When UK Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin presided over reforms giving women the right to vote in 1928, the party hoped for their support. Ironically, women instead turned to the Liberals, a party which had not shown consistent support for suffrage, according to new research from Mona Morgan-Collins.
Giving women the vote is recognised as one of the most significant societal changes of the last 150 years. New Zealand led the way in 1893, followed by Australia (1901) and Finland (1907), although the majority of global suffrage reforms happened after the Second World War.
The 1928 reforms in the United Kingdom enfranchised about five million young and working-class women, with the government of the day believing women were natural Tory sympathisers, stemming from their roles as mothers, homemakers and churchgoers.
It was also assumed that women followed their husbands’ lead in elections for most of the 20th century.
New research from LSE Research Fellow Mona Morgan-Collins blows both these theories out of the water, providing evidence that women’s early voting behaviour in the west had a significant impact on political outcomes.
“Contrary to the conventional wisdom that women supported Conservative parties when they won the vote, my research shows that women in fact supported political parties that redistributed wealth, thereby reducing inequalities,” Mona said.
This turned out to be the Liberal Party in the UK which, ironically, had not shown consistent support for women’s suffrage but offered women more liberal policies than the Tories. Interestingly, the newly enfranchised young and working-class women rebuffed the Labour Party, often seen at the time as a macho party predominantly supported by men – their husbands.
“At the time of suffrage in most Western countries, women’s unequal role in the household and their economic vulnerability drove them to prefer political parties which were more progressive, left wing and supported redistributive policies.”
“It is no coincidence that public welfare spending increased once women were given the right to vote,” Mona said. “Their suffrage coincided with increased public spending for maternity and child health, thereby reducing child mortality in the US, for example.”
Redistributive policies also appealed to women across Canada and Norway, with women shunning Conservative parties and instead giving their vote to left-wing parties that championed prohibition and other progressive social reforms such as women’s suffrage.
As in the UK’s case, the Conservative Party gave women the right to vote in Canada and Norway but women rejected their policies in favour of the socially progressive Liberals and Labour.
The US was a different matter. The Republican Party was the main beneficiary of women’s suffrage in the United States, Mona’s research shows, but it was a more progressive organisation when American women won the vote in 1920 than it is today.
“It was more economically conservative than the Democrats in the early part of the 20th century but also more supportive of women’s suffrage and prohibition. It specifically appealed to women’s social welfare calls so it is perhaps not surprising that women favoured the Republicans at that time.”
In fact, they are credited with helping the Republicans achieve a landslide victory that year, four months after winning the vote.
“One of the more intriguing aspects is that it is the opposite today,” Mona said. “For decades the Democrats have been seen as the more socially progressive party.”
Mona’s findings help to correct some of the assumptions that political scientists have made about women’s early voting behaviour, showing that not only did women refuse to mirror their husband’s political leanings, but they in fact shaped politics in a very distinct way.
Her research – which formed the basis for her recently competed thesis – is now being developed into a book, to be co-authored by Dr Dawn L. Teele at the University of Pennsylvania.
Additional information
Mona Morgan-Collins is a Fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interests cover topics in Comparative and American politics with a substantive focus on gender. She has a PhD from LSE which she completed in early 2016.
“First women at the polls: examination of women’s early voting behaviour” is available at: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3320/
July 2016