Good evening everyone. Theres a little more people here. Before we welcome our guest, good evening everyone. Good evening. My name is the tyson. In american art and culture here at the boston massachusetts. It is my sincere pleasure to welcome you and our speaker christine. Before i begin i want you to take note of two emergency exits that are marked at the front and rear of the room. If you will also take a moment to please silence your cellphones so we do not disrupt this fascinating top. While you are doing that, i would look to share with you and installation that i recently curated entitled anti separate. Using materials from the at the name collections, we take a look at the Suffrage Movement and how it contributed to be designing womens roles and responsibilities and societies from various perspectives. It also presents the complexities of the struggle to secure and protect Voting Rights for women and people of color in the past and today. Please take a look after the top. Id love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you have any questions, i will definitely be here to answer them. I should also mention that we have a large exhibition and our gallery across the way for required reading, reimagining a colonial library. That particular exhibition showcases rarely seen historic books that are treasures a 17th century boston. Community partners and each of us including you, are asked to consider which books should be considered required readings today. Theres some fascinating unimportant choices there. There is a place for you to share your own ideas as well. Free galleries mission to the anti suffrage and required reading exhibition or one of the many benefits of membership here at the at the name and we are grateful to all of the members for their support. How many of you are members, and how many of you are visitors . Welcome back to all of our members and welcome to all of our visitors we are glad you are here. You are welcome to tour the gallery, pick up the newsletter, find out about the myriad events that we plan here at the front desk. You can join the at the name as a member, and if youre thinking about it but are not quite sure, we have the passes available now. So come in, check it out, top with this spent some time and we hope to see you back again. Christina while bright, she is a professor of Political Science, director for the study of american democracy, see robert henry director of the Washington Program at the university of in addition to the book she will discuss tonight, she is the author and coauthor of counting womens ballots, female voters from suffrage through the new deal, and the politics of women. Womens rights. Parties, positions and change. As well as myriad articles on women as political rolemodels, the representation of women and Party Positions on education policy. How have american women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the 19th amendment . How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time . In a century of those four women, our speaker tonight offers an unprecedented account of women voters in american politics over the last ten decades. Please join me and offering an exceptionally warm welcome to christina well brent. applause . I thank you so much. What an honor in a thrill for me to be here. This is literally what i thought academia was going to be like all the time. This is not what my office looks like, but in my dreams its what my office looks like. This is a really exciting day for me to be here, talking to all of you. This is actually the release day for a century of votes for women. applause thank you. Im really excited to be here and talking to you about that book today. As you probably know, 2020 is the centennial of womens suffrage. It has been 100 years. Since the 19th amendment prohibited the denial of Voting Rights on the basis of sex. With the 19th amendment did, since that time, of course the question on everyones mind, journalists, voters themselves, definitely politicians, what would women voters do . What should we expect and women voters . As the already suggested when we look over this 100year period, there are lots of ideas about what it is women are going to do. How impactful they are going to be as voters. The kind of things that might affect the rubble voting behaviors. The headlines here the petticoat one was from 1928. 1956 the motions, down to the 16 ways of looking at a female voter which is from 2008. Women may decide the election from 2016. I do promise you in this were going to start in the twenties and get to 2016. Maybe even 2020 by the end. What i want to do is use a couple of examples of some conventional wisdom about women voters overtime that have shaped are thinking about women and their impact on politics in the United States. One of the things i hope you will take away from this lecture is to think about the ways in which, what we believe about women voters is in some way, some ways, as important as what women voters actually do. If we think of women voters and politicians think of women voters as say, soccer moms, white womens who live in the suburbs and drive mini vans, they will craft their appeals, they will design public policy, all in ways to try to appeal to what they have in mind as a woman voter. We know however, that white married women in the suburbs are not a large proportion of the female electorate. They become less so overtime. Again, i want us to think about, what do we think we know about women voters and what do we actually know . Im going to start with what i like to call twitter heartaches about women in the early 19 twenties. The very first convention, wisdom about women voters was this idea that women suffrage had been a failure. These are headlines from 1923 and 1924. This might be the only top you see this year, where one of the headlines is from a housekeeping as well as the washington post, etc. It was not just a journalist who concluded almost immediately after the 19th amendment that womens suffrage had been a failure. This was something that scholars tend to believe as well. For reasons i can talk more about, we actually had very little data about women voters in the period immediately after