The Dream — and the Myth — of the ‘Women’s Vote’
By AMANDA HESS
Has there ever been a more divisive female figure in American politics than Hillary Clinton? In 1992, when Clinton was running not for political office but as a more politicized first lady, she pitted homemakers against working women when she said, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” The controversy raged for months. An Illinois homemaker mounted a campaign to send chocolate chip cookies to Mrs. Clinton in protest. When Hillary Clinton, would-be first lady, spoke of ‘staying home and baking cookies’ and ‘standing by your man’ as if they were deadly sins for modern women, I was stunned.” As one homemaker put it on the “Today” show in 1992, “She has no use for us; we have no use for her.”
At the Republican National Convention that year, Vice President Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, was positioned as the anti-Hillary. She was introduced as “lawyer, novelist, volunteer, and she still has time to bake cookies.” Liberals, she said, are angry “because most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women. Most of us love being mothers and wives, which gives our lives a richness that few men or women get from professional accomplishment alone.”
Victoria Woodhull at a presidential rally in 1872.
When Victoria Woodhull ran for president of the United States, she couldn’t even vote for herself. “If the women can be allowed to vote,” The New York Herald claimed when Woodhull announced her bid in 1870, “Mrs. Woodhull may rely on rolling up the heaviest majority ever polled in this or any other nation.” After all, the paper said, “women always take the part of each other.” The Herald called for passage of a women’s suffrage amendment, and then “victory for Victoria in 1872.”
That was before the sex scandal hit. Woodhull was a divorced woman, and sexual history was already a point of controversy. But soon the papers dredged up a truly salacious item: She once shared her home with both her first and second husbands. Woodhull defended herself in the press. She explained that her family had taken in her alcoholic, disabled ex-husband as an act of charity, not bigamy. But the headlines branded her “disgraced” and called her career “BUSTED.” Woodhull was evicted from her home and forced to withdraw her 11-year-old daughter from school. The cartoonist Thomas Nast literally drew her as the Devil.
And the conventional wisdom that women would “always” support each other turned on its head. The suffragist support that had boosted Woodhull’s candidacy fractured. A columnist for The Cincinnati Commercial wrote that while “under certain circumstances, men may vote for a candidate who is somewhat less than immaculate,” a female candidate must present as “a paragon of propriety” if she hoped to “secure the feminine vote of the country in support of her political ambition.”
In 2016, the theory that women would vote together in the interest of their gender soared and crashed once again. This was supposed to be the election where women formed a coalition to block the man who boasted of groping them; who has been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women; who said women who have abortions deserved to be punished; who said women facing sexual harassment at work should “find another career”; who implied that a female journalist was on her period when he didn’t like her question; who said his female opponent didn’t look “presidential.” It was supposed to be the election in which women rejected the candidate who hates women in favor of the candidate who is one.
Instead, although Hillary Clinton won women last week — CNN exit polls showed that 54 percent of women voted for her — she also lost women. The women’s vote was drawn and quartered by race, education, geography and marriage: 94 percent of black women voted for Clinton, while 53 percent of white women voted for Donald J. Trump; 53 percent of married women voted for him; 62 percent of white women who didn’t attend college did, too. Over all, initial polls suggest that female voters were slightly less likely to vote for the Democrat than they were in 2012. And the most offensive thing Mitt Romney ever said about women was that he had consulted binders full of their résumés in order to hire them to his staff.
The idea of a “women’s vote” is both a lofty American dream and an ugly little myth. It’s been in circulation before women could legally cast a ballot. In 1858, a proponent of women’s suffrage argued in The New York Times that women “display more of the virtues of good citizens, forethought, temperance, industry, and self-restraint” than men do. And in 1871, Susan B. Anthony claimed that when women earned the right to vote, they’d collectively seize the moral high ground. Female voters “propose to do away with vice and immorality, to prevent the social evil” — sex work — “by giving women remunerative employment, to forbid the sale of spiritous liquors and tobacco and to teach men a higher and nobler life than the one they now follow,” she said. One man at a New York parlor meeting in 1894 said he supported women’s suffrage only because he knew it would not challenge the status quo. “If there was danger that women might overthrow anything good,” he said, “there might be a reason to prevent their voting.”
