Disappointed Hopes?

How did the first female voters use their ballots? Focusing on the presidential election of 1924—in which Progressive Robert M. La Follette secured 17% of the vote—this chapter examines the expectation that women would be particularly likely to support candidates associated with the Progressive movement. Employing new strategies to estimate women’s vote choice using aggregate data, the findings show that female voters were not uniquely likely to support the Progressive candidate. Rather, in a small number of Republican-dominated midwestern states, female voters were more Republican than men, and men were more Progressive than women, in their voting choices. As a result, the presence of female voters actually stabilized the electorate, reinforcing the Republican advantage in most states and dampening the Progressive surge in the Midwest in particular. The conclusion places these findings in the broader perspective of the nearly one hundred years of female electoral participation that has followed.