Vance Nomination Reignites Age-Old Question of Whether Women Should Be Allowed to Vote (2024)

Since he was nominated for the vice presidency, Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance has been in the news for his history of comments about childless women and his endorsem*nts of figures on the right who have said (among other things) that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged, that Jan. 6 was staged, and that the United States should become a dictatorship.

There’s “a lot going on there,” as people say, which perhaps explains why there’s been relatively little attention on this old chestnut of a take by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Republican megadonor who has been a mentor figure to Vance for years. (According to Vance, a 2011 speech Thiel delivered at Yale inspired him to become involved in the conservative movement; Thiel later hired Vance to work at one of his companies and unilaterally made him a viable Senate candidate in 2021 by giving $15 million to a super PAC that supported him.) Wrote Thiel:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into anoxymoron.

Zip the lips, ladies—the men are busy creating history, or at least they were! That passage is from a 2009 essay about the oppression of individual brilliance by government regulation; it was published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. In the piece, Thiel writes that democracy is particularly miserable for people with high IQs, concluding that hero-entrepreneurs like himself should seek to create their own sovereign kingdoms, beyond the reach of democratic politics, in outer space and the ocean—a conclusion that is perhaps germane to Democrats’ recent decision to characterize certain GOP candidates and ideas as simply too weird to vote for.

That said, although dismissing an idea as weird might be an effective political strategy, journalists have different standards and are committed to the spirit of free inquiry. Let’s take this seriously for a second and ask: Did expanding the franchise by passing the 19^th Amendment in 1920 deliver a permanent blow to U.S. economic growth and productivity? Did women crush the American dream like they’ve crushed so many dreams of having “a night out”? Would we (Americans) already be living in a future world of flying cars and thousand-year life spans if we (men/job creators) weren’t always getting nagged to take out the trash?

On the one hand, there are some autocratic libertarian nation-states elsewhere in the world that seem to approximate what Thiel and other Silicon Valley futurists think an ideal society should look like, and some of them do have a higher gross domestic product per capita than the U.S. Per the CIA World Factbook, the annual GDP per resident of Singapore is $127,500; in Qatar, it is $113,200, while in the U.S. that number is $73,600, which ranks 15^th in the world. On the other hand, liberal democracies like Switzerland and Norway rank above the U.S. by this measure as well.

The U.S. economy also seems to have grown at roughly the same pace before women began voting as it did afterward:

Indeed, the period of steepest growth in that chart occurred in the vicinity of 1940, when women’s labor participation surged as a result of World War II. This is not necessarily a surprise. The U.S. became significantly more democratic after women gained the right to vote, and a 2008 review of the academic literature on the relationship between democracy and growth concludes that the former has “robust, significant, and positive indirect effects” on the latter. (Democratic systems of government, the paper says, are associated with higher rates of worker skill and productivity, lower rates of political instability, and, contra Thiel, “higher levels of economic freedom.”)

But Thiel goes further than simply saying that voting itself is bad for business, postulating that women voters in particular have provided crucial support for social welfare spending and the regulation of industry. Here, too, his history is suspect, given that many Progressive Era responses to Gilded Age conditions were passed before 1910. (That year is the juncture at which a tipping-point process of states granting the ballot to women on their own began in earnest, culminating in the federal amendment a decade later.) In fact, the most well-known advocate of regulatory power in U.S. history may also have been the country’s most overtly masculine president—Teddy Roosevelt, who served from 1901 until 1909.

On that subject, Harvard professor Claudia Goldin—a historian and labor economist who won a Nobel Prize in 2023 for having “advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes”—pointed me to a 2020 paper, written by Dartmouth’s Elizabeth U. Cascio and Berkeley’s Na’ama Shenhav, that concludes that women voters’ disproportionate support for the Democratic Party in the U.S. is a relatively new phenomenon. “Recent work has shown that women turned left only after the 1970s in both the U.S. and Europe,” Goldin wrote in an email. “Women voted to the RIGHT of men until the 1970s or so in much of the developed world.”

Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California–Davis who wrote about the electoral consequences of the 19^th Amendment—as well as the growth of social welfare programs and federal regulation of business—in his bookWinter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal. “There’s no reason to believe women are intrinsically more liberal than men,” Rauchway agrees. “In the 1932 election, both Republicans and Democrats thought the women’s vote would skew to Herbert Hoover.” (Hoover, the incumbent Republican president, had served as the nation’s food administrator during World War I, and it was felt that this position had given him credibility with women who managed household food needs.) But per Rauchway, the first U.S. election in which a notable gender gap actually emerged was in 1980, when exit polling suggested that Ronald Reagan did 8 points better with men than with women.

This all said, Goldin notes, there is research showing that the expansion of the franchise had an immediate effect in the early 20^th century on the government’s attention to public health, particularly reforms that benefited children.

“In sum—the vote did matter and probably helped to clean up the food supply and create healthier cities,” she wrote. “Is that good for economic growth? Most would say ‘yes.’ Much better for wellbeing, and isn’t that what it is all about?”