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The surge of normie family women and Moral Foundation Theory
A lot has been written on how marriage and long term relationships, at least in the Anglo-saxon contest, move women right from the left. While I think this assessment is generally correct, anecdotic evidence that I gathered around tell me that is not exactly right.
Context: Every month I begin to see some of my female friends and acquaintances, generally middle-upper class women, getting married and having children (age=27 - 32). After the birth their social profiles become typical of a mother with a child; continuous social media posts of their children, mom's initiatives, kindergardens, lovely picture with their newly wed husbands etc But it was very curious to see that this sudden change of social media posting have not changed their past habit of "left-wing posting" about Palestine, gay marriage, feminism etc. Instead, it accelerated a lot.
Sometimes ago, someone here was talking about Moral Foundation Theory and how left and right (and men and women) are different from each other, and how mainstream marriage culture follows more the conservative moral framework than the leftists framework.
But I would like to add that, in my opinion, we are seeing a shift of moral mainstream and normie society going from following the Authority/Sanctity/Loyalty to the Care/Fairness framework. If this happen, the consequence is that people following the rightists moral framework will never find refuge in mainstream family-making society, because this society is becoming morally Leftists. I do not think that we have ever seen, in the history of humanity, a shift like this.
I don't think that's true at all. Haidt's research is outdated. SJ, the successor ideology, is not really a three-foundation morality. It's what happens when a conservative-by-temperament with six foundations is raised in 90s liberalism (which was a three-foundation morality), sees it as the "standard", and attempts to "conserve" it. It has Authority (trust ScienceTM) and Sanctity (hate-speech-as-blasphemy); I'm not 100% sure about Loyalty since SJ is hostile enough to its "normal" foes that it's hard to spot any additional hostility for traitors, but callouts are to some degree an anti-traitor mechanism.
What you're seeing is a paradigm shift in "what is conserved", and while it's taken a long time to fruit this tree was planted in the 1960s. I don't think that it's new in history; the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire is an obvious example. It definitely is very hard to reverse at this stage absent some sort of large shock* because the next generation's temperamental-conservatives are now your enemies - they're trying to conserve the new ideology. Without such a shock, your best bet is to try to nucleate a new counterculture based on some of the old principles but with the vibrant and consistent ideology needed to attract the next generation's temperamental-rebels (which is the alt-right in a nutshell), but even then it won't be the same and could be terrible in its own way (to take the low-hanging fruit, Nazi Germany was not the Kaiserreich, and even if it had counterfactually lasted long enough to stabilise, it would still not quite have been).
*The most plausible shock I can imagine is if the most-affected areas - i.e. the cities - are literally and specifically depopulated for some reason, be that nuclear war, a plague, civil war causing food disruption, or economic collapse again causing food disruption. There may be other possibilities I do not see.
NB: This post discusses what Is and Will be, not what Ought be. That which works is not necessarily good.
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How much of this is merely because said women have had more time to post about basic ${CurrentThing} as they’ve become Stay-at-Home-Mothers, women who’ve lightened their workload to fewer hours or to part-time, switched to better work/life balance jobs, and/or taken extended maternity leave?
One could move rightward yet still ${CurrentThing} post more than ever before if one has more free time and/or if Cthulhu swims left.
In a similar vein, phenomena such as QAnon and scam or scam-adjacent ventures like “MLM” are disproportionately composed of middle-aged women. Those who have all day to social-media-post in between the arduous task of recharging iPads (or putting in a new DVD back in the day).
Younger women would likely be busier with thot-posting, dating, and/or doing things to outright court male sexual attention (parties, nightlife, concerts, festivals) and that give them plausible deniability to take photos of themselves and thot-post. Thus leaving less time for posting more extended “thoughts” beyond posting black squares and rainbows.
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How much of this is just signaling, though? Like opinion polling of parents vs non parents has been done and shows a big trend, but Facebook posts probably reflect a different reality. I’d wager opinion polls come closer to the truth, whether due to filter bubble effects or to social desirability bias. Or more likely, some combination thereof.
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I think you're compressing too much into a single life stage. There's no reason to think that the stage of life of newly-weds are much like mothers of babies, are much like mothers of school children. I got married in 2016, we had kids quickly, and my first only entered kindergarten this year. That's almost a decade of life and 80% of my wife's time out of college, to sweep together into one motion.
