I’m leaving,” the woman announced trenchantly. Five women, all long-time Republicans, staged a media event during the GOP convention to dramatize their switch to the Democrats.
The gender gap. As we write, just before the election, the media are pressing the issue relentlessly, blaming the gap on the GOP’s pro-life plank. Republican strategists are straining to open the “big tent” flaps and woo in pro-choice women.
But, surprisingly, both press and politicians have it wrong. Polls show that the gender gap has little to do with abortion or women’s rights. Indeed, a recent Wirthlin poll found that men favor abortion more than women do: 43 percent over 34 percent.
The real gulf, it turns out, concerns the welfare state. Men tend to want to shrink government, cut taxes, slash spending. But growing numbers of women support government social programs. Why? Because with the staggering increase in divorce and illegitimacy, they and their children are more likely to be recipients of such programs.
In a recent Atlantic Monthly article, Stephen Stark notes that far more women than men supported the Clinton health-care plan-because women are less likely to be covered by existing insurance plans (more of them work part-time). Likewise, women are more concerned about Medicaid and Medicare—because they live longer. Finally, women are more likely to support Great Society programs aimed at the needs of the poor—because mother-headed families tend to be poorer than father-headed families.
In short, the widespread breakdown of marriage and family has left increasing numbers of women without adequate economic support. Which in turn, Stark writes, has “led more women than men to be dependent on and supportive of government welfare programs.” Susan Cullman of Republican Coalition for Choice puts it concretely: When you start cutting social programs, men think of getting government off their back; but women think, “My goodness, I might need that someday.”
The gender gap illustrates what has become a familiar pattern: a political issue that turns out to be at root a moral issue. The sexual revolution promised liberation from traditional morality, but the only folks liberated were men: They were freed from family responsibilities, while women were driven into dependency on Uncle Sam. We could even say the gender gap is a measure of the degree to which women have lost confidence that husbands and fathers will stick around.
Clearly, this trend is not a product of Roe v. Wade, as pundits portray it. In fact, it goes back to the industrial revolution. Prior to that, in colonial times, men worked in their homes and outbuildings and were regarded as “fathers of the community,” responsible for its moral tone. But the industrial revolution pulled men out of the home and created a new ethos of individual achievement. The role of moral guardians of home and community was picked up by women.
Even before women had the vote, they led morality-based movements to protect the family. They worked to ban prostitution and abortion, discourage child labor, and stop public drunkenness and gambling. As Stark writes, “One of the earliest political surveys, in 1919, showed that women in Illinois were twice as supportive of Prohibition as men—the first recorded gender gap.” The suffrage movement argued that the nation needed homemakers to infuse society with the values of home and family.
Yet this argument assumed a troubling premise: that men could no longer be relied on as champions of family values. As one suffragette argued, women need the right to vote “because men, even good men, cannot be trusted to take care of women’s interests.” Already women’s political activism was taking the shape we see today: reliance on the state to make up for the moral deficiencies of men.
Many liberals and conservatives have come to agree that government needs to be streamlined—which is to say, they take the “man’s” side in the gender gap. But the growth of government will never be tamed unless we first call men to examine their hearts and ask whether they are fulfilling their duties to their own families and communities. Churches need to preach once again a full biblical message on manhood: That men are called to fulfill an office as moral and spiritual head of the home. That maintaining a family is not “women’s work,” it is a man’s job. That family-related concerns such as education and health care are not only “women’s issues,” they are also part of men’s civic duty as custodians of their communities.
If government has a role to play, it is to reinforce, not substitute for, the moral responsibility of fathers—for example, by pursuing initiatives, as some states are doing, to reverse no-fault divorce. For if men do not uphold a moral standard in their own lives—staying married, raising their children, supporting elderly parents—then no matter which way they vote, they are contributing to inexorable social pressures to expand the welfare state.
Overcoming the gender gap does not require a “big tent” on abortion. It requires a big change in men’s hearts. When the church preaches the whole counsel of God, then believers may lead the way in restoring civic community from the ground up—beginning with families.
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