My name is theo tyson. It is my distinct and sincere pleasure to welcome you and our speaker christina wolbrecht, this evening. Before we begin, i want you to please take note of the 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 that we do not disrupt this fascinating top. While you are doing that, i would love to share with you and installation that i have recently curated on our north while entitled anti suffrage. Using materials from he boston athenaeum special collections, we take a look at how the Suffrage Movement contributed to be designing womens roles and responsibilities and society from various perspectives as they abide for quality. It represents the complexities 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 feedback. If you have any questions ill be here to answer them. I should also mention that we have a large exhibition in our gallery across the way, required reading, reimagining a colonial library. That particular exhibition showcases rarely seen Historical Books from 17th century boston. Community partners and each of us, including you are asked to consider which books should be considered required readings today. Are some fascinating and important choices in there by a variety of Different Community partners and there is a place for you to share your own ideas as well. Free gallery and mission to the anti suffrage and required reading exhibition are one of the many benefits of the membership here as he boston athenaeum, and we are grateful to all of our members for this. How many of your members and how many of your visitors . Wow. Welcome back to all of our members and welcome in to all of our visitors. We are glad you are here. You are welcome to tore the gallery and pick up a newsletter. Find out about the myriad events we plan here at the front desk. You can join the boston athenaeum as a member, and if you are thinking about it, we also have Day Passes Available now. Come in, check it out. Chalk with us. Spend some time and we hope to see you back again. Now, christina wolbrecht. He is a professor Political Science, director of the ramy center for the study of american democracy, and director of the Washington Program at the university of notre dame. In addition to the book that you will discuss tonight, she is the author and coal author of counting womens talents, female voters from suffrage through the new deal and the politics of women. Womens rights. Physicians 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 persisted and changed overtime . In a century of votes for women, our speaker tonight offers an unprecedented account of women voters in american politics over the last ten decades. Please join me in offering an exceptionally warm welcome to christina wolbrecht. applause thank you so much. Its such an honor and a thrill for me to be. Here i always imagined it would be like all like this all the time. This is not what my office looks. Like in my dreams, this is what my office looks like. This is a really exciting day for me to be here, talking to all of you. This is a release day for a century of votes for women American Elections since suffrage. applause thank you. Im 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 thesis of sex. Again, with the 19 amendment did, since that time, of course the question on everyones minds, journalists, voters themselves, definitely politicians, what would women voters do . What should we expect of women voters . What we see when we look over this 100year period is lots and 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 their voting behavior. The headlines on here date from the petticoat one is from 1928. The emotions of 1956 down to the 16 ways of looking at a female voter from 2008. Women may decide the election, which is from 2016. I do promise you in this we will start into the 20s but we will 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 has shaped our thinking about women. And their impact on politics in the united states. One of the things i hope youll take away from this 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 women living in suburbs and driving mini vans. They will craft their appeals. It will design public policy. All in a 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 very large proportion of the female electorate. They have become less so overtime. Again, i want to help us think about, what do we think we know about women voters and would do actually know . Im going to start with a very first, what i like to call the twitter hot takes about women in the early 19 twenties. The very first conventional wisdom about women voters with this idea that womens suffrage was a failure. These are headlines from 1923 and 1924. This might be the only top you see this year. One of the headlines is from good housekeeping. As well as the washington post, harpers magazine, etc. It was not just journalists who concluded almost immediately after the 19th amendment that womens suffrage had been a failure. This was something that scholars tended to believe as well. The reasons i can talk more about we actually have very little data about women voters in the period immediately after suffrage. As you probably are aware, citizens do not place pink and blue ballots into ballot boxes. We do not actually, for 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 use enfranchised women. They actually did call mens and womens ballots differently. What that means is that virtually everything that we know about how women voted comes from one state and two elections. Right . Before George Gallup and everyone else is going to events survey research in the 19 thirties and forties. We see this and popular history. Frederick allen only esther there was a popular historian in the 1920s. The American Woman when the suffrage in 1920. She seemed, it is true, to be very little interested and what she had i think i just skipped. No, i did not. So, what do we actually know . In some ways, we can kind of excuse oppose observers of the 1920s. They did not have much to go on. With this graph is going to show you is overtime, from 1920 to 1936, those five elections, the turnout rates of men involved in gold and women in purple. As you can see, in the first elections after women won the right to vote, there is quite a gap. Its about 30 something points between the turnout of men, which in 1920 is almost 70 of men, turning out to vote. This is from a sample of ten states that i will show you in just one minute. 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 this story, that women, most women did not actually choose to use that new right once they had. 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 voter makes almost no sense in american politics. Here, i want to talk about women depending upon where they lived. This is showing you turn out of, again, women in purple and men in gold, in ten american states. Im going to try and speak, i cannot read it very well. 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 a huge variation depending on where you lived and what womens turnout looked like in 1920. In 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 here in massachusetts and 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 the right to vote, the first time they were able to do so in both missouri and kentucky. The question is, what is different about missouri and kentucky, compared to massachusetts, virginia and connecticut . What is happening in these three different states . We have patterns among men. Turnout is much higher here on your right. Then on my left. What are the things that this data reminds us of . The united states, we have the right to 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 him 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 they are to turnout on election day. What makes these two different place is different . Virginia, massachusetts and connecticut . They all have, for example, a large number of electoral laws that provided barriers to many voters. They had pulled taxes. Literacy tests. Connecticut and virginia both had it. They had long registration periods. Its worth saying, i do not have any of those four states appear, but in four southern states, women did not vote in the president ial election of 1920. Those states had six month long registration periods, at least six months if not longer. The 19th amendment was ratified in august. About six or so weeks before the election in november, those four states said, we are sorry, it is nice that you have been in franchise, but you missed the registration deadline. We will see you in 1924. Other states, including massachusetts had similar restrictions. They found ways to let women vote. If you read the boston almanac, the report for Electoral Office in 1920, you can tell that they were a little put out. The state legislator meant when they first told him were going to take all the women register for school board elections, we let them move them over to the regular. And you have to hold all the special theys just for women to come and vote. There is this passive aggressive its 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, so in virginia the tests were meant to exclude in particular of course African American voters. I would love to tell you about how African American women, some African American women in virginia got around that and did vote in early elections, but of course most did not. Also to exclude poor whites. Had particularly strong effect, excuse me, on women rather than men. Youre going to pay a pull tax from your household and you cannot afford to, you are probably going to paid for the male head of household, but not for the women. In kentucky, on the other hand, in massachusetts i should say, and connecticut, in 1920, 60 of the population was first or Second Generation immigrants. The purpose of those laws were for those who were already in power to try to keep these immigrants away from polls and not having a big an impact on voting as well. Missouri and kentucky had very few Voter Registration requirements. No poll taxes, no literacy tests, etc. The other thing that makes 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. In most elections in the south in this period, there is not even republicans being fielded or nominated for office. The other hand, massachusetts and connecticut i should say, are overwhelmingly red during this period. They are john mattocks. They are overwhelmingly republican held during this period. Among these ten states, the only two that will be classified as competitive during this period are, and you guessed it, missouri and kentucky. The president ial election in 1920 was decided by 0. 05 . What happens when elections are competitive . Elections are really selling it. Theres a lot of campaigning. The parties have an incentive to reach out to every single vote. Some of the norms about women not voting was not nearly as important in an election that was going to be that very close. What we know is that these effects tend to be blurred in the 20s. Larger for women and four men. What it showing is 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 men and for women, there is a drop off. You live in a place with lots of loss, you will not see as much turnout. But the drop off as you can see, is even greater for women and it is from. These were brand new voters, trying to learn the ropes. They were discouraged vote, and even more likely womens voting. We can see similar competition. Purple is democratic one party places. The south. Gold are republican places, mostly the north and the west. The few sort of competitive examples that we have, again, that same pattern across men and women, but a bigger impact for women. Of the source of loss. I will stop at one other point. As im showing lots of graphs, while there are 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 use on the sorts of things. Given the reason insistence of womens suffrage, i think its always worth remembering that women got enfranchised, and while some were disappointed there was no revolution, the fact that there was not sort of suggest that this was a population that was perfectly capable, let me put it this way, it was at least this capable as men or. Of participating in elections. What this means is that the difference between the turnout of a woman in kentucky and the one in virginia is 50 points. Let me point out that that difference is larger than the difference between women and men in any one of those states. If you want to understand turnout, its better to know where someone lived than whether they were a man or a woman. The overall gap in 1920 was 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 a competitive border state is much larger than that. That is going to be a theme that you will hear again tonight as well, that there are lots of differences between women that dramatically outpace any differences between women and men in general. I will point out, because we are going to jump to the future coming closer to the end of this top. Since 1980, it took till 1980, 60 years after the 19th amendment was ratified. Women had been more likely to turn out in president ial elections then had meant. The difference grow a little bit overtime. But it is fairly steady. When it goes out with one, it goes up with another. Nonetheless, women have been more likely to turn out to vote since 1980. Now, mr. Allen has more to say about women voters. He goes on to say, not only was she interested in voting ways she could, but she voted mostly as what did mr. Alan mean by that . Another really popular conventional wisdom that we start in the 19 fifties that men are reported to be telling women how they ought to vote. It is a headline from the boston globe in the 1920s. The second headlight is from the Detroit Free Press in the 19 fifties. For most of the first half of the 20th century, the presumption that women voted ways that their husbands told them was really prominent. In a sense, what people were trying to do is make sense of the fact that women got the right to vote and voting patterns looked so similar. Oh, we thought women were so different but theyre voting the same as men. What could possibly be the reason . The reason was men were telling their wives how to vote. I will tell you a little secret. My husband and i also vote the same way in president ial elections. I will let you come to your own assumptions about the direction of influence their. These conventional wisdom has consequences. In the 1930s, George Gallup and others become the first sort of folks doing sophisticated polling in the united states. They are randomly selecting people. Using good methods. They have finally this opportunity in a systematic way to better understand the attitudes, thoughts, behaviors of people in lots of ways, what kind of cereal they by, but of course what kind of candidates they support. In his first polls, in the thirties and forties, George Gallup purposely under samples 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 would do with their husbands told him the night before. If you want to understand how people decide to vote you really got to focus on men. See their thought process and understanding. The data is not great if you want to understand anything about women during this period. I am about to finally a rule and put a lot of words on a power point slight. You do not really need to read these. If you had the look to go to graduate school and Political Science and study 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 is called voting, the second quote is from the famous book of the american voter, published in 1960, about 52 and 56, and then the last is a quote from a book chapter that