Women’s Suffrage: Women Who Vote… and Who Count Votes

Women have welcomed their civic consecration with joy and have honoured it by exercising, against all real or imagined obstacles, their new and august function.

La Humanitat, 21 November 1933 (p. 3)

A noteworthy detail is that women did not limit themselves to exercising the function of voters. With surprising integrity, they also fulfilled the other functions they were entitled to perform, and, alongside men, they constituted the polling stations as presidents or deputies, and, representing various parties, acted as proxies or scrutineers. They performed all these functions with noble dignity and energetic resolve.

La Vanguardia, 21 November 1933 (p. 8)

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Women’s Suffrage: A Long Journey

On 1 October 1931, the Constituent Cortes of the Second Spanish Republic approved women’s suffrage. After a long and polarised debate, women could finally vote. They would do so for the first time on a widespread basis in the general elections of November 1933¹. Decades of activism and political and social demands culminated in the implementation of women’s suffrage, which meant that nearly 50% of the population had the right to vote for the first time.

But access to suffrage also brought another change. In 1933, women not only voted for the first time but were also able to serve as members of polling stations. That is, for the first time, they could count votes.

Below, we present the story of the women who broke barriers and counted votes for the first time in 1933. In this interactive, we will also show that the women who served in polling stations became politicised. In other words, being part of the polling stations politically socialised them and led them to become more involved in politics and mobilise more in the future.

Let’s begin the journey!

“1933. Women vote for the first time in the history of Spain (Source: Ara.cat)

🚶‍♂️Let’s take a step back first. 🚶‍♀Women collecting signatures for the Statute of Núria in 1931 (Source)

The first time the Spanish regime formalised women’s voting rights was in the Royal Decree of the Municipal Statute, approved on 8 March 1924, during the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera.

This decree granted the right to vote to unmarried women (and only in municipal elections) provided they were heads of households, over 23 years old (the legal voting age at the time, also for men), “were not prostitutes, and their civil status did not change”. For the first time, women were included in the electoral roll, although only about a quarter of the voters were women.

Beyond the widespread sexist stereotypes present in early 20th-century society, this measure stood out for its political logic. Primo de Rivera wanted to bolster his electoral base in elections that were to be held in the late 1920s and believed that women would vote for conservative options aligned with his authoritarian regime.

Although elections were ultimately not held during the dictatorship, it was during this period that the first women entered institutional politics. The regime appointed some women as councillors and mayors in certain municipalities for the first time. Matilde Pérez Mollá was the first, in Quatretondeta, and Dolors Codina i Arnau the first in Catalonia (in Talladell, now Tàrrega). However, with the fall of the dictatorship, Spain returned to square one, and women lost the right to vote, as the reforms introduced during the dictatorship were annulled.

The fact that it was a conservative and authoritarian government that first granted women the right to vote also came as a shock to progressive movements, at the forefront of demands for social and political rights.

The Valencian writer María Cambrils, born in El Cabanyal (Valencia), for example, argued that the satisfaction with this measure was only partial: many restrictions still existed, and women were presented as a political tool to consolidate an illiberal regime.

Women’s Suffrage in the Second Republic

The right to vote for women was debated again with the arrival of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931.

The debate was intense and bitter. Deputy Victoria Kent, one of the three women deputies in the Constituent Cortes of 1931, assured the chamber that “it was dangerous to grant women the vote” because they had not shown a special interest in the republican regime. They needed time to learn how to vote, she argued.

In contrast, Deputy Clara Campoamor was a fervent defender of women’s suffrage. “Do not make a historical mistake,” she said. In her book El voto femenino y yo. Mi pecado mortal, Campoamor explains the difficulty of defending women’s suffrage, partly because much of the criticism came from within her own party.

On 1 October 1931, the inclusion of women’s suffrage in the Republic’s constitution was approved. Of the 470 seats, 161 deputies voted in favour, 121 against, and there were 188 abstentions.

For the first time in history, women could vote or stand for election without special restrictions. In turn, this also made them eligible to serve on polling stations. As is the case today, polling station staff are responsible for managing and supervising the smooth running of the election day.

However, there was a wait. Although universal suffrage (including women’s suffrage) was included in the Constitution in 1931, the implementation of this right had to wait.

It was not until 1933 that the first women were able to vote and serve on polling stations.

From that moment on, they could vote in all electoral calls and, therefore, also exercised their right to vote in the Cortes elections for the second time in 1936.

From July 1936, with the coup d’état by the rebels, women (and men) would have to wait until the late 1970s to be able to exercise their right to vote again.

Women in Polling Stations

In a system very similar to today’s, the organisation of elections involved dividing the territory into census sections. Each census section was assigned a polling station, and three of the voters in the section were chosen to form part of it.

As is the case today, the women and men who had to form part of the polling stations were chosen by lot. The results of these draws were public and published in official newspapers to keep a record.

