Well, those days are gone, we’re glad to report. A fresh breeze is blowing money into town—about $6 Billion’s worth. That’s the amount that will be spent on this year’s elections.

But what will they get for that $6 Billion, beside mountains of flyers and hours of TV ads? Will it change the outcome of a presidential election?

No one can tell for certain. But back in 1948, George Gallup was convinced presidential campaigns didn’t change voters’ choices.

In a very real sense, presidential elections are over before they begin.

They are decided to a great extent by events that have occurred in the entire period between two presidential elections, rather than by the campaign.

In politics it is always later than you think.

Gallup had polled voters before and after the presidential elections of 1940 and 1944. He found very few voters switched their choice of candidates between June and November.

Of course, it would be foolish to claim that campaigns have no effect or change no votes. But they appear to have less effect and to change fewer votes than the average party leader would like to think.

Voters listen to campaigns pretty largely to confirm what they already think.

[Yet] in presidential races today, everything is made to depend on the campaign—as if the voters lived in a mental vacuum for three and a half years, and only snapped out of it between June and November of the fourth year.

The ineffectiveness of presidential campaigns prompted Gallup to ponder—

Is this wise—this pitching of all effort and money into a campaign and then coasting along for four years?

Perhaps all the hullabaloo, the verbal blasts and counterblasts, the rallies, parades, blaring of bands, kissing of babies, the feverish rushing about of stump speakers and the millions of dollars spent are not entirely necessary.

[Could] a political party give up campaigning and win? Probably not. Some kind of campaign would be needed to keep in line the voting intentions of those who do make up their minds early.

Perhaps political leaders could profitably spend more time trying to increase public acceptance of their party between elections.

Is this still true today? Will those billions of dollars and hours of politicking ultimately change no one’s mind in the 2012 presidential election?
One recent study indicates that presidential advertisements could persuade voters, but did little to inform or motivate them to vote. Another study found that campaigns could influence voters “but the nature of this influence appears to be rather complex”—a meager return for such a high cost.

Gallup’s 1948 article— “Do Campaigns Really Change Votes?” — challenged several assumptions cherished by politicians. Party platforms, for example, were useless (“most people don’t read them”) and political speeches had almost no impact on voters (“n the course of thirteen years of polling, covering more than 190 state, local, and national elections, we have found little evidence that one speech or even a series of speeches changes many votes”).

He also made this claim:

Don’t worry too much about the women’s vote or “how to win the women over.”

They don’t vote in a bloc and they don’t vote any differently from men.

The division of sentiment among women is almost identical with that among men. Rarely in recent years has it amounted to more than two percentage points. There does not appear to be any such thing as the woman’s viewpoint in politics as distinguished from the male viewpoint when it comes right down to voting on Election Day.

That may have been true in the 1940s, but the granddaughters of those women voters are showing far greater independence in their choice. The “gender gap” has become significant. In 2008, Barack Obama received 49% of his votes from men and 56% from women. Interestingly, 55% of the votes for George W. Bush came from men, 48% from women—again, a 7% difference.

The gap reached 10% in 2000 (43% of women, 53% of men voted for Bush), and in 1996, the difference between men and women voting for Bill Clinton was 11%.

When the gender gap was just 2%, Gallup made several conclusions that—we hasten to add—might have been valid for their time.

Men and women, dissimilar biologically and to some extent emotionally, tend to think almost exactly alike politically.

The reason seems to be that, on political matters, women generally accept the judgment of their men-folk. They take their cue from the opinions or prejudices of a husband, a father, a son or other male member of the family. Of course, this is not true of all women. But in the average household the woman goes on the theory that her man knows more about those things than she does.

This is 1948, remember.

Polls have found that when a change of political sentiment takes place, it almost always starts with the men, not the women. The women catch up with the trend later—after they’ve talked to the boss.