Last week, on Election Day, female Clinton supporters traveled to the New York cemetery where Susan B. Anthony is buried. They wore yellow roses and affixed their “I Voted” stickers to her tombstone in an act of feminist tribute. But the suffragists who fought for a woman’s right to vote were invested in enfranchising a particular kind of woman. Their pitch for women’s political consciousness was rooted not in the collective experience of American womanhood, but in an image of white feminine virtue. Many white suffragists pointedly ignored the women of color in the movement. Rosalie Jones, a white socialite turned suffragist, gave herself the title of “general” and led an “army” of women from New York to Washington in 1913. When a group of Southern men confronted her to ask if she favored suffrage for black women, she hedged, telling them that the “states must solve their own problems.” And when a group of black women tried to join her march in Maryland, she refused to acknowledge their existence. They took up the back of the line for a few hundred feet before falling away.
In 1894, a white woman at a meeting of the Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association complained that New York had become “asylum for the trash of all nations” and argued that women’s suffrage ought to be carefully restricted to keep undesirable women out of the ballot box. “Think what it means to give it to all women,” she said. “Our criminal and pauper men have wives; there are thousands of female operatives in tobacco factories and similar fields of labor; there are probably two million Negro women in this country who are but little uplifted above the plane of animals.”
Here was a woman who was denied one of her country’s most basic rights. And yet she was content to argue that she should get the vote only once it was safely denied to most other women. After all, she was already empowered through her proximity to white men. If lower class, nonwhite, immigrant women could vote, that soft power could be compromised. Some women were so satisfied with that arrangement that they rejected suffrage outright. In 1908, an anonymous woman wrote to The New York Times to say, “There is a vast army of women who in silence resent the inference that only the so-called intelligent women have given thought to the subject and are qualified to tell what we ought to demand.” She added, “We wish our position in the matter to remain as it is — one of counsel and influence.” Not votes. The letter was signed: “Anti-Suffrage.”
Once women did get the vote, they did not all vote alike, even on issues of gender equality. In 1916, suffragists encouraged women in states that had already legalized suffrage to vote for the presidential candidate Charles Hughes (who championed a women’s suffrage amendment) over President Woodrow Wilson (who did not). The campaign was unsuccessful. “Woman voters fail to follow leaders,” the Times headline read. “Voted as the men did.” In 1920, the National Woman’s Party predicted that “the very presence of women voters in the electorate undoubtedly will insure certain reforms,” including a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women. But when the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in 1923, no female consensus emerged. Middle-class women, who championed the amendment, were pitted against the working-class ones who feared it would erode special legislative protections for female laborers. When the amendment rose again, in the 1970s, it would ultimately be defeated with the help of a new female faction, the hard-right housewives led by Phyllis Schlafly, who argued that the amendment would rob vulnerable women of legal benefits like alimony.
Why should women agree with one another? Unlike other voting blocs, women don’t cluster together in communities where they interact predominantly with other women and share the same social and economic realities. They are alienated from one another by race, class, geography, sexual orientation and marriage. In the face of those divisions, women develop radically different ideas of what it means to be a woman. Often those conceptions of womanhood conflict. And that’s never more obvious than when another woman is on the ballot.
Nearly 100 years after Victoria Woodhull’s historic run, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, campaigned for her party’s nomination for president in 1964. Though Smith had the support of organized women’s clubs around the country, a Gallup poll showed that American women were less likely to accept the idea of a female president than men were. A receptionist surveyed about Smith’s run said she “wouldn’t feel secure under an administration headed by a woman.” Even Nellie Tayloe Ross, America’s first female governor — sworn into office in Wyoming in 1925, in a special election held after her husband’s death — spoke out against Smith’s candidacy. She thought women lacked the “physical stamina” to be president.
