Exit poll data from the November midterm elections offered an important insight into the differences between demographics. While young men, married men, and married women all leaned toward
Republicans
, young, single women
broke
for Democrats by a massive margin.
This isn’t at all surprising to those who have been following cultural trends. Young women today are far more liberal than their mothers and grandmothers. One 2019 poll, for example,
found
that 51% of women between 18 and 35 support government funding for abortion, whereas 47% of women between 50 and 65 oppose it.
WHAT’S AT STAKE IN THE LEFT’S WAR ON WOMEN
Women are also much more likely than other groups to support
transgenderism
. A
survey
last June found that women (62%) are more likely than men (52%) to say gender-confused persons face serious discrimination and are also more likely to believe that it is extremely or very important to use a gender-confused person’s preferred pronouns.
This is all a part of the “Single Woke Female” phenomenon, as Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams put it in
a new report
. They write:
The rise of SWFs — a twist on the personal-ad abbreviation for single white female — is one of the great untold stories of American politics. Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen-Z and millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women. More likely to live in urban centers and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic Party’s and the nation’s shift to the Left.
Kotkin and Abrams also point out that the SWF voter bloc continues to grow in size. Far too many women are staying single for too long, with the number of married women in the United States decreasing from 70% in 1950 to 50% today. While men certainly bear some of the blame for the decline in marriage, they can at least say they’re trying: 61% of single men say they are currently looking for a relationship or dates, according to Pew, compared with 38% of single women.
Women who do settle down delay family-building for as long as possible. Since 2007, the birthrate for women in their 20s has fallen by 28%. Even the birthrate among women in their 30s and 40s has begun to decline over the past four years,
according to the
New York Times
. As Kotkin and Abrams note, 1 in 6 women will be childless by the time they reach the end of their childbearing years.
These two cultural trends, the decline in marriage and the delay in child-rearing, help explain why young women are so much more liberal than everyone else. They have detached themselves from the very things that tend to make a person conservative: community and
family
. For example, why would women support efforts to give parents more of a say in public school classrooms if they don’t see any value in parenthood in the first place?
This detachment is not just occurring among young women, either. Men, women, young and old, have all abandoned the nuclear family and the other institutions that keep us grounded. But this trend has its roots in a distinctly female movement: the sexual revolution and third-wave feminism. Indeed, the idea that we can detach ourselves from bodily responsibility sits at the very core of almost every single cultural debate today. From gay marriage to abortion to transgenderism, the common thread is the notion that we can free ourselves from biological realities and social norms and create new identities that answer only to ourselves.
The family is the best rebuke to this ideology. Through
marriage
and child-rearing, both men and women come to realize that their biological differences are, in fact, real and necessary; that their bodies are not their own; and that the task of creating and raising children requires a self-sacrifice that the sexual revolution expressly forbids.
Reversing the SWF phenomenon, then, requires a renewed emphasis on the traditional institutions that feminists rejected. This isn’t to say that women need to quit their jobs and get back in the kitchen, but we do need to recognize that there’s a difference between independence and self-interest and that pursuit of the latter in the name of the former leaves women far less fulfilled and much more liberal than when they began.
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Kaylee McGhee White is the editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