In all fairness, it should be said that there is no real reason why women should vote differently from men, even if they paid no attention to the ideas of the allegedly dominant male. No one would argue that women ought to vote differently just for the sake of being different. The only point here is that one must be cautious in talking about the woman’s viewpoint in politics. Although the average male candidate running for office usually makes quite an effort to win the feminine vote, it may be questioned whether such pains are necessary. If the male voters can be won over, the women will generally come along too.

Presumably, some of those billions of dollars are being spent right now to understand just why women don’t vote the same as men.

Big Money and Women Voters: Who Really Chooses the President? The Saturday Evening Post

“Fixing a Flat” by Norman Rockwell

August 6, 1946

How to put together a cover for The Saturday Evening Post: First, get an idea and run it by the art director for approval. Second, find the setting for the scene. Locating a ramshackle cabin in Vermont proved difficult, so Rockwell found a nicely kept hunting lodge and, to say the least, took liberties.

Next, borrow a couple of goats from a neighbor. Finally, choose your models. The lazy, good-for-nothing onlooker on the porch was a friend of the artist who was nothing like the shiftless character portrayed here. The young ladies were daughters of friend and fellow cover artist, Mead Schaeffer. And the landscape? It sprang from the imagination and palette of the artist. “You just couldn’t make it look like Vermont,” Rockwell said, “because in Vermont, they’d yelp.”

“Convention” by Norman Rockwell

May 3, 1941

Rockwell liked faces with “character,” so this pretty young lass is atypical of his models. The scene is somewhat atypical as well—a big city convention. First jobs often consist of being a babysitter or a soda jerk, but a coat rack? Can she remember which black umbrella went with which gentleman?

“The Charwomen” by Norman Rockwell

April 6, 1946

Certainly Rockwell was loved for his paintings of children, but what other illustrator would think of painting two elderly charwomen? Typical Rockwell touches include the minute detail of the patterns on the aprons, a well-worn mop handle, and an environment less than “perfect”—a little debris here and there. That was part of Rockwell’s brilliance—so many artists “cleaned up” the setting, even of kids playing outside.

The ladies in question were well-respected neighbors of the artist, who had reservations about posing as cleaning ladies. Rockwell convinced them they were only acting, and they played their roles very well. They were delighted with the result and said they would pose any time without arguing about the roles to be played. It wasn’t always thus. One matron was “Rockwellized” as a portly maid and never spoke to him again.

“The Flirts” by Norman Rockwell

July 26, 1941

A gorgeous blonde in a convertible? How can it not be love at first sight? Stopped at a red light (which we see reflected in the truck’s mirror), a trucker picks petals to determine if “she loves me” or “she loves me not.” A few questions spring to mind: why did the guy just happen to have a daisy on hand, and how did the lady keep her hat on—never mind her hair perfect—driving an open car? And why, oh why have people complained that this cover is an example of sexual harassment? Oh, please! It’s clearly all in the spirit of fun! (Geez, I thought the blonde in the convertible needed to lighten up…)

Two unique things about this cover: This was the first cover where the artist just used his streamlined initials instead of his full name, and Rockwell played with the masthead as part of the truck signage.

“The Decorator” by Norman Rockwell

March 30, 1940

Another cover that doesn’t look “like a Rockwell.” Hubby’s favorite chair may be in for a bit of spring brightening up, and he may not be pleased with the idea. Or maybe he just wants to enjoy his sports page and pipe in peace.

“First Evening Gown” by Norman Rockwell

March 19, 1949

Far from home in Vermont in late 1948, Rockwell rented a studio while visiting sunny California. Only it wasn’t. That particular winter was rainy, and the poor natural lighting in the studio frustrated the artist to the point that he kept taking this painting into the men’s room to review it in better light. The result, despite the problems, is a delightful bobby soxer checking out her first gown. Somewhere there must be a mother grateful to see the dungarees, loafers and socks disappear, if only for an evening.

