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Title: Weakness in Numbers? Female Wellbeing and the Scarcity of Women in the American West

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2016

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Abstract: The American West was a bastion of women's rights in the late 19 th and early 20 th Centuries, a fact that is perhaps surprising given the region's predominantly male population early in its history. Is it possible that improvements in women's legal status in the early American West may have arisen not in spite of, but rather because of imbalance in these states' gender composition? Primary evidence shows that frontier policymakers proposed the expansion of women's rights as a solution to the scarcity of women in the early American West. By providing women rights elusive elsewhere in the U.S., they argued, they could entice the female settlers necessary for sustainable communities. To examine whether these stated intentions in fact manifested in policy, we test whether states that were more heavily male-skewed in the marriage-age population granted women greater rights to political participation. Despite their professed motivations for conceding rights to women, we find little quantitative evidence-whether at the state or local level, or differentially by access to polity-that these policymakers' desire to attract female settlers drove expansion in women's suffrage or in women's participation as elected representatives. Acknowledgements: We are grateful to audiences at the 2015 World Economic History Congress and the University of Oxford for their comments, and to Holly J. McCammon for sharing data. 2

Url: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a2dc/f7f7e221a3a11746c601d86ddb702690b848.pdf

Url: https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-server/files/815.pdf

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Authors: Arthi, Vellore; Greenwald, Diana

Conference Name: 2016 AEA/ASSA Meeting

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Gender

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