How Will White Women Vote? It’s a Question With a Fraught History.
With a closely contested election just days away, much attention has been paid in recent weeks to whether enough Black men are willing to vote for a Black woman for president. The argument goes that Black men may be the obstacle to Kamala Harris’s defeating Donald Trump — and becoming the first female president. In a video that went viral, former President Barack Obama chided Black men for maybe not wanting to support Harris because she’s a woman; some polling shows her Black-male support slipping. News networks devoted numerous segments to pundits’ raising the alarm about the ambivalence of some Black men to a Harris presidency. Harris, responding to the concern in the final stretch of the campaign, released her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.”
But this framing has obscured a significant truth: Polling shows that a clear majority of Black men, some 69 percent according to an October 2024 Times/Siena Poll, support Harris. The only group supporting Harris at a higher rate than Black men is Black women, at 81 percent. There is one group, however, that deserves more attention as they could very well determine this election: white women.
At about 59 million voters, white women constitute this nation’s single largest voting bloc, and also its most divided. About 53 percent of white female voters identify as or lean Republican, compared with 43 percent who identify as or lean Democrat, according to the Pew Research Center. (White women without college degrees are much more likely to lean Republican, while a majority of those with college degrees align with the Democratic Party; education levels among Black and Latino women do not have a significant impact on their party affiliation.) While a majority of all American women have voted for a Democrat for president since 1996, white women have not. In fact, a majority of white women have cast their ballots for the Democrat running for president just once since 1968 — and that one time was not for Hillary Clinton but for her husband, Bill, in 1996.
Black men, on the other hand, have already proved they will vote for a woman for president. In 2016, eight of 10 Black men voted for Hillary Clinton in her historic run. The only two groups where a majority did not support Clinton were white men and white women. Despite Clinton’s running against an opponent who was facing multiple sexual-assault cases, who was exposed in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tapes bragging about grabbing women’s genitals and who promised to seat Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, just 45 percent of white women voted for Clinton, compared with 98 percent of Black women. Now polls show that 51 percent of white women say they will vote for Trump over Harris.
That could end up being the most important number for Harris. If indeed she becomes the first woman to breach the 235-year unbroken line of men ascending to the highest office in the land, it may very well be because white women do something they have long struggled to do: align their interests with those of Black women. In an election where our very democracy may be at risk, the stakes could not be higher. History shows us that advances toward equal rights in this nation can come to pass when white women join with Black Americans to fight for a common cause, but that same history reveals how fragile that alliance can be.
The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July.Credit...Francis Chung/Politico, via Associated Press
The two greatest movements for women’s rights in this nation — the suffragist movement and the women’s liberation movement — were each rooted in Black freedom struggles. Each historical example demonstrates the transformative potential when white women act in solidarity, not with white men as they so often do, but with Black women. But each also demonstrates the fickleness of white women when it comes to that solidarity.
The movement for women’s rights was born of the abolitionist movement, when Black and white women began to contemplate their distinct rights. For white women who believed ending slavery was a moral and religious issue, participating in abolitionist gatherings and activism gave them an early taste of political involvement and the ability to assert their own thoughts and beliefs in the public square.
Most women at the time could not vote or hold public office. They were explicitly excluded from most colleges and professions and often could not be a party to contracts or in many cases own property. For Black women, who toiled under dual oppressions for being both Black and female, the struggle for racial and gender equality could not be separated. Through abolitionism and the argument of natural rights that underpinned it, some white women also began to question the way white men discriminated against them. “The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own,” wrote Angelina Grimké, who along with her sister Sarah Grimké left their slaveholding Southern family for a life in Philadelphia, where they converted to Quakerism and became abolitionists.
In 1837, at the First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, an interracial group of 200 women gathered and for the first time called publicly for women’s rights. But this alliance would soon break down. White women were using organizing skills they learned from the abolitionist movement to fight for their own rights. But when they convened the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, considered the first gathering dedicated exclusively to women’s rights in the United States, they did not invite Black women. Only one Black person was in attendance — a fugitive from slavery named Frederick Douglass. He was largely responsible for the convention’s publishing a declaration in support of female suffrage. And yet white women soon abandoned their common struggle with Black women specifically and Black people in general. In the aftermath of the Civil War, when Black men finally achieved the franchise with ratification of the 15th Amendment, many white suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony, were angered that Black men had gotten there first.
