One Question at a Time: The Impact of the American Civil War on Mobilization for Women's Suffrage

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the American Civil War on mobilization for women’s suffrage in the US. I construct a new dataset of soldiers enlisted in the Union army and their wartime experience, and locate them to their town of residence. Leveraging variation in casualty rates, I show that people from towns with more casualties were less likely to petition for women’s suffrage in the following years. Consistent with a narrative that attention and capacity to mobilize for political change is limited and that major events, such as the Civil War, can shift preferences and priorities away from reform I find evidence of two possible mechanisms through which casualty rates drive these results. Firstly, Northern towns with higher casualties were more attune to the salience of Black rights - which the Civil War was fought over, resulting in a prioritization of this movement over women's suffrage. Secondly, that the collective trauma of casualties resulted in a tightening of pre-War social norms that were not welcoming of female political empowerment. I also find evidence that the effect is not driven by the demographic shock of high casualty rates, due to high levels of immigration at the time.