Rockwell Ladies in the 1940s The Saturday Evening Post

Woman With Basketball by Carol Aus

Woman with BasketballCarol AusNovember 20, 1909

Dr. James Naismith is credited with inventing basketball in 1891, and apparently it didn’t take long for the ladies to try their hand at the sport. A Norwegian artist named Carol Aus (1868-1934), about whom little is known, painted this young player for a 1909 Post cover.

Woman Playing Tennis by George Brehm

Woman Playing TennisGeorge BrehmAugust 3, 1907

We have plenty of cover art showing a pretty lady posing with a tennis racket or other sports equipment, but an action shot like this tennis player makes a person wonder how the artist did it. A person might also wonder how the lady was so active in a long skirt. This is from 1907.

Lady Fishing by Harrison Fisher

Lady FishingHarrison FisherAugust 16, 1902

We have dozens of covers depicting the art of fishing, the first of which was Grover Cleveland fishing in 1901. The second, in 1902, was of a lady reeling one in! Harrison Fisher was a big name in Post covers, doing nearly 80 between 1900 and 1915.

The Finals and Alice Gray by Pete Fountain

The Finals and Alice GrayPete FountainMarch 21, 1903

We have numerous depictions of the great game of golf, also. This is one of the earliest, from 1903. Maybe they couldn’t vote, but women could certainly golf…and fish, hunt, play tennis, basketball and baseball.

Woman Archer by J.J. Gould

Woman ArcherJJ GouldJune 1, 1907

This is another action painting. Early Post artist J.J. Gould went for verisimilitude in this one from 1907. The lady looks like she knows what she’s doing.

Woman on Horseback by Philip R. Goodwin

Woman on HorsebackPhilip R. GoodwinJune 9, 1906

Hundreds of covers depict a lady reading, holding flowers or a fan, or simply looking lovely in a beautiful gown. This 1906 cover shows many of the fair sex were made of sterner stuff.

Classic Covers: Women in Sports in the 1900s The Saturday Evening Post

Nationally, however, it seems to balance up this way: in war industry, women have been pulling their weight, and still are, though the last few months of 1943 saw a dismaying tendency among job-holding women to quit.

Women do all right in the armed forces when enlisted, but too few bother. In civilian-volunteer work, the situation is healthy only in special lines. In the home they could do better; in general co-operation they are unimaginative. The sum is not impressive. It is easy to see why many women going all-out in topside war-activity jobs admit disgust with their own sex, sometimes heatedly.

The author reported that the WACs (Women’s Army Corps) was having trouble meeting recruitment numbers. Hospitals were short of nurses’ aides. Moreover, women were spending a lot of the money they were earning and not saving precious household wastes.

The favorite general diagnosis for the failure of women to enlist is that fathers’ and boy friends’ disapproval is the catch. In view of how little masculine disapproval affected women’s urge to vote and wear colored nail polish, the theory seems inadequate.

Rosie the Riveter’s detractors like to harp on the fact that, in spite of fair-to-wonderful pay, absenteeism and turnover run higher among women than among men in war jobs.

Fair-to-wonderful was $31 a week doing the same job that paid a man $56 a week. Beyond the unfairness of the pay inequity, there’s also the household budget reality: a women who replaced a man lived on 45% less money.

"When G.I. Joe comes home from the wars, and naturally wants his old job back, will she have to come down from her perch?"

Admirers point to the fleets of planes over Berlin and Micronesia, made in plants where 40 per cent of the pay roll are women, many of whom never had an industrial job before.

The significant point seems to be that, where employers realize that women are not just “little men,” but different creatures, Rosie does very well. In some War-Department plants, handling high proportions of women cleverly, their absenteeism and turnover are better  than men’s.

The Moore Dry Dock Company, of Oakland, California, an important shipyard turning to women as manpower dwindled, once had a women’s turnover of 20 per cent every three months… Nowadays. Moore’s newly recruited women go on the job after a full course… to break them in on what men know automatically… It works. The first three months reduced turnover of women so processed to 7.9 per cent.

