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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Monday morning, everyone. We'll have David Remnick on the show today, The New Yorker editor-in-chief and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. Also, we'll do a Monday morning swing state series look at Georgia, such a big story now as they are shattering records for early voting. We'll go live to Georgia later this hour and see if we can learn anything already about that vital swing state. Special for today, we'll have day 1 of a fall membership drive Brian Lehrer show quiz series. We like to have some fun during these fundraising drives and give away stuff. This drive, it's a quiz a day this week based on our series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today, 100 years of Democratic presidential candidates as our quiz. If you think you know your Democratic nominees for president, get ready to call in in about an hour. Get two in a row right, and you'll win a limited edition 100 Years of WNYC Stanley Cup, the same 30-ounce Stanley mug we're giving away as a thank-you gift in the drive.

We begin this week by continuing our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. It's thing 32 today and very relevant to the presidential election. 100 years of women having the right to vote. Technically, it's 104 years as the 19th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified in 1920. Did women start voting at a higher rate than men right away as they do now? They do now. When did the gender gap in presidential votes first emerge? How did we get to a point in American politics today where the gender gap might set records as Donald Trump tries to go all in on appealing to the grievances of men?

Our guest for this 100 Years segment is Jennifer Piscopo, director of the Gender Institute and professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway University of London. Among many other things in this country, she wrote an article for Smithsonian Magazine on the occasion of the 19th Amendment's own centennial called How Women Vote: Separating Myth From Reality. That takes us through the so called women's vote of the last hundred years. Professor Piscopo, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Jennifer Piscopo: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: To start with, a fascinating note of what we might call prehistory, local to our area, no less, from your article, in the earliest days of the US as a country, women could vote in the state of New Jersey. That was 130 years before the 19th Amendment. Really?

Jennifer Piscopo: That is absolutely correct. New Jersey took the promises of equal rights, equal votes for all that were offered by the founders of the United States, which were predominantly men, but New Jersey took them to their logical conclusion. There was a brief moment where women who met the requirements in New Jersey for property ownership were able to vote before the legislature realized the loophole for not specifying that actually, when they said, "All voters that met the requirement," they meant only men, and unfortunately, that loophole closed after a very short period of time.

It is a really nice fun fact to bring out, to point out to students and to our colleagues, citizens and friends that there was one state that had that vision very early on about what equality could mean if it was extended to all groups in society.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting that you wrote that women could vote if they met the same other qualifications as men, which meant being a property owner at that time. The voting women, you wrote, were mostly widows, but the state legislature took that right away in 1794. Do you know anything? Is anything handed down about how they justified that at the time?

Jennifer Piscopo: Well, I think there was this surprise. It's hard to go back to that time, but we have to go back to the time and really think about, they didn't specify men, they didn't put that word there because there was just this understanding or this assumption that those who met the qualifications of property ownership, of having a certain amount of wealth, would be men. The reason primarily widows qualified was that was one of the few circumstances where women could inherit their own property and meet those property qualifications.

I think it was about being caught off guard and then saying, "Wait a minute, these women are voting. That wasn't what we meant. We need to actually go be quite specific about who-" meaning men, "-actually meet those property ownerships." That's really important that you pointed that out because at the time, the franchise was definitely not for all men. It was not for men that were enslaved. It was not for Indigenous men. It was not for migrant men. It was for a very small subset of men. They wrote the Constitution, and they wrote those early state legislative constitutions with themselves in mind. They quickly corrected that oversight in New Jersey.

Brian Lehrer: Race, class, and gender had official barriers in the original constitution. The 19th Amendment finally gets ratified in 1920. Your article tells us that there was no polling in the 1920s in presidential elections, but historians seem to think women did not surge to the ballot box immediately with their new hard-won right and vote at the same rate as men. What's the best evidence about who started voting right away and who did not?

Jennifer Piscopo: Here I really have to recognize the painstaking work that my colleagues Christina Wolbrecht and Kevin Corder did, using archival data to really understand in those first decades before polling, how women voted. What they found is a really important truth that matters still today, which is that in the most cases, women respond to the same kind of electoral incentives as men. When elections are more competitive, we see higher turnout because individual voters are more likely to think that their vote matters. This is why both candidates in the race today are trying to remind us how close the election is.

On average, we have very few inferences about women's turnout, but we know that in the 1920s and the 1930s, the 1940s, where the state elections were closer, women did start to turn out at levels closer to men responding to those same incentives, "This is a more competitive election. My vote won't matter. I'm going to turn out."

Brian Lehrer: Still it was about a two-to-one voting ratio, men to women, that your colleagues estimated nationally in those early races in the 1920s or so, right?

Jennifer Piscopo: That's true. There are still a lot of barriers that any population that historically has not had the vote then faces when they get the vote. If we think about women as a broad category, there's access to information, there's access to political information. Women might not be socialized to consume political information in the same way as men.

