The pandemic, economic, and racial justice crises that have gripped the world since the beginning of 2020 have eclipsed what was, for many American feminists, poised to be an important year of reflection and debate. Although women in 15 US states enjoyed voting rights on terms equal to men before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and although many indigenous peoples, immigrants, and people of color were excluded from the franchise a good deal longer, the Nineteenth Amendment was a tremendous achievement—not only because millions of women were newly enfranchised after its ratification but also because it represented the culmination of the largest sustained social movement of women this country has ever witnessed.

Much has changed for American women in the hundred years since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. In 2019, women’s rates of labor force participation surpassed men’s for the first time. Today, women are much less likely to marry or have children than they were in the 1920s. And, since the 1990s, women have formed the largest part of the US electorate both numerically and in terms of rates of turnout. Yet, 100 years of suffrage has also left many gendered inequalities intact: most legislative bodies, cabinet positions, Supreme Court seats, and spots on company boards are still held by men. Women are still paid significantly less than men even when they labor in the same occupation. And, though Hillary Clinton won a majority of the votes cast in the 2016 presidential election, the United States has still never elected a woman president. In a forceful new book, A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections since Suffrage, Professors Christina Wolbrecht and Kevin Corder grapple with these transformations and stagnations, revealing some surprising consistencies in the ways that women are talked about as political actors, at the same time as they reveal changing patterns of participation and vote choice in more recent years.

Beginning with the 1920 presidential election and ending with the 2018 midterms, Corder and Wolbrecht draw on a wealth of survey research, including their own estimates of participation and preferences of the first women voters, to track gendered patterns of turnout and vote choice over five periods: post-suffrage through the end of the New Deal (chapter 4), the World War II era and subsequent Baby Boom (chapter 5), the civil rights movement and the second-wave surge in feminist mobilization (chapter 6), the rise of the Christian Right and the emergence of the new democratic coalition (chapter 7), and from 9/11, through the Obama years, to the election of Trump (chapter 9). In eminently readable prose, Corder and Wolbrecht catalog how politicians and news outlets described women as political actors in each of these periods, consider the claims that scholars have made about women’s political behavior, and assess what we actually can know given the period-specific data that are available to us. Each chapter then analyzes patterns of turnout and partisan preferences along the dimensions of race, age, educational levels, household composition (including marital status, parenthood, and employment), and geographic region.

Corder and Wolbrecht show that an initially large gender turnout gap but a relatively small preference gap (with white women leaning slightly more Republican) that characterized the earliest elections with women voters began to dissipate by the 1936 presidential election. After that point, within demographic groups, men and women tended to vote at similar rates and for similar parties for 30 more years. In the 1970s, the parties began to divide on key feminist issues like abortion, and the Democrats made relative strides toward integrating women into the party: whereas in 1968 only 13% of the party’s convention delegates were women, the proportion rose to 40% in 1972 (p. 129). A shift of white men away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans, and the increasing allegiance of African Americans of both genders toward the Democrats, catalyzed the coalition that is still in force today.

In recounting this tale—of initially large gender differences in turnout and small differences in preferences, which transformed into small differences in turnout and larger differences in preferences—the book compellingly argues against a single notion of “the women’s vote” that traverses time, space, and demography. It deals in a sensitive manner with some of the thorny racial tensions that have plagued women’s movements in the United States, and takes care to document race-based behavioral patterns in each of the periods it studies. It also takes seriously regional differences across the states. For example, by showing that Southern women, initially among the least likely Americans to vote, have now surpassed Southern men in participation rates, the book suggests that falling levels of education have had demobilizing effects on men in the South.

The attention to group-based differences and regional patterns of participation is a hallmark of Wolbrecht and Corder’s long-term collaboration, but the description of larger demographic changes for US women is new. Their accounting of average differences across groups is exemplary, but at times I wish they had pushed the demographic analyses further by telling us more about how demographic changes made the abstention or participation of specific groups more politically salient. For example, they tell us that in the early 1960s unmarried women with and without children were the most Republican. Because women were less likely to work outside the home, and women who did not work were the most Republican of any group, there was a gender preference gap in favor of the Republican party. Providing this type of insight in a more systematic way would help clarify the political meaning of demographic changes by providing a better picture of how women’s power has changed as a result of their changing lives.

Wolbrecht and Corder’s sweeping tour of gender and political behavior over the last century, which deftly presents and at times defies old ideas with new data, was hard to put down. The book’s contribution rests not only in the analysis of women voters, but also in its recounting of how our knowledge of elections more generally has evolved over the past century, and how our understanding of women in politics has grown with the increasing integration of women into the political science profession. It is a welcome text not only for scholars interested in gender and politics but also for those interested in the development of behavioral research on American politics more generally. It could be assigned in any graduate course on American elections or in any course on gender and politics, and it is approachable for entry-level undergraduate courses. As we gear up for future elections, this is the book to read and to recommend to your siblings, your parents, your friends, and your Twitter followers.