Rosie’s other troubles may come from the obvious fact that, to quote a sage expert, “Women don’t have wives”—nobody at home to clean the house, get breakfast, pack a hearty lunch and have a hot supper waiting. With a home and often youngsters to look after before, or after, her eight-hours at the plant plus transportation time, Rosie has a job and a half. No wonder so many women quit war jobs in a few weeks from discouragement or, after four to six months, from exhaustion.

The steady rise in the birth rate in the last few years is one thoroughly valid reason, of course, why many young women are not in war work. The nation now has more than 1,500,000 babies and children under four whom it would not have had if the birth rate had stayed at 1937 levels. Taking care of them under wartime shortages of help and safety pins is often a full-time job for a new mother, and always the best possible national service.

Almost 3,000,000 babies born since 1940 were “first births,” meaning inexperienced mothers. The total woman-hours involved in taking care of the 10,300,000 American babies known to have been born in the last four years is no negligible factor in the national situation.

Still, many women accepted these challenges. They took on totally new jobs and continued to hold the old one as homemaker. However they contributed to the war effort, women must have taken a dim view of the armchair experts who questioned their patriotism. They could criticize women’s motives and performance because they were volunteered, not ordered. Men escaped such criticism thanks to the wonderful incentive of the Selective Service Board. Even so, many men found ways to dodge the draft, and the criticism.

An eminent American legislator, asked to wrestle with that problem for purposes of this article, finally muttered something about “Why just talk about women? Too many Americans of both sexes are still trying to sit out the war.”

Read “Are Women Doing Their Share in the War?” [PDF download].

War, Work, and Women, Part II The Saturday Evening Post

Domestic America had also changed. The returning GI might have sensed a difference in women’s attitudes, but nothing like a call for equal rights. Women, for the most part, quietly put down the rivet gun and resumed traditional roles as homemakers. They were generally glad the men had returned and looked forward to the domestic life the Depression denied them.

But the war years had given women a closer look at attitudes that shaped their lives and destinies. They thought about it, long and hard. And while they continued the model of femininity their mothers had instilled in them, they raised their daughters with different expectations.

Three articles from 1944 give an historic view of attitudes that shaped women’s post-war thinking. The first, “Paper Dolls” [May 20, 1944 - PDF download], reported on women journalists who had proven they could do the jobs left vacant by men in service.

Women have invaded such hitherto inviolate masculine precincts on newspapers as finance, politics, sports, and the police beat. Paper dolls are reading copy, working on the rewrite desk, taking pictures. They are covering riots, crimes of purple passion, train wrecks, fires and suicides without swooning.

Much to the astonishment of the misogynists who work alongside them, the paper always appears on time, it is reasonably free of errors and there has not yet been a deluge of libel suits or indignant readers canceling their subscriptions.

The authors, who were [ahem] both men, grudgingly conceded:

It pains die-hard newshounds to admit it, but the newspapers would have been in an awful jam in the last two years if women had not been ready, willing and sometimes [sic] able to step into vacancies on staffs depleted by the draft.

While ignoring the condescension in their article’s title, the authors wrote about the outspoken, unapologetic contempt that newspaper editors felt toward women.

"Typical copy desk today. That skirted reporter at the left chats sociably between puffs while two female copyreaders struggle with dispatches and a copy girl does her best."

All things considered, the recommendations in favor of newspaperwomen outweigh the objections against them, but the ancient prejudice still holds firm. Managing and city editors are suffering the dames under protest; chivalry impels them to throw the ladies a few words of good cheer and encouragement, but candor compels most editors to admit they will take a dumb man of erratic social habits over a smart gal every time.

According to the city editor of a major paper, “No matter how able they are, all are given to chattering among themselves and with personable male staff men,” Bodin broods. “They are coy and warm by turns; they clutter and clatter endlessly. Every afternoon, just after the home-edition dead line, the local room presents the sight and sound of a meeting of neurotic clubwomen. The atmosphere demoralizes the men. I have to restrain myself violently from installing a samovar and serving tea and ladyfingers at three o’clock.”