If we add in those other factors that you mentioned, race, class, there were still, at the time in the United States, a lot of barriers to voting that were put in place based on race and class. In the Jim Crow South, you had poll taxes, you had literacy taxes. Those would, disproportionately perhaps, have disadvantaged women more than men because women, especially women of color, formerly enslaved women, might not have had access to the same educational opportunities, the same money-earning opportunities, and wouldn't be able to pay those poll taxes or pass those literacy tests.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, as usual, in our 100 Years segments, we have time for a few oral history contributions to help us tell the story from you. I wonder for this, who has a family story of a woman as far back as you can go, being the first woman in your family to vote? 212-433 WNYC. Does anyone have a grandmother or great grandmother maybe, who might have even handed down a story of what it was like to see the 19th Amendment get ratified in 1920? We would love to hear such a story. If anyone listening now happens to have one, 212-433-9692. If not that, who has a story of a woman in your lineage being the first woman in the family to cast a vote for president?

Any question for historian, Jennifer Piscopo, in this 100 Years of 100 Things segment, 100 years of women having the right to vote, and we're going to get up to this year's election and where it fits in this historical narrative. 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692.

The first presidential election year when women did vote at the same rate as men, your article tells us, was 1980, Carter versus Reagan. What would you say spurred turnout to that equal status in that election?

Jennifer Piscopo: Right. By 1980, a lot of the barriers that I mentioned just a second ago have disappeared. There's a few important changes. We have the Voting Rights Act in the 1965 that strikes down many of these discriminatory provisions, especially in the South, but not only in the South, poll taxes, literacy taxes, that increases the ability of women, especially women of color, to turn out to vote.

You also have a changing era in American politics. You're coming out of the 1960s. Out of the 1970s, there is a women's movement, draws greater attention to women's civic engagement, women's political participation. Some of these social changes that do take several decades to unfold start to bear fruit, if you will, by the 1980s. This is when we start to see women turn out at the same rates as men.

Brian Lehrer: We also saw the first gender gap in that election. Your Smithsonian article tells us-- you remind us that Reagan got 55% of men's votes but only 47% of women's votes. What will you identify as the main reasons for that historically?

Jennifer Piscopo: That's right. We think about turnout differences, but then we also think about differences in who women and men vote for. When folks talk about the gender gap, they're thinking about for a particular candidate, it's usually the winning candidate, we can do it for the losing candidate as well, what's the within candidate difference for women's favorability versus men's favorability for that candidate? This is when we start to see the emergence of, on average, women supporting the Democratic candidate more than the Republican candidates.

Those social changes that we just mentioned start in the 1980s to become aligned more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. We also start to see the parties diverge in how they appeal on social issues and appeal on social issues with gender dimensions relative to gender equality, women's role in society, and then increasingly relative to reproductive rights and abortion. This starts to have an effect with women, on average, starting to cast their votes more for the Democratic candidate than for the Republican candidate. That has become now one of the very stable patterns among the American electorate.

Brian Lehrer: The gender gap persists, and so does the gap between men and women being elected to Congress. You're right. Even though women got the right to vote in 1920, by the end of the 1930s, there were still fewer than 10 women in the House of Representatives. Why did it take a long time for either women to enter politics or to be allowed to enter politics if there were other barriers?

Jennifer Piscopo: Exactly. The barriers for voting become even more magnified if we apply those same barriers to running for office. Running for office does not just require a lot of political knowledge and political engagement. It also requires a lot of resources. It requires a lot of time, and it requires the ability to enter a competition and then to actually be able to leave your family, travel to the Capitol, and serve your country by being represented in office.

All of these barriers, then, are magnified for women who, historically, have not had access to the same amount of financial resources. We know from a lot of research that often women, even when they have income of their own, think about that income as being family income as opposed to income with which they could pursue their own political ambition, and men don't always think about their income in that same way. These, again, are just averages that we know from research, have not had access to time because of childcare and family responsibilities. Of course, politics requires a lot of time and a lot of travel.

The parties also play an enormous role in thinking about who they recruit to run for office. Local party organizations, state party organizations, for decades, if not centuries, are accustomed to looking to men as their typical candidate. Women who have ambition, who can find the resources, can find the time, who want to do it, could still struggle even to be noticed and recognized by political parties as viable candidates and as good candidates to be fielded.

It took a long time for women to start to run, to start to be elected. As you said today, we still don't have gender parity among women and men, but we do see some strong party differences in which party does tend to elect more women to office, and that is the Democratic Party.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Professor Piscopo, ready to hear a few oral history stories from our listeners?

Jennifer Piscopo: It sounds amazing. I am so ready.

Brian Lehrer: Here is Jenny in Manhattan. Jenny, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in.

Jenny: Thank you for taking my call. I told your screener, my mother was born before women had the right to vote. When she was able to, my grandmother took my mother as a tiny little girl to vote. Bunny (phonetic) Maybrook voted for every single election right through the presidential election between Trump and Clinton. I remember her going with her little walker to the voting booth and saying, "I cant believe I'm voting for the first woman president." As it turned out, she did not. At the end of the election when the results came in, she said, "Jenny, when I go, I'm going to go confused."