suffrage. As you probably are aware, citizens do not placed pink and blue ballots into ballot boxes, and so we do not actually, from the official voting record, have a way to know how men and women voted. There is one exception to that which is illinois, because of the unusual way they initially franchised women, actually did count women men to womens ballots differently. In the 1916 to 1920, what that means is virtually everything that we know about how women voted comes from one state and two elections. Before George Gallup was going to invent survey research in the 19 thirties and forties. We see this unPopular History allen book only esther day was really Popular History of the 1920s. The american women won the suffrage in 1920. She seemed, it is true to be very little interested and what once she had it. I think i just skipped no i did not. So, what do we actually know . And some ways we can kind of excuse observers in the 1920s. They did not have much to go on. They were out there interviewing Party Leaders and trying to understand. Let this careful show you is overtime from 1920 to 1936, that was five elections. The turnout rates of men in gold and women and purple. As you can see, in the first elections after women when the right to vote, there is quite a gap. 30 some points between the turnout of men which 1920 is almost 70 , men are turning out to vote. This is from a sample of tennessee, about a third of women in that first election after the 19th amendment are turning out to vote. In some sense, it looks like there is some truth to the story, that most women, the majority of women did not actually choose to use that new right once they had it. The story gets a little bit more complicated if we start to look at different groups of women. That is going to be another theme of my top. To talk about the women voters, makes almost no sense in american politics. Here, i want to talk about women depending upon where they lift. This is showing you turn out again. Women in purple, men and gold. In ten american states. I cant read it very well here, virginia is at the end. Massachusetts is next, connecticut, oklahoma, minnesota, kansas, illinois, iowa, missouri and kentucky. What i hope you can see is that there is huge variation depending on where you live and what womens turnout looked like in 1920. And some places, womens turnout was incredibly low. Fewer than 10 of women turned out to vote in virginia in 1920. Only a little bit higher just around 20 in massachusetts and in connecticut. On the other hand, there were other places where the turnout of women was actually quite impressive. More than half of women took advantage of their right to vote the first time they were able to do so in both missouri and kentucky. So the question is, what is different about missouri and kentucky compared to massachusetts, virginia, and connecticut . What is happening in these two different states . As you can see, we have similar patterns among men. Turnouts much higher, here on your right then on my left. One of the things that this data reminds us of, is that the United States, we have the right vote, but the obligation rests almost entirely upon the individual. You have got to register yourself. You have got to get to a polling place. You have got to know when to vote. You have got to, maybe in some places, pay a poll tax. Or register far in advance of the election. What that means is that different groups capacity to overcome barriers and differences in the barriers that they face are going to explain a lot about how much people vote, and how likely theyre going to turn out on election day. What makes these two different places different . Virginia, massachusetts, and connecticut, all have, for example, a large number of electoral laws that provided barriers to many voters and pull taxes, or literacy tests which connecticut and virginia both hat. They had long registration periods. It is worth saying, i do not have that appear, but in for southern states, women did not vote in the president ial election of 1920. Those states had six month long registration periods, at least six month if not longer. The 19th amendment was ratified in august, about six or so weeks before the election in november. Those four states said, oh we are sorry, it is nice that you have been enfranchised but you missed the registration deadline, so we will see you in 1924. Other states, including massachusetts, had similar restrictions, but found ways to let women vote. If you read the boston almanac, the report from the Electoral Office in 1920, you can tell that they were a little put out. The state legislator first told them you have to take all the women who are registered for School Board Elections because we let women do that, and move them over to the regular. Then you have to hold all the special days just for women to come and vote. So there sort of this passive aggressive, it was much work, but we managed to register all these women to vote. We know that the places that have more electoral restrictions are going to have lower turnout. That was of course the very point of most of these restrictions. In virginia, things like the pole tass and literally literacy tests were meant to exclude american african voters. I will tell you more about African Women and they did actually vote in the early elections but most did not, but also to exclude poor whites, also we will see had a particularly strong effect on women rather than men. If you will pay a pull tax in your household and you cannot afford to, you will probably paid for the mail of the household and not the women. Missouri and kentucky in the other hand, i should say massachusetts and connecticut rather, in 1920, 60 of the population was first or Second Generation immigrants. The purpose of those laws for those who are already in power to try to keep these new immigrants away from polls and not have them have an impact on voting, and we will talk about that as well. Missouri and kentucky had very few Voter Registration requirements. No poll tax, no literally no literacy tests etc. The other things that make these two groups of states different is the level of competition. The 1920s were a time period in which most american