How Were Early Women Voters Mobilized?

• In Event: From Past to Present: Women’s Political Mobilization and its Policy Impact

Abstract

The historical exclusion of women from the `public sphere' reduced women's access to traditional resources of mobilization, yet substantial proportion of women nonetheless participated in elections upon their enfranchisement. In contrast to conventional narratives, we theorize that the social and political embeddedness of women in the `private sphere' of the home and the community increased women's responsiveness to social context. Specifically, we argue that social composition of women's immediate surroundings is particularly important in bringing new women voters to the polls. Utilizing original dataset of individual voting records in selected Swedish municipalities in the interwar period, we employ a difference-in-difference design that allows us to isolate the community effects from confounders at the individual level. We find strong support for our argument. As theorized, social homogeneity of local communities enhanced women's -- but not men's -- decision to partake in elections for at least a decade after suffrage. These findings challenge the conventional understanding of the `political', where women’s embeddedness in the home and community serves as a political resource, rather than a liability.

Authors

• Grace Natusch, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Mona Morgan-Collins, University of Pennsylvania