I wouldn't expect being newly married to change much at all, compared with having children, so mixing those two together seems confounding to whatever effect you're noticing. As a mother of 3, she has nothing in common from a 'stages of life' perspective with newly weds. I would consider a newly married woman to be much more similar to a single woman than to a mother.
If your pool of new moms is too small to notice a trend without also including newlyweds or mothers expecting, then I suspect you don't have enough data beyond an anecdotal impression. If the trend actually reverses or moderates if you look at only mothers, or only mothers of children older than 3, then there's your answer. If the trend seems just as strong without newly weds, then I see no reason to combine them in your observation.
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This is mostly because nowadays women who are new mothers don’t have a community generally and so become isolated as a result of motherhood especially with WFH.
As a result their social outlet is social media which is easily to fall into a radicalization spiral the more time you spend on it. I think people underestimate how much left-wing stuff women receive on tiktok & instagram etc - when tiktok shows my apolitical gf’s political oriented videos almost all are israel palestine videos (as opposed to say budget issues, local politics, etc).
I have approximately 1 male friend who posts right wing political stories on instagram and about 100 female friends who posts left wing stuff constantly. Instagram is pretty much the only real world based (as in you still connect to your real world friends as opposed to youtube/tiktok) social media anyone around me uses. I am flabbergasted how female and left dominated it is. This wasn’t the case back when everyone was on Facebook at all. I think something about social media becoming image/video dominated truly broke the gender balance.
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I would expect this to mostly be a causation/correlation mix-up. Conservative women are more likely to be married and have kids, for a variety of reasons including being older, less educated, less urban, more religious, etc. That doesn't imply that getting married or having kids makes any individual more conservative than they were before.
Unless someone's controlled for all the factors, or done before-after studies with controls, or etc.
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I haven't fleshed this out, so forgive me if I don't have a great model, but my first thought is that this is pretty much the story of the last thousand years or so, with pretty much all advanced Western societies increasing the general inclination towards the Care/Fairness dimensions and decreasing Authority/Sanctity/Loyalty. Can you elaborate on why you think that's not the case? What I'm thinking of are things like abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the welfare state, and emphasis on individual rights with cultural changes away from allegiance to royalty, filial piety, and religious piety.
This is all stuff that’s happened in the last 300 years, though.
My impression is that it goes back quite a bit farther, but in any case, it's not something that seems like it popped up in the last few decades.
It’s true that Christian Europe partially(it’s complicated) abolished slavery over the latter half of the Middle Ages, but Christendom famously reintroduced slavery during the renaissance in the transatlantic slave trade. Nor did anyone in Europe have any issue with conquering big chunks of the new world and subjugating the inhabitants. The welfare state specifically dates from the late 19th century, when it was introduced in Germany for bismarckian realpolitik reasons. Rome had a welfare state for the exact same reasons. Women’s suffrage is specifically from the 19th century and pre-enlightenment there was no trend towards universal male suffrage either.
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In my experience (knowing a lot of lefty young women who have later become mothers), motherhood isn't as much correlated with leaving the left entirely as it is with downscaling politics and moving to more "grounded" issues (ie. schools and family services instead of the Big Global Causes). However, for a lot of them, busy with taking care of kids, the only respite in a day might be short Instagram breaks to browse the feeds of their friends (many/most of them predictably people they've hung around with before becoming parents, ie. other lefties), and once they spot that kids are killed in Palestine or there's a feminist meme going around in Stories, they might just as well just reshare it.
I mean, it would be a fairly odd though pattern to go "Hum, I'm a mother now, guess it's time to sympathize with Israel instead of Palestine", especially considering how much of pro-Palestine content revolves around harrowing news like this. (Of course, motherhood might lead to a new search for a religion, and in Western context that often means a church that supports Israel, which might then cause that flip.)
Your link doesn't seem to work.
Should work now.
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I think there's an important confounding factor for both political orientation and marriage: age. One is more likely to be married the older one is and the rule of politics used to be that the older one was the more conservative one was. There is some evidence that for Millenials this trend has reversed. That Millenials are actually getting more liberal, or staying about as liberal, as they get older. Given the relation between age, political orientation, and marriage I don't think it's too surprising to see a reversal of the historical association between age and political orientation manifest as a reversal of the historical orientation between marriage and political orientation.
