Roaring Twenties

The Impact of the Women’s Vote in the 1920 Election

The 1920 presidential election was the first in which women could vote nationwide. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, added roughly 27 million women to the electorate. The election was, in theory, a referendum on women’s suffrage and the new women voters. In practice, it was a disappointment to the suffragists who had predicted that women would vote as a unified bloc for progressive causes. The history of the amendment is in The History of the 19th Amendment: A 72-Year Fight; the leaders are profiled in Leading Suffragists: The Women Who Won the Vote.

Prediction vs. Reality

Suffragists and anti-suffragists both expected a “gender gap” — women voting differently from men, and especially for women’s-rights candidates. The anti-suffragists, who had argued that women would vote for “papa’s” party regardless of their sex, predicted that women would vote much as men did.

The liquor industry, which had funded the anti-suffrage movement, expected women’s votes to be the death of Prohibition.

The reality was, in some ways, the latter. Women did not vote as a unified bloc. The 1920 election did not show a clear gender gap. The women’s vote was split along class, ethnic, religious, and regional lines in much the same way as the men’s vote. Republican Warren G. Harding won in a landslide — 60 percent of the popular vote and 404 of 531 electoral votes against Democrat James M. Cox — and the women’s vote appears to have broken in much the same way as the men’s.

The first studies of women’s voting behavior, conducted in the 1920s and 1930s, found that women voted in much the same way as their husbands. In some surveys, the correlation between a husband’s and wife’s vote was as high as 0.85. The “gender gap” — the tendency of women to vote for Democratic candidates — did not appear in 1920 and would not appear in any consistent way until the 1980s.

Who Could Actually Vote

The Nineteenth Amendment, on paper, ended the denial of the vote “on account of sex.” In practice, only women who could meet the existing state-level requirements could actually vote. Those requirements excluded most of the women the amendment was supposed to help.

In the South, the Jim Crow system applied to Black women as well as Black men. Poll taxes, literacy tests, the white primary, and outright intimidation kept the vast majority of Black women from the polls. The 19th Amendment did not enfranchise Black Southern women in any meaningful way; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would be needed. The story of Black women’s exclusion is told in Leading Suffragists, especially the work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell.

In the North, the barriers were different but real. Literacy tests in some states — particularly New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — excluded immigrant women and many native-born women as well. “Pauper” exclusions denied the vote to women on welfare or in state institutions.

The result was that the actual electorate in 1920 was much smaller than the potential electorate. The 1920 election saw about 27 million votes cast — about 49 percent of the eligible voters. Of the votes cast, about 8 million were cast by women — about 36 percent of eligible women voters. The male turnout was about 68 percent. The women’s turnout was, in percentage terms, much lower than the men’s.

The Turnout Puzzle

The lower female turnout in 1920 was a puzzle to contemporaries. The most common explanation is that women had not been mobilized. The NAWSA had dissolved itself into the League of Women Voters in February 1920 — six months before the amendment’s ratification — and the new organization was focused on civic education rather than voter mobilization. The National Woman’s Party (NWP) had shifted its focus to the Equal Rights Amendment.

A second explanation is that the anti-suffragists had been right that women would vote much as their husbands did — and that the women who would have been the most likely to vote were the women whose husbands were already voting. The women who did not vote in 1920 were, in many cases, the women whose husbands did not vote.

A third explanation is that the barriers to voting in many states were, in effect, a poll tax on women’s suffrage. The lower female turnout was, in part, a function of the registration system.

The 1920s Elections in Retrospect

The 1920 election was the first in a series in which women voted as a new and sometimes decisive bloc. In the 1922 midterms, the Republicans won a landslide. The 1924 election saw Coolidge defeat the conservative Democrat John W. Davis and the progressive Republican Robert M. La Follette. Coolidge won 54 percent of the popular vote. The women’s vote appears to have favored Coolidge by a slightly larger margin than the men’s, in part because of the strong religious-tinged support for the Republican Party in the rural Midwest.

In 1928, the women’s vote was the most consequential. The Democratic nominee, Alfred E. Smith of New York, was a Catholic and a “wet.” The Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover, was a Quaker and a “dry.” The Klan ran a virulently anti-Catholic campaign against Smith. The women of the South and the Midwest voted heavily for Hoover; the women of the Northeast voted heavily for Smith. The gender gap in 1928 was, by some measures, the largest of the decade — though in a different direction than the modern gender gap. The political consequences of 1928 are told in Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover: The Republican Decade.

The Long-Term Consequences

The women voters of the 1920s had an effect on the welfare-state expansion of the period. The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 — the first federal welfare program — provided federal funding for maternal and child health. It was supported by women’s organizations and would not have passed in 1921 without the women’s vote. The act was administered by the Children’s Bureau. The Sheppard-Towner Act was a small program — about $1.2 million a year — but it was a precursor to the New Deal welfare state of the 1930s.

The 1920s also saw the Equal Rights Amendment stall. Alice Paul’s 1923 ERA was opposed by many suffragists, including Carrie Chapman Catt, who argued that the amendment would undermine the protective labor legislation for women workers. The ERA did not pass.

The 1920s saw the first women in Congress — though the achievement was modest. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, elected in 1916, was the first woman to serve in Congress. She was reelected in 1940. The first women to be elected state governors were Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas, both in 1925.

The link between the women’s vote and the flapper culture of the 1920s — and the broader 1920s context — is critical. The 1920 election was the political expression of the cultural revolution of the 1910s and 1920s. The cultural change and the political change were inseparable.

The Disappointing Election

The 1920 election was a disappointment to many of the suffragists. Harding won in a landslide. Cox lost badly. The Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, ran from prison and received about 3 percent of the vote. The disappointment of 1920 led many suffragists to conclude that the vote was only the beginning. The post-1920 women’s organizations — the League of Women Voters, the National Woman’s Party, the National Council of Women — would shape the politics of the 1920s and beyond.

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