“If Democracy Is Worth Fighting for, It’s Worth Voting For”: Women’s Work and the 1944 Presidential Election

For the first time in eighty years, the United States conducted a presidential election in wartime in 1944. FDR, seeking an unprecedented fourth term, was aware of how critical the soldiers’ vote had been to Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. But early in 1944, Congress failed to create the substantive absentee ballot program for soldiers that the President sought. With over eleven million men in military service in 1944, women became the majority of voters for the first time. For the first time in almost two decades, women were specifically appealed to throughout

the campaign. The work of organizing the campaign – registering voters, campaigning at the local level, and organizing get out the vote work on Election Day – also fell to women.

This paper examines the work, both paid and unpaid, of those women campaign workers. Their labor was essential to ensuring the continued function of American democracy in the wartime context. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties had professional directors of their Women’s Divisions, Marion Martin and Gladys Tillett. Martin and Tillett worked with their small paid staffs to organize the labor of tens of thousands of volunteer women throughout the country. While women had been used, especially by the Democrats, to sell the party to local voters throughout FDR’s presidency, the war created new challenges and new tasks. Women had to do work they had never done before, while gas rationing and time in the paid labor force had the potential to upend the work patterns that volunteer women had used for years. Centering women’s work in this wartime context shows how critical their labor was to the effective functioning of a bedrock piece of the American state: the democratic election process.