That 1949 poll occurred during a specific moment. President Truman had just named Eugenie Anderson of Red Wing, Minnesota, as ambassador to Denmark, the first woman to hold that rank in US diplomacy (earlier appointments had only reached the level of minister). Around the same time, writer Vincent Sheean argued in a magazine piece that a woman president would function as a powerful symbol of America’s desire for peace, coming just a few years after the Second World War. Public opinion was catching up to arguments like that one, slowly.
The idea of a woman running the country wasn’t new even then. Victoria Woodhull, a stockbroker and newspaper publisher, ran for president in 1872 on the Equal Rights Party ticket, nearly fifty years before the 19th Amendment gave women the vote at all. She named Frederick Douglass as her running mate, though he never acknowledged the nomination and campaigned for Grant instead. Woodhull’s run got treated mostly as a novelty by the press of the day, but it opened a door that stayed cracked for the next century of women who followed her.
Gallup kept asking the same question for decades, and the numbers moved in fits and starts. A majority said yes for the first time in 1955, at 52 percent, then the figure barely budged for the next 14 years, sitting at 53 percent in 1969. The 1970s changed that.
Support jumped to 66 percent by 1971 and kept climbing through the decade, right around the time Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith became the first woman to seek a major party’s presidential nomination, running for the Republicans in 1964, and Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to seek the Democratic nomination in 1972.
The gains kept coming after that. Geraldine Ferraro joined Walter Mondale’s ticket in 1984 as the first woman nominated for vice president by a major party, and by 1987 Gallup found 82 percent of Americans willing to vote for a qualified woman for president. That number crossed 90 percent by 1999 and has stayed roughly there ever since, occasionally dipping a few points but never returning to anything like the resistance of the 1930s and 1940s.
VIDEO | Geraldine Ferraro accepts VP nomination at 1984 DNC
The most recent chapter came fast by comparison. Hillary Clinton became the first woman nominated for president by a major party in 2016 and won the popular vote before losing the electoral college. Kamala Harris became the first woman elected vice president in 2020, then the Democratic nominee for president in 2024. Neither reached the office, which means the 48-48 split recorded back in 1949 still describes something true, just not about public willingness. The country said yes long ago, but the office itself has been more elusive.
Here, see George Gallup’s original 1949 write-up of the poll results. It’s a small time capsule of a moment when the country was just starting to say yes.
VIDEO | History of Victoria Woodhull
The idea of a woman president gains in favor
George Gallup, Abilene Reporter News (Texas) October 29, 1949
Princeton, NJ, Oct 28, 1949 — A woman for President of the United States? American voters are getting to like that idea better and better.
Twelve years ago, they turned thumbs down on it with a resounding NO in an Institute survey. Today, the cause of women’s rights has advanced to the point where opinion is evenly divided on the idea of a woman for President. A woman in the Vice-Presidential spot gets an even more favorable vote.
The importance of women in politics was highlighted this month when President Truman appointed America’s first woman ambassador — Mrs Eugenie Anderson of Red Wing, Minn — to be our envoy to Denmark. (Women have previously been appointed as ministers only). Having a woman for President was proposed recently by Vincent Sheean in a magazine article on the grounds that a woman as Chief Executive would be an “irresistible symbol” of America’s desire for peace.
Voters questioned on the idea of a woman president
The idea of a woman in the White House was put before the nation’s voters by the Institute in interviews with a balanced cross-section in all states. Here are the results and a comparison with a similar survey in 1937:
“If the party whose candidate you most often support nominated a woman for President of the United States, would you vote for her if she seemed qualified for the job?”
Today [1949]
Yes: 48%
No: 48%
No opinion: 4%
1937
Yes: 33%
No: 63%
No opinion: 4%
‘Mrs President’ is not in the cards, a survey of future voters indicates
Eugene Gilbert, Gilbert Youth Research Co – Logansport Press (Logansport, IN) October 21, 1956
You’ll wait a long time for a woman president if teenagers — the voters of tomorrow — have their way.