By the time Shirley Chisholm — America’s first black congresswoman — announced her run for president as a Democrat in 1970, 66 percent of American women had come around to the idea of a female commander in chief. But Chisholm’s bid laid bare the deep racial fault lines in the feminist movement. Though she was initially backed by a number of prominent white feminist leaders, they wavered as the 1972 election neared. Chisholm’s congressional colleague Bella Abzug refused to endorse her and declined to campaign on her behalf. Gloria Steinem sat next to Chisholm on a Chicago TV talk show and hedged: “I’m supporting both Shirley and McGovern.” Betty Friedan introduced Chisholm at a rally and said, “We will settle for no less than the vice presidency.” Chisholm was forced to kick off her own remarks by reiterating that she was running for president, not V.P. “I don’t want half-baked endorsements,” she added. Once Friedan did enthusiastically commit to the campaign, her white feminist outlook proved a liability. Weeks before the Democratic National Convention, Friedan insisted on campaigning for Chisholm in Harlem, where she planned to hand out watermelons to the locals. Black women on Chisholm’s staff mobilized to derail Friedan’s plan at the last minute. The Amsterdam News reported that “one of the sisters on the slate had to be restrained” when she heard the news.
And still, the myth persisted. “Women will decide who the next President of the United States will be,” Abzug declared at the 1983 National Women’s Political Caucus, where President Ronald Reagan was roundly denounced by women in attendance. But even after Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, Reagan won re-election with 55 percent of the female vote. Two decades later, even Sarah Palin made a bid to pick up Clinton supporters in 2008, saying that Clinton “showed such determination and grace in her presidential campaign” and piggybacking on Clinton’s “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” line to argue that she and John McCain “can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all!” Fifty-seven percent of American women picked Barack Obama and Joe Biden instead.
Has there ever been a more divisive female figure in American politics than Hillary Clinton? In 1992, when Clinton was running not for political office but as a more politicized first lady, she pitted homemakers against working women when she said, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” The controversy raged for months. An Illinois homemaker mounted a campaign to send chocolate chip cookies to Mrs. Clinton in protest. Family Circle asked Clinton and Barbara Bush to submit their own cookie recipes for the readers to bake and judge (the tradition haunts first spouses to this day). Alcestis Oberg wrote in to USA Today “in defense of cookie bakers,” writing: “They call me ‘Cooky.’ I know cookies. I love cookies. Cookie bakers are my friends. When Hillary Clinton, would-be first lady, spoke of ‘staying home and baking cookies’ and ‘standing by your man’ as if they were deadly sins for modern women, I was stunned.” As one homemaker put it on the “Today” show in 1992, “She has no use for us; we have no use for her.”
At the Republican National Convention that year, Vice President Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, was positioned as the anti-Hillary. She was introduced as “lawyer, novelist, volunteer, and she still has time to bake cookies.” Liberals, she said, are angry “because most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women. Most of us love being mothers and wives, which gives our lives a richness that few men or women get from professional accomplishment alone.”
The myth of the “women’s vote” expects all women to see themselves reflected back in the face of a female candidate. Clinton’s campaign slogan made it visceral: “I’m With Her.” But there are many ways of being a woman in America. How could any one woman possibly represent all of them? As one female Trump supporter told New York Magazine: “I think it’s a disgrace to have Clinton as our first woman president. She does not represent women at all — or me, as a woman, at all. I’m sorry.” It’s not hard to imagine a female Democrat saying the same thing about, say, Sarah Palin. “People no longer hear, ‘Do you want a woman to be president?’ ” the Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told The Times in February, before she joined his team. “They hear, ‘Do you want that woman?’ ” So far, the answer has always been no.
Amanda Hess is a David Carr fellow at The New York Times.