In the ensuing decades, suffragist leaders continued to exclude Black women from their efforts to gain the vote in a strategy that became known as “expediency.” The argument, according to the historian Paula Giddings, was that including Black women in the suffragist effort would make it harder to pass an amendment for women’s suffrage, but that once white women got the vote, the franchise for Black women would soon follow. “The old warhorses of the suffrage movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony did believe in the female franchise as a panacea to the nation’s ills,” Giddings writes in her seminal book, “When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America,” and considered white women a counterbalance to white men and the injustices Black Americans experienced. But Black women considered this naïve: Some of the worst abuse, oppression and exclusion they experienced came at the hands of white women.
In making the case for their own enfranchisement, some white women argued that giving white women the vote would help maintain white hegemony in a country experiencing demographic and political change. Instead of allying with Black women, who shared their oppression as women, they leaned into anti-Black and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The policy of expediency promised that white women would support Black women once they secured the vote for themselves. But when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified, most leading white suffragists rebuked pleas from Black women to pressure the federal government to enforce voting rights for Black women in the South, who faced threats and violence at the polls. “No women are free until all are free,” proclaimed a 1921 resolution by Black suffragists. But for the next four decades, Black women fought with little support from white women, facing beatings, bombings and assassinations, before they finally secured their vote with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Suffragists celebrating their victory following the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Bettmann/Getty Images
Even after abandoning their Black sisters, white women did not get the full equality they sought. By the 1960s, despite gaining the right to vote, women remained second-class citizens in the United States. Laws and policies enacted by white men allowed women of all races to be openly and legally excluded from jobs, housing and institutions of higher learning, and they could be prohibited from getting credit cards or loans without a man to co-sign. In many states, women did not even have the right to turn down sex from their husbands, as spousal rape was legal.
Once again, it would be the struggle for Black people’s rights that paved the way for white women to achieve theirs. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most sweeping civil rights law passed since Reconstruction, made it illegal to discriminate against Black Americans in public spaces, education and employment. But it also became the first federal law — almost as a fluke — to make it illegal to discriminate against women in employment.
When Congress was deliberating over the bill, a segregationist congressman named Howard Smith added a protection against gender discrimination in employment, believing that including women as a protected class in the bill could tank it. He inserted the word “sex” to Title VII of the bill. To the surprise of many, the bill passed anyway.
This “first legislative victory for women’s rights sneaked in through the back door of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the journalist Clara Bingham writes in “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.” “The one word that Smith added changed the course of women’s history.”
A brilliant Black civil rights lawyer and strategist named Pauli Murray had lobbied Congress to include a prohibition of sex discrimination in the 1964 act. In fighting against racial discrimination, she had faced her share of gender discrimination, and so upon its passage, Murray promoted the idea that women needed to form their own civil rights organization, what she called an N.A.A.C.P. for women. She and other Black women joined with a cadre of white women activists, who like the suffragists before them experienced a political awakening while working within civil rights organizations. In 1966, Murray and a biracial group of 49 women founded NOW, the National Organization for Women.
This era would mark a cataclysmic change in the rights of American women, with lawsuits successfully challenging discrimination in employment and education and wages, and with women’s winning the right to access birth control and abortion and own their own homes and get their own credit cards. Using the 14th Amendment, which was enacted at the end of slavery to ensure Black Americans equal protection of the law, activists won a landmark Supreme Court case that recognized women as a “protected class.”
But while some white women, such as Gloria Steinem, worked hard to ensure the movement was inclusive, many other white feminists did not see the need to intertwine the struggle for Black liberation with the struggle for women’s liberation. By the late 1960s, the women’s movement was ascending even as the civil rights and Black Power movements were disintegrating. White-dominated feminist groups failed to endorse Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for president in one of the two major political parties, in 1972. Over time, many of the movement’s Black founders, such as Pauli Murray, became disillusioned and distanced themselves from mainstream feminist organizations.
The attitude that many Black women had toward white feminists during this period was summed up by Toni Morrison, who asked in an essay in 1971 in The New York Times: “What do black women feel about Women’s Lib? Distrust. It is white, therefore suspect.” She went on: “In spite of the fact that liberating movements in the black world have been catalysts for white feminism, too many movements and organizations have made deliberate overtures to enroll blacks and have ended up by rolling them.” Black women, she continued, “know that racism is not confined to white men, and that there are more white women than men in this country.” She recalled that it was white women who were the face of ugly opposition to school and housing integration in the North and the South. They were both oppressed and oppressor. And as the historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae has written in The Times, white women helped knit white supremacy “into the fabric of their communities.”