For example, in the DOGC published on 21 October 1933, Teresa Tor Llaugí appears, chosen to be the president of District II, Section 1 of La Pobla de Lillet.

The draw and, therefore, the fact that anyone could be chosen to form part of a polling station, although often a nuisance for those selected, is a very valuable tool for the research community. It allows what is technically known as a natural experiment.

Thanks to this natural experiment, we can rigorously study whether being part of the polling stations had any impact on the people who formed part of them. In other words, did the women who were randomly chosen in 1933 to form part of the polling stations participate more in the 1936 elections than the rest of the women who did not form part of the polling stations?

A Trip to the Archives

Once we knew what we wanted to study, we needed to build a database. How did we do it? Fortunately, our country has very valuable information, whether digitised or gathering dust (metaphorically) in various archives. After an exhaustive search, we ended up going on a trip to Girona.

It is important to note that we needed to create a database of voters for at least the three Cortes elections held during the Second Republic (1931, 1933, and 1936).

Ideally, we had to be able to trace the same person across all these years and, therefore, know whether they voted (or not) in each of the elections.

Fortunately, in Girona, both the electoral roll (all the people entitled to vote, with some personal characteristics) and the people who went to vote are preserved.

When you go to vote today, you know those sheets where your name and ID are handwritten and where your name is underlined? (The famous ‘ruler’ paper!). During the Second Republic, they also recorded all voters in a similar way (we don’t know if they used a ruler, though). Unlike today, and to the delight of political scientists, this information has been preserved.

From here, “only” digitising it remained. We decided to look for information from those polling stations where we knew women had been appointed to form part of them. Then, we complemented the information with more data from other places where there were no women in the polling stations. The goal was to find out whether they voted (or not) in the elections held during the Second Republic. Naturally, we cannot know what they voted for, but we do know whether they went to vote or not, which is already a lot!

After a few months of effort, we managed to create a database of different municipalities in Girona. In total, we collected information on nearly 500 individuals who were appointed as members of polling stations. Of the women, 92 participated in polling stations as titulars or substitutes: 16 as presidents and the rest as deputies (what we now know as vocal members).

It was important to cover the Girona region. After emptying all the information, we detected that there were 27 municipalities where women formed part of at least one polling station. To give a few examples, there were women in larger and more urban environments, such as La Bisbal d’Empordà or Girona.

However, there were also women in polling stations in rural and less populated municipalities, such as Santa Pau (Garrotxa) or Urtx (Cerdanya).

To ensure that these municipalities were not “special”, we also randomly selected an equivalent number of municipalities where only men were in the polling stations. Municipalities such as Banyoles, Palafrugell, Espolla, or Planoles (in grey on the map). We verified that these municipalities had similar characteristics and, once the checks were done, we were able to continue with the data collection.

The database of these first women who were chosen to form part of the polling stations can be found here.

The Politicisation of Women Who Served in Polling Stations

To analyse all the collected data, we compare whether the women who were chosen in 1933 to serve on polling stations voted more in 1936 than the women who did not serve on polling stations in 1933 (and who also did not serve on polling stations in 1936).

To have more points of comparison, we also compare it with men. In summary, we have four groups:

1. Control: People who did not serve on polling stations in 1933.

2. Alternate: People who in 1933 were chosen by lot to serve on polling stations as substitutes and did not have to assume responsibilities as poll officers.

3. Poll Officer: Thos who were chosen by lot to serve on polling stations and actually worked there all day (from sunrise to sunset!).

4. Defier: In 1933, some people were chosen by lot as acting poll officers and, therefore, should have been members of the poll board but, for whatever reason, they evaded their responsibilities and did not perform their role.

What do we find? First, we look at the people who did not work at the polling station (the vast majority of the population). We observe that, in this population group, the probability of participating in the 1936 elections was around 73% among men and almost 60% among women. Therefore, women were more likely to abstain.

Now we look at the category of substitutes, i.e., those people who went to the polling station in the morning and had to return home because the titular members showed up. Again, we see the gender bias: women substitutes in 1933 had a lower probability of voting in 1936 than men substitutes. Moreover, while men substitutes voted more than men in the control group, no statistically significant differences were detected among women.

Now we take a look at the men and women who worked at the polling station. What do we see? There is no longer a gender bias. That is, women who served on a polling station in 1933 had the same probability of participating in the 1936 elections as men.

We can also compare this with the people who, for whatever reason, evaded their civic duty to form part of the polling station. Here we see that the probability of voting is lower, with high levels of variation and no gender bias. (The results of this category are unreliable because it involves very few individuals.)

Want to Know More?

We explain all this in the following academic publication: Working For Democracy: Poll Officers and the Turnout Gender Gap, published in the British Journal of Political Science.

Footnotes

1. In some Spanish municipalities, though not in Catalonia, women were already able to vote in local elections in April 1933.