Let Mother vote!
We’ll vote like Father, vote like Son
And two good votes are better than one . . .
—from the 2024 Broadway musical “Suffs”
The campaign by Suffragists to win American women the right to vote was a long one, begun in 1848 and not won until August of 1920. This leads us, 104 years later, to 2024 and the stunning fact that it’s women who are going to decide the next president and the political makeup of the next Congress.
More women than men have voted in every presidential election since 1980. In 2020, a non-presidential year, 28.2% of women from age 45 to 64 reported voting. That’s more than the 25.4% of men in the same age cohort.
Older women’s voting habits outstrip those of younger ones: From 1994 to 2022, only 7.2% of eligible women 18 to 24 voted; in the age group 25 to 44, 25.2% did so. In both cases, the female vote percentage was larger than the male.
Using Census Bureau data, the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics reports that women register to vote at higher rates than men. And since 1964 the number of women voters has exceeded the number of male voters. As of 2022, there were 7.4 million more women than men registered.
Given that one candidate, Democrat Kamala Harris, is a woman, it is tempting to assume that’s where women’s votes will go. True, 54% of women voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and many Republicans and independents in the presidential primaries felt that Nikki Haley had a better chance than Trump. But “women” are not a solid voting bloc—how could we be when there are nearly 89 million of us registered?
Women who prize the right to family planning, and have been frightened by the chipping away at the right to abortion by the US Supreme Court, may make that their pivotal issue and vote Democratic. In almost a dozen states, they face ballot initiatives against abortion (with some activist groups also inveighing against fertility treatments and contraception), and that could be motivation for some.
Women firmly in the right-to-life camp could swing their vote to the Republican candidate, who has recently said he favors a universal abortion ban, not leaving it to the states, the way the Supreme Court did when it overturned Roe v. Wade. However, a survey by KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) of more than 1,300 women across the country found that 82% of the Republican women polled said that access to abortion should be protected by law in cases of pregnancy-related emergencies.
There are other issues galvanizing women of all ages. Some 40% across all ages called inflation their top priority; 22% cited threats to democracy; immigration and border security motivated 13%; gun policy 4%.
The KFF poll also found that 59% of women over age 55 felt that the candidates’ personal characteristics were most important in voting, not stances on specific issues (32%) or their own political affiliation (9%). And despite the heated rhetoric, only 10% of women in the KFF poll said abortion was their top issue.
Elections are wild and woolly beasts, and no one can say for sure which way the feminine flag is going to flutter this November. Responsible women, and especially older women, will watch the debates, weigh the issues, and be wary of the lack of guard rails on social media, where propaganda runs wild.
This isn’t necessarily what Helen Reddy meant when she sang “I am woman / hear me roar” back in 1971.
But women don’t have to “roar.” All we have to do is vote.
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