Teaching for Suffrage: How Teachers Spurred Women's Suffrage Activism in Norway

• In Event: Historical Causes and Consequences of Women’s Political Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

Women's inclusion in the public sphere sets the 20th century apart from the previous ones. The enfranchisement of women was the first act in this gender revolution. Leading accounts in comparative politics suggest that suffrage reforms succeeded due to a combination of women’s political activism and weak incumbents looking for voters to shore up their positions. Nevertheless, the level of women’s activism has either been assumed to mirror economic development or taken as exogenously given. This paper goes beyond these accounts to argue that women’s large-scale entrance into the teaching profession fueled female political mobilization for suffrage. The teaching occupation departed from common female occupations at the time—such as domestic, textile, and telegraph workers—in being publicly visible positions that involved daily contact with communities across the country. Female teachers were thus exceptionally well placed to organize and mobilize in favor of women’s suffrage. Empirically, we use two reforms in Norway (1860 and 1890) that expanded women’s access to the teaching profession. We couple the timing of the education reforms with the notion that women living close to the teaching colleges may be more likely to attend the teacher colleges. Using an instrumental variable design, we then look at the effect of being a teacher on (i) membership in suffrage organizations, (ii) signing suffrage petitions, and (iii) publicly supporting suffrage. The paper thus shows how the rise of women teachers may be an underacknowledged way in which education reforms affect gender equality in the public sphere.

Authors

• Johannes Lindvall, University of Gothenburg

• Valeriya Mechkova, Varieties of Democracy, Gothenburg University

• Øyvind Søraas Skorge, Oslo Metropolitan University