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This reminds me of a good post from a couple of years ago about how most of the ‘defund the police’ or ‘teach CRT’ type stuff was in practice accomplished by married white women, who dominate a lot of institutions and local government (and, of course, HR departments). The activists had always been there but the suburban white mom demographic, which had previously been at least solidly small-c conservative flipped in part after Trump’s election, and since it had a vice grip on a lot of city council seats, school board positions and so on, they could ram changes through surprisingly quickly with no real safeguards.
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Feminism and standard liberalism are now the conservative position; 'conservative' in these days means reactionary. Progressives and social activists can put up a big stink, and this forum does like to talk endlessly about them, but their positions are just 10-30 years ahead of the mainstream. The kind of society that was futuristic in the 90s with Star Trek: TNG is now considered the default with respect to the mainstream of society. They are the ones that define what is acceptable, they are the social censors and define what is considered wholesome. The current age of mainstreaming of feminism and political correctness has outlasted the time that reactionaries want to call back in their idealism -- 50's and early 60's. Eventually all the people who lived back then will die out and kids will grow up with absolutely no social context of anything different.
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I must have missed these discussions, because I've never seen this as far as I recall. How does this argument work?
No, that's not necessarily the case. More left-wing women getting married and having children doesn't have an obvious bearing on whether right-wing women are doing the same.
Also, while I am familiar with the argument that gay marriage harmed the institution of marriage, I have never heard anyone argue that this marriage institution ever required holding right-wing social views on things unrelated to it. What prevents a right-wing woman from thinking Palestinians don't deserve what Israel does to them?
My understand was that this was based on a statistic that found married women are more conservative than single women. There are a few different reasons this might be/have been the case. I could see a social pressure, stronger in the past, expecting that a wife would adopt political views more in line with her husband/would vote in step with her husband. Married women will be older on average than single women so the basic older>conservative pipe line. The institution of marriage could change how someone evaluates a lot of different questions, putting priority on their children over welfare for strangers, etc. This is at least my vague understanding of the situation (but it could be a reference to something totally different?), and some possible arguments.
I think the elephant in the room is the baby. It’s absolutely amazing how much having a baby in the family can shift your perspective on a whole host of issues. I find the biggest difference is in the value of stability, of protecting the child both physically and emotionally, and in choosing the extended family and close friends over other people and things. When you have to think about your kid growing up in the world, it suddenly isn’t all that appealing to suggest revolutionary changes, or fighting the power. When you say “defund the police,” some part of your unconscious brain understand that you’re chaining up the guard dog that is tasked with keeping your family from being robbed. When you say “upend the political system,” again some part of your brain understands that you rely on the rest of society being stable so you can be economically stable and safe. These things become a lot less desirable when you’re not just asking if I will be safe and economically stable, but if you’re risking those things for the baby. I don’t think that it’s a straight liberal or conservative thing, just a stronger preference for stability and a strong urge to favor things that they associate with stability.
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Also, selection effects, whereby more conservative women are more likely to get married.
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Caveats about a bubble and all but...
Among the women my wife socializes with, and in the polarized climate of my state with regard to schools secretly transitioning children, it's a pretty hot third rail in their interactions. But thus far, every single mom my wife has touched that third rail with (often after months of trying to feel them out) is horrified and aghast at the policies public schools are fighting tooth and nail for. It's utterly inconceivable that a public institution would take such serious health measures with their children and keep it a secret from them. And yet here we are.
Every other issue is a toss up honestly. But, that is the single issue which, for whatever reason, D's have decided makes you "far right", and we've yet to encounter a mom who supports it in the wild.
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There's also the fact that living with, being tied to, and having lots of intimate conversations with a person you've committed yourself to just changes your worldview to be in line with them. It's very difficult to get that close to someone and not seriously evaluate their worldview in a way you might not if it were just presented to you by a stranger.
This effect is probably stronger if your own worldview is weaker or less reasoned. While social pressure plays into it, I think it's more the informal pressure of being exposed to contrary ideas by someone you love rather than any formal pressure to conform.
(This was actually a factor for me in dating -- I really did not like many of the conservative women I met whose worldviews seemed imposed on them from the outside instead of something they'd worked out themselves with fear and trembling. I was fortunate to meet my girlfriend who is both not crazy or a progressive ideologue, and actually well-informed on what she thinks.)
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How far back does this trend of "marriage -> more right-wing" go for women? A century? Two centuries?
When all women were married, women were generally more conservative than men, and now it’s the opposite.
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