Nine tenths of high school boys feel the job is too tough and too complex for a woman. And while many girls in the same age bracket believe a woman could handle the office all right, 58 percent say — for various reasons — that the ladies had better direct their political ambitions elsewhere.
To governorships, for example. Many more youngsters say women could make good governors. Or to the Supreme Court of the United States. Fifty-seven percent of the boys and 73 percent of the girls believe women could serve capably on the high tribunal.
These reactions turned up in our nationwide survey on the youngsters’ views of woman’s place in the higher spheres of public life and business.
The question of a woman president is often batted around in election years. Former President Harry S Truman has said that a woman may well occupy the White House someday. And President Eisenhower has said that women are competent for the office — though too smart to seek it.
Too temperamental?
But 92 percent of the boys we queried disagree sharply. They’re convinced the presidency is a job well beyond a woman’s capacities.
“Dames,” as one Chicago youngster expressed it, “are too temperamental. The first thing you know they lose their tempers. Boy, the country will be in a real mess the day a woman president takes office.”
Our survey indicates that many boys strongly suspect a woman’s place is in the home — not on the political hustings. Here’s how a lad from Minneapolis, speaking in the authentic voice of the 19th century, viewed things:
“When women stop rearing children to go into politics, we will be in a sorry state. What will happen to the home without the mother influence? I don’t want to see it.”
Of course, women have been entering politics in increasing numbers. Sixteen served in the last session of Congress, including Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the Maine Republican. They’ve held Cabinet posts and been ambassadors.
With this in mind, apparently 42 percent of the teen-aged girls we queried expressed themselves in favor of a woman President — provided the candidate was of the caliber of Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, Senator Smith, or Clare Boothe Luce, the United States ambassador to Italy.
Girls fear war
In fact, many of the girls feel the country might be better off with a woman at the helm.
“If women were running the country,” a New Jersey girl said, “there wouldn’t be so much talk of wars.”
Distrust for male pugnacity was implied also in this response by a Kansas high school girl: “Women don’t want to go out and conquer the world. When we have a woman President, she will concentrate on ‘domestic tranquility’ and not on producing atom bombs.”
While most of the girls believe women are perfectly capable of handling presidential chores, 58 percent turned thumbs down on the idea. Among these, the thought predominated that ingrained male prejudices would make a feminine bid for the presidency largely a waste of time.
While no woman has ever been nominated for the presidency or the vice presidency by any major party, there have been women governors. The first was Nellie Tayloe Ross, elected in Wyoming in 1924.
Business women OK
And a much larger percentage of young people in our survey professed no objection to lady governors. Thirty-three percent of the boys and 55 percent of the girls thought women might make good chief executives of their states.
A Missouri girl said: “Women are especially good at the personal approach. I think that heading a state would require lots of this talent. Nothing is as important as getting on friendly terms with the inhabitants. And in this a woman could really excel.”
While youths are somewhat bearish on the talents of women for high public office, they’re apparently prepared to allow them greater latitude in the business world.
Some 76 percent of the teenagers, of both sexes, said the fact that a woman ran a company that employed them would not cause them to lose enthusiasm for their job.
Having a woman for an immediate superior, however, was a different question. But even here, 66 percent of the girls and 63 percent of the boys said they could see no objection.
One fervent minority report came from a 17-year-old youngster who had summer job experience with a lady boss. “That woman was the hardest taskmaster I’ve ever run into,” he complained. “No man would be that tough with us. I’ll take a man giving the orders any day.”
But if there was no strenuous opposition to women running business firms, there was marked division of opinion on their service on the boards of large corporations.
The girls — 75 percent of them — thought that women should be represented on the boards of every major corporation, particularly in view of women’s extensive stock ownership. Seventy-one percent of the boys failed to see much sense in this argument.