In 1972, according to Giddings’s book, just 45 percent of white women favored “efforts to strengthen or change women’s status in society,” while 62 percent of Black women did. That same poll showed that only 35 percent of white women sympathized with the women’s liberation movement, compared with 67 percent of Black women. And by the late 1970s, the tide began to turn against the women’s movement as it had against the civil rights movement. White women helped foment the backlash. Led by the attorney and Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly, conservatives coalesced around an opposition to civil rights and feminism. They joined with white men to help prevent the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have enshrined gender equality in the Constitution. “The problem was, after the Roe decision,” said the activist Nancy Stearns. “our side went home.”
In a 2019 study, “The Gender Gap Is a Race Gap: Women Voters in U.S. Presidential Election,” published by the political scientists Jane Junn and Natalie Musuoka in the journal Perspectives on Politics, analyzed white women’s voting patterns in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections. The study found that white women’s race — more than their religious beliefs, income or education — predicted their support for Republican candidates. Outside party affiliation, race, specifically, identifying as white, is the only variable “that is consistently significant across all three elections,” the study concluded.
A campaign rally in Wisconsin in August.Credit...Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
Despite the headwinds Clinton faced in 2016, following Barack Obama’s historic presidency, Clinton hoped to make history herself. Her campaign slogan, “I’m With Her,” leaned into her candidacy and set a sharp contrast between her and her opponent. Trump, who consistently made misogynistic and racist remarks, ran partly on his promise to overturn women’s 50-year constitutional right to abortion, considered one of the greatest and most important victories of the women’s liberation movement. Clinton vowed to protect that right, and many pundits predicted that Clinton would overperform among women.
And she did overperform. Some 54 percent of all women voted for Clinton; 41 percent of men did — the largest gender gap in a presidential election in more than 35 years, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
In 2024, because of the Trump presidency, many women for the first time find themselves living in a country where abortion is illegal. We are seeing stories now of women — even those who wanted their pregnancies — bleeding out, dying or nearly dying or losing their ability to ever have children. Infant-mortality rates have risen since Roe was overturned and millions of women lost abortion access, according to a study published this month by JAMA Pediatrics. And because of the Trump presidency, many Black Americans for the first time in their lives find themselves living in a country where affirmative action is illegal, leading to the elimination of race-conscious policies across American institutions that were born of the civil rights movement, leaving many fearing that already gaping racial opportunity gaps will only get worse.
It is not incidental that the reversal of women’s rights has coincided with the backlash against the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the rollback in civil rights for Black Americans and the conservative anti-diversity crusades. “Historical patterns suggest that just as Black women are vital to Black movements, so Black movements are vital to the progress of feminist movements,” Giddings writes. “Feminism has always had the greatest currency in times of Black militancy or immediately thereafter.” She goes on, “Conversely, new gains for women become more difficult to attain when Black issues are not high on the national agenda or the national consciousness.”
In 2020, the common refrain was that Black women, who organized and helped turn key states such as Georgia in the presidential election and ensured Democratic control of the Senate, saved democracy. Now white women are being called to do the same.
In an election where the failure to support a Black woman could usher in the second presidency of a man who is threatening to jail his opponents and put millions of people in camps before deporting them, and who the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, has warned is a fascist and the “most dangerous person to this country,” some are taking up that call.
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms for Demand Action, a gun-safety group, in July gathered 164,000 white women on a “White Women for Kamala” Zoom call following a similar call organized by Jotaka Eaddy, founder of Win With Black Women a few days before that drew 44,000 Black women and raised $1.5 million. “My role has become to help white women understand the political and economic power they have to make the world better for everyone, not just their own family or their own community,” Watts told The 19th*, a news organization named after the amendment. “We are the largest single voting bloc, and yet many of these women — a majority of these women — in recent presidential elections have voted in a way that upholds white supremacy, that upholds the patriarchy.”
A few weeks later, on the night Harris was to accept her own historic nomination as the first Black woman to lead the top of the ticket of a major party, Hillary Clinton, wearing suffragist white just as she did when she accepted the nomination, called on all women to unite behind Harris. Walking out to a standing ovation that roared on for more than two minutes, Clinton stood in the same city where NOW was founded 58 years earlier, and traced her own lineage through Shirley Chisholm. Clinton said that she and her forebears put “cracks in the highest, hardest, glass ceiling” and on the other side of that ceiling, she saw freedom. And that freedom, she said, would be embodied by Harris’s doing what Clinton had not been able to do: become the first woman to serve as president. “Because my friends,” Clinton said, looking out at a rapt audience waving “When We Fight, We Win” signs, “when a barrier falls for one of us, it falls and clears the way for all of us.”
The question remains: Will enough white women help knock that barrier down? The motto of Harris’s campaign is that it’s time for Americans to turn the page on Trump, but if indeed we do, if democracy is preserved, it may hinge on white women’s finally turning the page on their own past.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights.