Freakonomics is one of my favorite non-legal blogs to read.  Today, they point out that Catherine Rampell’s argument that ““jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women” is not  novel.  Ian Ayres notes that Akhil Amar made this observation back in 2005 in America’s Constitution: A Biography:

 

Much as the Founding Fathers had structured a Constitution whose promises of freedom and democracy sought to pull skilled European immigrants across the ocean, so their pioneer grandsons in the West evidently aimed to draw American women through the plains and over the mountains.

Data from the 1890 census provide some support for this admittedly crude theory. For every hundred native-born Wyoming males, there were only 58 native-born females. No other state had so pronounced a gender imbalance. Colorado and Idaho were the fifth and sixth most imbalanced states overall in 1890. The other early woman-suffrage state, Utah, had a somewhat higher percentage of women (thanks to its early experience with polygamy), but even Utah had only 88 native-born females for every hundred native-born males, ranking it 11th among the 45 states in the mid-1890’s. Also, the second, third, fourth, and seventh most imbalanced states — Montana, Washington, Nevada, and Oregon — would all embrace woman suffrage in the early 1910’s, several years ahead of most sister states. In all these places, men voting to extend the suffrage to women had little reason to fear that males might anytime soon be outvoted en masse by females (Amar, America’s Constitution, pp. 419-25).

 

Tags: legal history

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 2:04 pm by Shalini and is filed under Lawyers in the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.