A Century of Votes for Women : American Elections Since Suffrage

A Century of Votes for Women examines how women voted in the first 100 years of suffrage. Challenging the idea of 'the woman voter', the authors trace how the press, politicians, and scholars have described women voters and how different groups of women actually voted across a momentous century.

How have American women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? In A Century of Votes for Women, Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder offer an unprecedented account of women voters in American politics over the last ten decades. Bringing together new and existing data, the book provides unique insight into women''s (and men''s) voting behavior, and traces how women''s turnout and vote choice evolved across a century of enormous transformation overall and for women in particular. Wolbrecht and Corder show that there is no such thing as ''the woman voter''; instead they reveal considerable variation in how different groups of women voted in response to changing political, social, and economic realities. The book also demonstrates how assumptions about women as voters influenced politicians, the press, and scholars.