states were overwhelmingly blue, or overwhelmingly red. This is the solid democratic south, that did most elections in the south in that period. Republicans were not even fielded or nominated for office. On the other hand massachusetts and connecticut i should say are overwhelmingly red in this period. But our overwhelming republic held during during this period. Among these ten states the only two that would be classified as competitive during this period they are, missouri and kentucky, you guessed it. The president ial election in 1920 was decided by point oh 5 of the vote. What happens when elections are competitive . Elections are really ceiling. It a lot of campaigning, an incentive to reach out to every single vote. Suddenly those norms about women not voting do not seem merely as important when an election is that close. What we know, is that these effects tend to be or were in the 20s larger for women than four men. With this is showing is that women on the left and men on the right, the gold is places that have a lot of election restrictions, and the purple is places that had almost none. For both women men and women there is a drop off. If you live in a place with lots of laws you will not see much of a turnout. But the drop off as i hope you can see is even greater for women than it is for men. These were brandnew voters trying to learn the ropes things that discouraged voting or even more likely to discourage womens voting. We can see something similar for competition. Here purple is democratic one party places, so the south. Gold, republican places most of the north and the west, and the few competitive examples that we have, again that same pattern across the men and women, but it bigger impact for women of the sorts of laws. I will stop and make another point. I want you to be watching throughout as im showing you lots and lots of graphs, that while there are always the gender differences, the patterns are still the same. It turns out that men and women are both rational, reasonable human beings who pay some attention to politics and have used on the sorts of things, and so given the resistance, the generations of resistance to human suffrage, women got enfranchised and while some were disappointed that there was no revolution. The fact that there wasnt sort of suggests that this was a population that was perfectly capable of let me put it this way, it was at least thats capable as men were of participating in elections. What this means is that the difference between the turnout, the average turnout of the women in kentucky and a woman and virginia is 50 points. Let me point out, that difference is larger than the difference between women and men in any one of those states. If you want to understand turnout it is better to know where someone lived then whether it was a man or a woman. The overall gap in 1920 is just 32 points between men and women. But the gap between different kinds of women, women who lived in the south and women who lived in the competitive border states its much larger than that. That will be a theme youre going to hear again tonight as well. There are lots of differences between women that dramatically outpace any differences between women and men in general. I will point out, we will jump to the future coming closer to the end of the stock. Since 1980, it took till 1980, so 60 years after the 19th amendment was ratified, women had been more likely to turn out and elections than half men. That difference has grown over time but it is fairly steady. Again, youll see one turnout goes up but nonetheless, women have been more likely to turn out to vote since 1980. Mr. Alan has more to say about women voters. He goes on to say, not only was she very little interested in voting in which she could, but she but she voted, but mostly as the and regenerate men about her did. What did mr. Allen mean by this . Another really popular conventional wisdom that we start in the 19 fifties that men are reported to tell women how they got to vote as a headline from the boston globe in the 1920s. The second headline is from detroit free press, for most of the first half of the 20th century, this presumption that women voted the ways that their husbands told them was really prominent. In a sense, what people were trying to do was make sense of the fact that women got the right to vote and voted voting patterns looked so similar. Oh, we thought women were so different and they are voting the same as men are in general. What could possibly be the reason . The reason was, men were telling their wife how to vote. Ill tell you a little secret. My husband and i also vote the same way in president ial elections and i will let you come to your own assumptions about the direction of influence their. laughs these conventional wisdom has consequences. In the 1930s george gala and some others like fred harris and others, becomes the first folks doing sophisticated polling in the United States where they are randomly selecting people, using good methods and we finally have this opportunity in a systematic way, to better understand attitudes, thoughts and behaviors of people in lots of ways, what kind of serial they by, but also what kind of candidates they support. In his first polls in the thirties and forties, George Gallup purposely under sampled women. The reason was, he was trying to understand how people decided who to vote for. As far as he was concerned, there was no puzzle when it came to women. Women which is to with their husbands told them the night before. If you want to understand how people decide how to vote, you really have to focus on men. Their thought process, their understanding. The data is not great, if you want to understand anything about women during this period. Im about to violate a rule and put a lot of words on a powerpoint site. You do not need to read these all. If you had the luck to go to graduate school in Political Science and steady american politics, these would all be names written upon your heart. These were the very first studies, systematic scholarly studies done of voters in the United States. The first book reporting on elections in 48 and 52 its called voting at the columbia university, secon