The 1920 Election

While women in many states could vote for any number of issues and offices at the state level, it wasn’t until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that women could finally vote in a presidential election. Yet turnout by women in the 1920 presidential election was relatively low, with women voters estimated to have turned out at a 35 to 45 percent rate (compared with 68 percent of men voters).

Republican Warren G. Harding, a senator from Ohio, won the election against Democrat James Cox, who had a young Franklin Roosevelt as his vice presidential running mate. (It should also be noted that Eugene Debs ran on the Socialist Party ticket — while incarcerated — and won 3.4 percent of the popular vote.) Political advertisements for both Harding and Cox appeared in pages of The Woman Citizen with specific appeal to issues of social welfare, which were thought to be "women’s issues."

Fears of a "monolithic female voting bloc" never materialized. Indeed, the League of Women Voters, which emerged from the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was specifically nonpartisan and never endorsed specific candidates; rather, the League of Women Voters hoped to educate and inform women voters so that they could exercise their vote responsibly.