Presidential elections in the twenty-first century broke with history in many ways, from the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 vote count to Barack Obama’s barrier-breaking nomination and victory to the unprecedented events of the 2016 campaign. From “W is for Women” to the first major party nomination of a woman candidate for president, women remained front and center in presidential election discourse and debate nearly 100 years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

The presidential election of 2016 generated a wave of explicitly gendered protest activism. The post-inauguration Women’s Marches in D.C. and around the country are estimated to have involved more than one in every 100 people in the United States and likely represent the largest single-day demonstration in American history. The marches were organized and dominated by women who reclaimed and reworked gender stereotypes with pink hats and feminist slogans. Other organizations which emerged to challenge the Trump administration often were founded by women and/or had an overwhelmingly female membership base. For example, women made up about 70% of members of groups associated with the anti-Trump Indivisible Project. Daily Action, a service that encourages users to call members of Congress, reported that women accounted for 80% of its users after 2016. Women in general are more likely than men to say they have participated in a political event or protest since the election. The future may well be female: The presidential election of 2016 inspired heightened interest in engaging in protest among (Democratic) adolescent girls.

With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, those who had fought to accomplish women’s suffrage throughout the nation had high hopes for new women voters. “Let the politicians keep in mind the fact that the women’s vote is going to be a tremendous factor in this election,” warned one suffrage activist. Another predicted a “marked change because of women’s entrance into the electorate.”

Consider the presidential elections of 1932 and 1980. These two contests occurred less than 50 years apart but represent distinctly different moments for the political fortunes of the major parties. The historic election of 1932 ushered in a new Democratic majority that would persist for decades. In that election, slightly fewer than 50% of eligible women turned out to vote, compared to three-quarters of men, a more than 25-point difference. Despite differences in turnout, both women and men gave a large majority of their votes to the political party that promised to work aggressively to alleviate the suffering of the Great Depression: 60% of women and 57% of men cast their ballots for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt.

On July 19, 1848, some 300 women and men gathered at Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. They had traveled from as far as fifty miles away in response to an advertisement Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and three other women had placed in the Seneca County Courier just five days earlier, inviting the public to a “women’s rights convention.” After two days of speeches and deliberations, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men (one-third of those in attendance) signed the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence. The document identified grievances related to employment, marriage, and property, and directly critiqued women’s place in society, religion, and the home.

In the wake of the presidential election of 1980, the women’s movement was at a crossroads. The victorious Republican party had removed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the defining feminist issue of the time, from its platform after nearly 40 years of support, and, for the first time, added an unequivocal statement in opposition to abortion rights. New president Ronald Reagan was strongly supported by Phyllis Schlafly, the well-known anti-feminist activist and organizer.

The decades of the 1940s and 1950s conjure conflicting images of American women. The strong and independent Rosie the Riveter of the Second World War soon gave way to June Cleaver, the perfect suburban mother. Betty Friedan would later describe this aggressive reassertion of traditional gender roles as “the feminine mystique.” For women and politics, this era is usually cast – if discussed at all – as one of relative political quiescence, sandwiched between impassioned Progressive and suffrage activism and the second wave of the women’s movement. While the view that women were absent from politics in the immediate postwar period has been challenged on several grounds, our understanding of women as voters during this period remains limited and often characterized more by stereotypes than evidence.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in August 1920, setting off a flurry of speculation about how newly-enfranchised women would vote in the upcoming presidential election. Although women in fifteen states already enjoyed the right to vote by 1920, politicians and observers nonetheless expressed uncertainty about what to expect. “Women’s Vote Baffles Politicians’ Efforts to Forecast Election” claimed one newspaper. Another reported that “anxious politicians of both parties are sitting up nights worrying about [women’s votes].” Appeals to new women voters emphasized issues specific to women, such as equal pay and maternity care, and issues related to women’s roles as mothers, such as child labor and education. In the aftermath of the election, many claimed that women had handed the election to Republican Warren G. Harding, for reasons ranging from his good looks to the Republican party’s support of women’s suffrage. Others attributed the Republican advantage to specific groups of women; the women many considered most likely to turn out to vote in 1920 – suffrage activists – tended to be native-born white women, who like native-born white men, were expected to vote Republican.

American women boast a long legacy of political activism on issues ranging from the struggle for independence from England to their own political and social rights. In the nineteenth century, women organized an independent social and political movement for women’s rights and suffrage. Many of those women also were active in, and learned from, the abolition, temperance, and Progressive movements. Their crowning achievement, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, made gender-equal suffrage in the United States a reality and opened the door to electoral participation for generations of women.