The girls write well enough, they have a deft touch on descriptive stories, human-interest yarns and interviews—provided they don’t gush over the interview. Yet it is rare to see a woman write the lead story on a news break of major importance. Most editors believe women have a constitutional inability to gather up all the loose ends of a complicated story and weave them into a compact, well-rounded piece.

Fortunately, the authors were aware of some basic truths of the situation:

A few words in defense of the girls should be offered at this time. All the faults found with them can be applied to inexperienced men: editors are prone to forget that the majority of their paper dolls were secretaries, file clerks, telephone operators, receptionists or copy a girls a short time ago.

They have been thrown into jobs demanding special technique and know-how without the basic training given men reporters in normal times. Veterans had to serve a long apprenticeship of dreary leg-work, and they were promoted slowly as their knowledge of the craft expanded. The girls have been plunged into the whirlpool of news without the breaking-in process that teaches them how to keep their heads above water. Newspaperwomen further are laboring under strains men do not have to contend with.

Many are married and some have young children; there are households to maintain and, if husbands are in the service, there is a constant pressure for money.

Read “Paper Dolls” [PDF download]

Next: You Just Can’t Get Decent War Workers These Days

War, Work, and Women The Saturday Evening Post

Read “A Friend of Her Parents” by Alice Duer Miller [PDF].

If you liked this, look forward to next week’s article, How Montgomery Smashed Rommel.

A Friend of Her Parents The Saturday Evening Post

The good doctor examined the changing roles of women in America. He discussed the long hours and meager rewards of the a housewife during the early part of the 20th century, comparing the hours, wages, and conditions of men working in industry to women working at home.

“Most factories have got down to the ten-hour day and many to the eight, and all are rapidly approaching this standard; but the average household day, whether for housekeeper or for domestic, still runs from fourteen to sixteen hours,” reads the Post article. The author also noted that while men working in factories leave their work behind, women do not share these same benefits. “He would certainly be a rash man who would assert that the hours of any factory or sweatshop were longer than those of housework, or that the wages were lower. For almost every man or boy who has to rise in the gray dawn of the winter morning to report for work in the factory or shop at six or seven a.m., some woman has to rise an hour or more earlier in order to prepare his breakfast. And at whatever hour he plods wearily home in the dusk of evening to his supper, some woman has to go on working an hour longer to clear up the table and wash the dishes.”

A century later…

The February 2, 2009, issue of The New York Times reported: “With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation’s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history,” from the article “As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force,” by Catherine Rampell.

Today, though job security is rare during an economic downfall, statistics show women are more likely to retain jobs for a number of reasons, including the fact that men were heavily represented in distressed industries such as manufacturing and construction.

This raises the question: With record numbers of women whose primary positions were once full-time housewives now becoming breadwinners for their families, will the lot of household responsibilities shift as well?

“Many women say they expect their family roles to remain the same, even if economic circumstances have changed for now,” reads The New York Times story.

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The Real Housewives of America The Saturday Evening Post

That’s the surprising finding from Harvard University’s long-running Nurses Health Study.

The mineral, present only in tiny amounts in the body, seems to support a healthy immune system, memory, and motor function.

To zero in on zinc, think red meat and poultry. Beans, nuts, whole grains, fortified breakfast cereals, and dairy products are good sources too. Supplements are also available. Further study will help con-firm—and clarify—how zinc levels influence the risk of developing diabetes.

Zinc and Women The Saturday Evening Post

Delayed Resemblance The Saturday Evening Post

I spent a recent weekend in a small town about two hours away from the comforts of home. I was among a group of 20 women: 12 total strangers, five acquaintances, and two who may know me better than I know myself.

Today, I am grateful. I am more open to life’s joys and struggles, and the people who experience them. I am amazed by the power of love.

And I am exhausted.

My Weekend Getaway The Saturday Evening Post