Brian Lehrer: That it didn't result in the election of the first woman president by the end of her lifetime?

Jenny: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Jenny, thank you. That's a wonderful, wonderful story. Let me go to Matthew in Brooklyn next. Matthew, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Matthew: Hi, Brian, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you. Hi.

Matthew: My great aunt, I didn't even think about the fact that at some point she didn't have the right to vote. I said to her, "Aunt Dinah, when was the first election you voted in?" She said, "Well, let me think. When did we get the right to vote?" I thought, "Wow." I said, "Well, what was the first public event that you remember?" She stopped and she said, "I think it was the assassination of William McKinley." That's how old she was.

Brian Lehrer: Did she say anything about what it meant to her to get the right to vote? Do you remember anything?

Matthew: Well, what I remember is she was a spinster and she worked for the government, for the federal government, for many years. She definitely was very much a feminist. She didn't say anything specific, but it definitely meant a lot to her.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much.

Matthew: You're welcome. Bye-bye.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Here's one in a text message. Listener writes, "My great great grandmother was involved in the suffragist movement in Detroit. My grandfather used to talk about being sent to the corner to buy cigarettes and beer for his grandmother and her friends during their meetings," writes Kristen in Brooklyn. Some great stories from our listeners, Professor Piscopo. Now we need to bring it up to the present for the end of this segment, the elections in the Trump era.

What kind of gender gap was there in 2016 when there was also the first woman nominee of a major political party, Hillary Clinton, as our first caller was, of course, referencing? Was it bigger than the previous elections, say, when Obama won?

Jennifer Piscopo: In 2020, we saw that women voted for Biden on an average of 12 to 15-point but you actually asked me about 2016. We have seen the gender gap increase with every election. The trend that we mentioned earlier, where women have been, on average, increasingly more likely to support the Democratic Party, has been growing. This is also a product of the issues the parties are emphasizing, in addition to the candidates that the parties are running.

It's important to remember, too, that when we talk about the gender gap, there is variation among women. We've been talking this whole segment as if women were a homogenous group, but we know that women are not a homogenous group. They have racial identities and class identities. Those are two big identities that matter a lot for voting. You might hear it talked a lot about that. When we break down the 2016 vote, especially for Hillary Clinton, we see that actually white women did nothing support Clinton. On average, white women supported Trump, but women of color, Black women, Latino women, Asian Pacific Islander women supported Clinton.

There's another very important story, which is the interaction then between race and class, because even though on average, white women supported Trump relative to Clinton, you also had young women, young white women, college educated white women, and white women with high earning power supported Clinton. There's really important race and race class interactions and how we think about the women vote and supporting women candidates and supporting the Democratic versus the Republican Party.

Brian Lehrer: Let's close it with this. We've been seeing Donald Trump campaign explicitly to men and women in different ways that seem to be almost sacrificing a potentially bigger women's vote to get a much bigger gender gap than ever, hoping enough aggrieved men, if I can put it that way, will make up more than the difference. There was that rant in the news this weekend by Trump, what a real man's man, the golfer Arnold Palmer was appealing to, let's say, a very traditional notion of masculinity. He said this at a recent Pennsylvania rally, addressing women directly.

Donald Trump: You will be protected, and I will be your protector.

[applause]

Donald Trump: Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free.

[applause]

Donald Trump: You will no longer be thinking about abortion.

Brian Lehrer: You will no longer be thinking about abortion. As a political science professor, would you do a little political analysis of that for us?

Jennifer Piscopo: Well, there are a lot of things happening in those Trump appeals. I think it is true that aside from this clip- and we'll talk about the clip in about 10 seconds, but aside from this clip, I think it is true that the Republicans with Trump in this race have been doubling down on their appeals to men. That might not be the winning strategy for them, because women turn out more and women turn out, on average, for the Democratic Party. The party should be thinking, if it wants to win, it needs to try to win some women voters.

Then we get to this clip from Trump, which is their attempt to try to win over some women voters.

Why would he make that comment about abortion? Well, in his mealy-mouthed Trump fashion, he's responding to the fact that in the midterm elections, when a state had, on the ballot, a ballot question about abortion rights, that not only fueled turnout, it fueled turnout from women, and it fueled turnout from women who were Democrats who were voting in favor of abortion rights.

Again, that's bad news for a Republican Party that is trying to base its electoral strategy on appealing to men, and so Trump makes this convoluted statement about, "Stop thinking about abortion, women voters. Come to me, I'm going to protect you." The data suggests that this really might only appeal to that segment of white women, it's usually married women, we know that from the polling data, that already support Trump. It seems unlikely to convince those younger women, those educated women, to become pro-Trump voters, but I guess you have to try.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer Piscopo, director of the Gender Institute and professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway University of London. She wrote a Smithsonian article back in 1920 on the occasion of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. We've been drawing our history from that article and her knowledge as a professor and scholar, obviously. That's our 100 Years of 100 Things segment for today, number 32, 100 years of women having the right to vote. Professor Piscopo, awesome job. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jennifer Piscopo: Thank you so much. Have a great day.

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