North American female suffrage: the role of occupational dispersion in the West

Until the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1919, voting rights for women in the US were not mandatory. Accordingly, many states refused women this privilege. However, the West appeared to be an exception, with all but one state in this region having granted female suffrage before federal enforcement. This paper seeks to understand the role of regional trends in female labour force participation in women’s enfranchisement, with a focus on the impact of occupational dispersion between 1880 - 1910. By exploring an avenue outside of religion and gender imbalances, an original contribution to existing literature on the success of Western women’s suffrage is provided. I utilise census data and governmental marital status statistics to conduct graphical analysis using cartography and complementary log-logistic regression analysis. The key finding of the paper is that women in Western states tended to be engaged in a narrow range of jobs – a consistent pattern found over the period of study. This helped them form a collective voice to fight for emancipation by facilitating mobilisation and more effective suffrage strategies. Hence, although the impact of women’s occupational dispersion is not found to be statistically significant, the relationship between the two variables is nevertheless historically meaningful.