| This dissertation is a study of the electoral mobilization of women in the United States between 1917 and 1932. It seeks to explain why, when women were becoming increasingly important in the electoral calculations of major party elites, women's elites were becoming increasingly unsuccessful in their efforts to win policy concessions from those same elites. The argument is based on the organizational consequences of women's prior disfranchisement for the competition between the major parties and the National League of Women Voters (NLWV) in the mobilization of women's votes by appeal to gender solidarity. That organizational legacy of disfranchisement altered the path of electoral mobilization typical for a group sharing a strong norm of group identification. First, the National American Woman Suffrage Organization (NAWSA) adapted to disfranchisement by adopting an organizational form which would later prove inappropriate to the task of coordinating women's electoral mobilization. Second, the major party organizations created their own women's divisions to facilitate women's mobilization well before constitutional enfranchisement. Third, because the NAWSA had to undergo a period of adaptation before it could begin to mobilize women to vote, the major parties' women's divisions had a significant head start in initiating women's electoral mobilization after their enfranchisement; that head start allowed the parties to reap the benefits of the bandwagon dynamic of mobilization on the basis of group identity. Fourth, because the newly transformed woman suffrage organization (now the NLWV) could not effectively appeal to women's electoral loyalties after the development of the parties' electoral bandwagons, it eventually dropped out of the market for women's mobilization. And finally, without the potential threat of women's votes after the mid-1920s, the NLWV ceased to win policy concessions for women, despite the parties' increasing success in mobilizing women's votes by appeal to gender solidarity. |
