The Ballot and the Paycheck: Women's Suffrage and Female Labor Force Participation, 1880--1920

Abstract

Did granting women the right to vote affect their economic opportunities? This paper examines the relationship between state-level women's suffrage laws (1869–1918) and female labor force participation using census data from 1880–1920. Exploiting staggered adoption across 15 states before the 19th Amendment, we employ Callaway and Sant'Anna's (2021) heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences estimator with 36 never-treated states as controls. Using a sample of 883,887 women, we find no statistically significant effect of suffrage on female labor force participation (ATT = 0.4 percentage points, SE = 0.8 pp). Critically, we document substantial pre-trends violations (joint test p $<$ 0.001), suggesting that early-adopting states were on differential trajectories before treatment. These identification challenges prevent credible causal interpretation. Our findings highlight the difficulty of isolating the economic effects of political enfranchisement when progressive states selected into early adoption. [JEL: J21, J16, N31, D72]