Female percentage of the population in 1920

[Ellen_Cherry]

I’m interested in knowing if women made up the majority of the population in 1920, when the 19th amendment was ratified by the states, affirming women’s right to vote.

I know that today, women make up the majority of the population. What I’m interested in knowing is if the number of women was greater than men in 1920 in the United States.

I found good information about women’s suffrage in this article (Grolier’s), but I don’t think it addresses my question specifically. It says this:

Aftermath of the Vote

As the majority of the population, women are also the majority of the electorate. Nonetheless, women have not exercised their full potential to vote for issues of special concern to them. Initially after enfranchisement, voter turnout among women in most countries was lower than men’s. Female voter turnout matched that of men in Japan, Britain, and Finland in the 1960s, Sweden and Canada in the 1970s, and the United States in the 1980s.

If anyone has a link to a repuatable source saying either yay or nay, I’d appreciate it!

Thanks!

[elfje]

not answering your question, but very interesting read about US of A in the 20’s:

http://www.nhmccd.edu/contracts/lrc/kc/decade20.html#events

but this site has an actual graph that answers your question.

the answer is yes, but the difference wasn’t as big as it is today.

http://www.efmoody.com/estate/lifeexpectancy.html

[jimmmy]

Well I’m going to dispute that.

According to the Census there were fewer females than males in the 1920 US (circa 51mil vs. 53 mil)

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/censusbin/census/cen.pl

I think it was the mid-30’s (correct me) before the mortality of death by childbirth came down enuff for female life expectancy to rise above males in the U.S.

[aahala]

I was looking for the same site as jimmmy was posting.

The clickable link is:

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/

[Ellen_Cherry]

Many, many thanks to you all! My googling this morning was woefully inadequate.

I’m definitely bookmarking that census site.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

A snippet on this topic from Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945:

(M)en continued to outnumber women in the United States until 1950, when the effects of declining immigration, heavily male, and rising maternal survival rates made women for the first time a numerical majority in the American population.

[chukhung]

If the subject is

*Originally posted by Ellen Cherry *
when the 19th amendment was ratified by the states, affirming women’s right to vote.

then I’d like to know what the breakdown between men and women of voting age was.

I’m guessing that the overall ratio of males to females and the ratio of men over 21 to women over 21 was pretty much the same in 1920, but I do wonder about the effect of WWI on the male population.

[Ellen_Cherry]

I wondered about that too, chukhung. In fact, I was proceeding from an assumption that women might well have outnumbered men in 1920 (even if they otherwise might not have), owing to their decline in numbers after WWI. But the census data doesn’t appear to bear that out.

[aahala]

chukhung

You might want to look at the site I gave earlier. One can pull up the stats, clear down to the county level, for all the questions originally asked in the census year. For example, I found that in my home county in 1940 there were two whites born in Denmark, presumably one of those were my ggrandmother.

[istara]

I never realised maternal mortality affected demographics so much.