Practicing the Right to Vote: Views Towards Female Voters and Home Voting in 1923 and 1944

As has been noted in theorising about citizenship, its expansion in the twentieth century took place through the interaction between sociocultural practices and institutional ideals and rules, many of which were based on ideas of gendered difference. Taking into account theories of citizenship as practice, we focus on what can be called informal voting restrictions, i.e., the practices and norms that made it more difficult and less feasible for women to cast their ballot. By exploring and analysing discourses of women as incompetent political citizens in relation to factors such as female turnout at parliamentary elections, the electoral system andelectoral law, we show that women were not welcomed into the political land scape as independent political agents. First, we discuss how women voters were received by the ruling male politicians. Then we assess the extent to which the electoral system was more favourable for men than women and the difference between male and female turnout in elections. Finally, drawing on archival material on the execution of elections, we demonstrate our argument by discussing in more detail the parliamentary elections of 1923 and the 1944 national referendum on the founding of the Icelandic Republic. When Icelandic women were granted the right to vote and to stand for parliamentary elections in 1915, they faced not only formal restrictions, such as the infamous 40-year age limit, but also a set of informal hindrances. The fact that very few women were elected to parliament until the 1970s and 1980s makes it clear that it proved more difficult for women than men to exercise their rights as candidates for parliament. But sources on the execution of elections (including voter turnout) show that there were also informal gendered obstacles when it came to practicing the right to vote. Prior to the Icelandic parliamentary elections of 1923, it had been decided to change the electoral law so as to allow the elderly and infirm to cast their vote at home. However, following accusations of electoral fraud, this permission was withdrawn in 1924. Significantly, home voting was reintroduced for the 1944 referendum held in conjunction with the founding of the Icelandic Republic, the aim being to secure a high turnout. The 1923 elections were the first to be held after a 1920 constitutional amendment had eliminated the 40-year age limit. Turnout among female voters in creased dramatically from previous elections. With regard to home voting, 78% of the elderly and infirm who made use of this opportunity were women. This raises the question of whether the elimination of the 40-year age clause — which admitted a large number of younger female voters into the electorate — may have prompted the introduction of home voting. Can the decision to enable ballots to be cast by old and sick women, a group of voters who for many reasons were more unlikely to resist entrenched patriarchal authority, be seen to have been a countermeasure against the effect of the new younger, and in some ways more independent, female voters? In this context we bring in a discussion of those voters who were in a vulnerable socioeconomic position, where factors such as age, education (literacy), sex and class intersected; we also discuss how patriar chal views pertaining to the old social order could affect the opportunity to exercise the right to vote. Our sources on the execution of elections provide us with examples of politicians and their supporters, as well as men of authority (i.e., heads of households or public officials), trying to influence whether and how people used their right to vote. It is therefore telling that in the lead-up to the 1944 referendum — held to decide whether Iceland should sever its last remaining ties with the Danish kingdom — the male politicians responsible for deciding how to execute the referendum chose to reintroduce the home vote, thus dismissing previous concerns