The Myth of the So-Called ‘Women's Vote’

Almost exactly 106 years ago — on Nov. 2, 1920 — millions of American women went to the polls to cast their ballots in their first presidential election. The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, had been ratified just three months earlier.

At the time, the country was emerging from the devastation of World War I as well as a deadly influenza pandemic. Now, change was in the air. 

The Roaring Twenties, with their flappers, jazz clubs, and newly liberated women, were just around the corner. After decades of marches, protests, petitions, and political maneuvering, millions of women — though by no means all women — had become voters.

For politicians and political strategists the change came with a slew of vexing questions: Would women vote for the same candidates as their husbands? Would they favor peace over war? Would they usher in a new era of moral reform? Might they fundamentally reshape American politics?

Good questions, sure, but lurking beneath them was an assumption that would prove remarkably persistent: that women, by virtue of being women, would all vote alike. 

Even today, the idea that all women somehow want the same thing, endures. We see it in how politicians address women as blocs: Like when Donald Trump told “suburban women” in 2020 that they should support him because he had saved their neighborhoods. Or when, in 2024, Joe Biden invoked the “power of women,” suggesting that their anger over abortion restrictions would help propel Democrats to victory. (Figures from earlier this year show that just 64% of women support abortion.)

Moreover, we see it in polls that lump women together as a single, homogeneous group: In 2024, exit polls reported that 53% of women had voted for Kamala Harris, a figure that obscured the fact that roughly nine in 10 Black women supported her, while a majority of white women actually voted for Trump.

It seems almost too obvious to state, but I’ll say it anyway: Different women have different values, different priorities, different household economies, different backgrounds, and different, well, everything. Why, then, would experts assume they’d vote the same way? As Americans head to the polls for the 2026 midterms, it's worth asking why we so often still fall into the trap of talking about women as if they all want the same thing. 

The idea that women might vote as a unified political bloc is at least as old as America’s suffrage movement.

Some suffragists argued that women's participation would elevate American politics. Women, they suggested, would bring their experiences as mothers, caregivers, and moral guardians into the public sphere. Their votes might advance education, public health, child welfare, and peace. Opponents of suffrage, on the other hand, feared women's participation would upend traditional political and social arrangements by bringing, they thought, those exact same issues into the political sphere. 

Either way, both sides shared a common assumption: that women possessed a distinct political identity that could be predicted based on their gender. 

Of course in practice, these assumptions were far from reality.

Even on the question of whether women should be allowed to vote, women were not in agreement. While suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and Carrie Chapman Catt spent decades fighting for the ballot, plenty of women were organizing just as fervently on the other side of the debate.

In 1911, Josephine Dodge, a wealthy New York philanthropist who had also championed the establishment of childcare centers for working mothers, became the founding president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), which peaked at about half a million members in 1919.

Dodge and her fellow anti-suffragists argued that most women did not really want the vote — another sweeping generalization right there. Women already had their hands full managing homes and raising children, they argued, which left scant time to follow politics or participate in elections. 

Other people argued that women could exercise greater moral influence outside the messy world of partisan politics, while some opponents went so far as to question women's intellectual fitness for political life.

Let’s linger on that for a moment: At the time, women were organizing politically to argue that women had no business participating in politics. If women couldn't even agree on whether they should have the vote or not, the notion that they would somehow agree on what to do with a vote was always going to be a stretch.

No wonder the enfranchisement of millions of women did not produce the ideological upheaval some may have anticipated.

In 1920, the Republican Warren G. Harding defeated the Democrat James M. Cox in a landslide, to become America’s 29th president. Women, far from voting as a unified bloc, appeared to follow many of the same political patterns as men. Exact statistics don’t exist — Illinois was the only state that recorded the presidential vote according to sex — but historians tend to agree that there was no significant distinction.

Both Harding and Cox had advertised in the popular magazine The Woman Citizen, while the newly formed League of Women Voters remained resolutely nonpartisan, focusing instead on educating women about their new political rights. 

As for turnout, according to the political scientists Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder, who reconstructed historical voting patterns, only about a third of voting-age women cast ballots in 1920, compared with roughly two-thirds of men. 

Among other things, that low turnout demarcated women voters as a distinct minority group — a small enough group for the argument to be made that they could all be lumped together. In the decades that followed, women’s participation grew first slowly, but always steadily. Indeed by 1980, women were turning out to vote in presidential elections at higher rates than men, a pattern that has continued ever since, but still the “women as minority” idea stuck.

According to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), 66.9% of voting-age women voted in the 2024 presidential election compared to 63.7% of men. 

To be sure, the fact that women don't vote alike does not mean that gender has no bearing on politics. It actually does. In fact, one of the most consequential developments in modern American electoral history has been the emergence of what political scientists have dubbed — surprise, surprise — a “gender gap.” It describes the topline difference between how men and women vote, with women, on average, more likely than men to support Democratic candidates and men more likely than women to vote Republican. 

The phenomenon came to national prominence during the 1980 presidential election, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, with Reagan garnering approximately 55% of men's votes but only 47% of women's. Women, it seemed, were significantly less enthusiastic about the Republican candidate — and Republicans more broadly — than their male counterparts.

But a gender gap is not the same thing as a voting bloc. In 1980, for example, Reagan still won a slightly larger share of women’s votes than Carter did. It wasn’t that women were uniformly rejecting Reagan and Republicans; they were simply less likely to support them than men were.

Beneath those broad gender differences lie all sorts of other divisions, including race, religion, education, age, economic and marital status, and geography, factors that have long shaped women's political preferences, often more powerfully than gender itself.

According to research by CAWP, across Asian American, Black, Latinx, and white voters, women are more likely than men to report voting for a Democratic candidate. But at the same time, a majority of white women have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since the 2000 presidential election when white women were almost equally split between Al Gore, the Democrat, and George W. Bush, the Republican who won.

The same has also been true of the issues women prioritize. Reproductive rights, childcare, and equal pay may be important to many female voters, but so are inflation, immigration, taxes, and national security. And naturally, women don't necessarily agree on the solutions to any of these issues, either.

When men disagree about politics, we generally accept it as the natural order of a functioning democracy. When women disagree, their divisions are treated as something remarkable, unexpected and surprising. 

Bizarrely this holds true even as we slice and dice the women voters into finer categories. In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, we've heard plenty about suburban women, young women, married women, unmarried women, college-educated women — the list goes on. But still the implication holds that so-called women’s issues would somehow trump any other political leanings women might hold; or indeed, that women might hold political leanings counter to the broader stereotype of “how women vote.”

We see this reflected over and over in headlines which continue to lump women together: In October, The Washington Post reported that suburban women were souring on a Republican Senate candidate in Texas (really? All of them?) and Bloomberg explained “How Women Voters Could Swing the Senate.” (The headline only holds up if we assume that women vote Democratic). Meanwhile an Puck article published in August heralded the “Revenge of the Walmart Moms.” 

Can you imagine a headline about “men swinging the senate”? Or about “the revenge of the Walmart dads”? Can you imagine Joe Biden invoking the “power of men?”

Back in 2016, Salon pondered “The mystery of Republican women backing sexist Trump.” Perhaps if we'd spent less time marveling at the supposed mystery of women supporting Trump, and more time trying to understand what actually motivated them, we'd have a better grasp of American politics today.

Dividing tens of millions of voters into broad demographic categories can, of course, tell us many useful things about the electorate. But it can also obscure a more fundamental truth. Women — just like men — are not, and never will be, a political constituency with a single set of interests, priorities, or beliefs.

More than a century after women secured the vote, it’s time to ditch our surprise when women exercise their political independence by disagreeing with one another, when they vote in supposedly “unexpected” ways, or when they care more about inflation or geopolitics than childcare and reproductive rights. Women, after all, fought for the right to vote, not for the obligation to follow some uniquely female set of values that never existed in the first place.