It’s only been 95 years!?
The 95th anniversary of the 19th Amendment passed at the end of August and it made me pause, reflect, sip my $3.99 Trader Joe’s wine, and think some more. It’s only been 95 years since women were granted suffrage in our country. Somehow I missed this in-between indulging in my various, privileged hobbies, such as yoga and eating popcorn/drinking red wine during Scandal.
95 years can be considered both a long and short amount of time, depending on perspective. There are still people alive that were born pre-1920 on this planet, which potentially remember a time when women weren’t allowed to vote. I follow a lot of blogs and media outlets, reading some of the work related to women’s issues, especially on the definition of feminism, the rejection of feminism and being labeled a feminist, the new era of post-modern feminism, the era of Beyonce/Emma Watson/ Nicki Minaj-Taylor Swift-femimsim, etc…
I wonder, in this short and long period of time, “Have women fought hard enough following the suffragettes? If they were here today, would they say we disappointed them so far?”
I have so many questions, so many “what ifs, would we, have we, could we…?”
What if women just voted more, could we have progressed further? Would the private sector have taken a cue from women voting outcomes on issues that impact women in the workforce earlier? Would the maternal leave choices of Marissa Mayer be perceived in a different light? Would her choices have been different? Could my choices be different? Would being a mother still be so intrinsically linked to a women’s identify in everything that she does?
Broadly, does the rate of women voting influence how we view the role of women?
Opportunities for women have expanded. For some women, these opportunities are vastly greater than for other women based on socio-economic and racial demographics. The intersectionality of women’s rights, civil rights, immigrant rights, LGBQT rights, among others, have surfaced in recent media reports. The point of this blog isn’t to place blame on our female predecessors for their participation or lack of participation and the resulting progress women have made. It’s also not to place blame on our predecessors for not including intersectionality of these issues into the progress of women in general. That type of criticism is a post all on its own and needs more introspection on how women of all ethnicities, backgrounds, religion, sexual orientation, and among others, interact with each other. Rather, the point of this post is to establish a dialogue of whether female participation in voting incites meaningful, formal and informal, change in our society?
I decided that I should probably use some of my graduate training and look at some data, the best being voting outcomes by gender and legislative outcomes that directly address women’s issues. The following are graphs I pulled from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. The top graph depicts the percentage of men and women who are eligible to vote that reported voting since 1980. The bottom graphs exhibits the number of people who reported voting, segmented by gender since 1964.[1]
While the proportion of eligible voters who reported voting has fluctuated since 1980, women report voting at a higher percentage than men. The fluctuations appear to sync with both genders. The same behavior occurs with the number who reported voting by gender, with women outvoting the men. As I looked over these graphs, my intuition suggested that when women vote at higher rates, meaningful legislation for women is enacted at higher rates.
I chose to look deeper into the voting patterns by genders since women were granted suffrage and the amount of legislation passed since 1920 that directly addresses women’s issues. However, I ran into problems when trying to find data on voting patterns by gender in the earlier parts of the 20th century. The Census began tracking voting patterns by demographic in 1964, providing insight of how previous demographics behaved. In prior elections, data was collected solely by votes per candidate in each election district, whether it be local, state, or federal.
Additionally, legislative data portals do not provide readily available statistics on what issue or demographic a particular piece of legislation is trying to target. For example, there isn’t a tag next to the title of legislation that says, “women”, “children”, “low-income”, “civil rights”, “tax breaks for Wall Street”, etc… But there should be.
So I had to find the second best alternative and utilize different centers and institutes relating to women’s issues. According to the National Women’s History Project, since 1964, a total of 10 laws were passed by Congress that directly relate to women’s issues. Two of these 10 laws were reauthorizations of the Violence against Women Act. Between 1920 and 1964, a total of 2 laws were passed by Congress that directly related to women’s issues. Comparing the two time periods, legislators post-1964 are weakly responding to the rise of women voters in elections. The majority of the influential acts of policy were the result of Supreme Court decisions, not the result of legislative action. This really angered me since the individuals that were truly shaping policy were not the ones voted into office.
So has women’s suffrage been utilized to its fullest potential, based on voting outcomes? Or is women’s suffrage and its subsequent higher rates of women voting establish a signal to institutions as the Supreme Court to validate our rights? I can’t exactly say because the quantitative evidence is not available, but the hunch is there.
Further thoughts entered my mind….
Clearly, the women’s vote is an important demographic for any candidate to grab, especially in a general election. It doesn’t surprise me when I think about the rise in articles of conservative pundits that the GOP fervently arguing that they do not have a war against women? Again, this is a topic for a completely different blog entry with its own caveats that can be argued both ways.
Perhaps these voting trends are a signal of things to come where issues aren’t solely segmented into fiscal and social categories. The issues affecting women and those eligible to vote have direct social and economic impacts, establishing the new era of intersectionality of politics that hasn’t been covered in previous elections. Could the pivotal need to obtain the female vote eradicate the notion that one could be a “fiscal conservative, yet social liberal” (and theoretically vice versa) that is inherent in many independent Americans’ political views? Could the rise of women voters as a strong voter block and the intersectionality of fiscal and social issues be the beginning of the end the deep, partisan political climate we observe today in Washington?
However, we can only loosely observe that some type of relationship is emerging between women’s voting patterns, legislative outcomes, and judicial decisions. As women become more engaged in the democratic process and become a powerful voting bloc, could this have significant multiplier effects in the informal institutional behaviors in employment and educational sectors?
I definitely believe that as we, as a society, progress and observe the unequal effects of the role of women in our society in our communities and more broadly, our economy, that institutional changes will occur. It’s a matter of time, but it cannot be another 95 years to make that type of progress. Now, that would be a disappointment to the suffragettes.
[1] Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/genderdiff.pdf
This blog is part of a gender equality series. Other posts in this series include:
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