Mary Walton reflects on the 90th anniversary of the first election in which women in the United States could vote.
Here is a taste:
After six decades of trailing the male electorate, in 1980 more women than men cast ballots. By 2008, 10 million more women than men voted.
Susan J. Carroll, a senior scholar at Rutgers University‘s Center for American Women and Politics, suggests three reasons for the gender gap. More women are single and financially independent and often head households; more wives are collecting the substantial paychecks that come with professional and managerial positions; and finally, since the launch of the women’s movement in the 1960s, women have come to see their interests as different from men’s. They trend Democratic, says Carroll, because Democrats are more supportive of the so-called compassion issues that women value — education, healthcare and the government’s social safety net.
It’s as the suffragists originally predicted.
Democratic women outnumber Republican women 13 to 4 in the U.S. Senate and 56 to 17 in the House. Given the prospects of a Republican rout in Tuesday’s elections, it is likely that the number of women in Congress will shrink for the first time in three decades.
Today’s sorry state of political discourse, where even female candidates rip into each other like pit bulls, would doubtless dismay the suffragists of a century ago. But years after the suffrage victory, when she was focused on passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, Alice Paul mused that “if we get freedom for women, then they probably are going to do a lot of things that I would wish they wouldn’t do; but it seems to me that isn’t our business to say what they should do with it. It is our business to see that they are free.”
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