, are very similar to men. They're the state of the economy, they're the question of what government should be doing, should be doing more, should be doing less, concerns about foreign affairs, etc. And so I don't think any candidate cannot speak about these sorts of issues. There remains a great deal of inequality in the conditions of women's lives. And certainly government has had a huge impact on that. But it's interesting to watch for a hundred years candidates try to sell something very specific to women. And it actually not be that successful. We've been talking a lot about the difference between men and women when it comes to turnout and and voter behavior. But there's also some other things at play here as we said at the very beginning, that women are not a monolith that way. There's also racial identity and education level and all kinds of other factors that play in here. What kind of trends do we see there about how some of these other identity factors influence both turnout and also partisan preferences, which I know is something that you also go through in quite a lot of detail in the book. Yeah, I would emphasize two things. One on race. What's fascinating there is that we know that African American voters in general and especially Black women voters overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. We know that white women on average are more likely to vote Republican than they are to vote Democratic. And the gap between them, if I had to pick, what do you want to know about a voter to best guess how they're going to vote? I would not ask if it was a man or a woman. I would ask race, I might ask education level. There's huge gaps between Black voters and white voters, for example. That being said, white women are still more Democratic than our white men and Black women are still more Democratic than our black men. And I think this is often hard for people to put these two things into their head at the same time. It might be that a majority of white it is, that a majority of white women vote Republican, let's say 60%. But 70, 72, 73% of white men vote Republican. And so they're both on average Republican but women less so than men or men more so than women. So often we talk about the gender gap, this idea that women are more Democratic, I think it leaves the impression that all women or most women are Democratic. And that's just simply not true when we're talking about white women. It's fascinating that we see that in the African American community as well, that both Black men and Black women vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates, but Black women even more so than Black men. The second thing I want to emphasize is, is what's what I'm really watching these days is the importance of education. We know that education sort of is a measure of socioeconomic status has become increasingly important, again, in American elections. And so on the one hand, I just said earlier that the gender gap in 2016 wasn't very big. And so what I present on this, I usually start with, you know, boy, we have this really unusual election, but we got such a normal turnout. And then I say, however, this also reminds us of the diversity of women. So it turns out that white, excuse me, yes, that white women with a college education swung to the Democratic Party pretty heavily in 2016. That is to say, even more so than they had in 2012. On the other hand, white women without a college education became much more Republican in 2016 than they'd been in 2012. Now men and less with no college education and with college education is also moved in those same directions, but not nearly to the extent white women did. And so, you know, once again, it turns out when we get sort of under the data, we start just stop just talking about women and the gender gap. We start to see much more interesting patterns. And so to me, the question for women going into 2020 is, can Trump keep those white women without a college education, who certainly helped him out in a lot of swing states in 2020 and can Biden keep those white women with a college education who already were overwhelmed in the Democratic, but became even more so in 2016. Sure. And there's also the question of what extent does partisan identity play here? Are we at a place now where someone's partisan identity is going to be, if not the most important than one of the most important factors, maybe going beyond some of those things you were just talking about? Oh, I would say partisanship is the most important thing. If that's on my trace of questions, I get to ask. That would be the first one. And we know for both men and women in 2016, 90-something percent, women who identified as Republican voted for Donald Trump, and 90-some percent of women who identify as Democratic voted for Hillary Clinton. And those numbers almost exactly the same for men. That, of course, only in a sense leads to the proceeding question, which is, okay, then why is it that there are more women who identify as Democrats than men who identify as Democrats? If that sort of sense of party ideas, so dominant, that doesn't really help us understand voting. It just leads us to the question before that. We know that partisanship is a sort of form of identity, like lots of other identities, religious identity, racial identity. It develops young. It's pretty stable over the life cycle, but that doesn't mean it never changes. The other piece of this that may be kind of a secondary theme in the book that you touch on from time to time is women's representation. And what, you know, we have seen, of course, Hillary Clinton, Geraldine Fararo, and certainly an increase in the number of women candidates and office holders up and down government, but it has not kept pace with women's voter turnout over the past 100 years. So where does, where do you see this kind of representation piece fitting into the bigger story about women voters over the past 100 years? Sure. You know, one of them is a sort of reminder that when we talk about mass politics, I just to say everyday citizens, the whole population, that's a very different thing than to talk about elite politics, right? So what it takes to get people to turn out to vote, which is the most common form of political activity that Americans engage in. They're much more likely to do that than writer representative or go to a protest or other sorts of things. That voting is just a very common activity. And as we've mentioned for going on 40 years now, women have been more likely to do it than have men. Running for offices is a very different thing. And it's important to start with the fact that most people would never even consider such a thing, right? So getting past that first point, where you imagine of all the different options for your life at any point, that one of them might be to run for your school board or your state legislature or eventually for Congress is a mindset that most people don't have. We have really good evidence by people who have said this closely, looking at the sort of occupations, for example, where we know candidates for office tend to come, the law, business, education. Women are less likely to say they were ever encouraged to run for political office, and they're much more likely to think of themselves as being qualified or interested in running for political office. Part of that is sort of the the loop of the representation, which is where you started this, right? If you look out at the elected officials and they're all wearing blue suits and red ties and they're white and they're male, that just may not be what you imagine yourself doing. One of the in another line of research I do with my colleague Dave Campbell, we look exactly at this sort of role model effect question. And we do see, for example, that when Geraldine Perro ran in 1984 and hopefully the first fear of the woman happened in 1992. That did get a lot more younger girls interested in politics. And so it feels like in the last couple of years, Hillary in 2016, the huge wave of women candidates in 2018, we're going to see a lot of women candidates again in 2020, that that loop is sort of happening. More people are looking up and saying, wow, that woman doesn't have a traditional background. She's a woman. She's standing there with her kids, like I can relate to her better. Maybe that is something I could do in my community as well. We'll leave it there for now. Christina, thank you to you and to Kevin for your collaboration on this book. And thank you for joining us today to talk about it. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Jenna. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.