The Enduring Power of the Feminist Revolution
My old friend Eli Zaretsky, the author of Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, has often told me that of all the movements of the Sixties, the feminist revolution has had the most intense psychological impact on American life and politics. The point is debatable—certainly the revolution in civil rights has stirred the country—but if you look at American politics of the last fifty years and at the social conflicts that have divided us, changes in women's status and opinions, and the reaction these have engendered among men, have played an enormous, and sometimes, unacknowledged role.
Take the changes in political party composition. Political commentators have often explained recent changes as the result of two factors: the growing "diploma divide" between voters with a four-year college degree ("college-educated voters") and voters without one ("non-college voters”) and the growing allegiance of young voters to liberal ideas and the Democratic Party. In both these cases, changes in women's outlook have played a huge role, and these can be traced back ultimately to the feminist revolution that began in the Sixties.
Women and the Diploma Divide
The key to understanding the gender gap and the diploma divide is the shifting allegiance of college-educated women. There has been a diploma divide in American politics for a century. Through the Sixties, the more education a person received the more likely he or she would vote Republican. As late as 1976, Republican Gerald Ford won the women's vote in the presidential election. But that began to change in the late 1970s, and there is now a large "gender gap" in American politics. In 2020, Democrats won the women's vote by 11 percentage points.
The main reason for the change is the support for the Democrats by college-educated women. In 1994, the year Pew Research began polling party support, they were 35 percent Democratic, 33 percent Republican, and 29 percent independent. When the independents were broken down to those leaning to one party or another, college-educated women were Democratic by only 50 to 48 percent.
By 2023, the differences had become dramatic. Forty-four percent of college-educated women identified as Democrats and 26 percent as independents. If the independents are broken down, college-educated women are Democratic by 60 to 37 percent. That's a 21-percentage point swing. If you look at non-college educated women, they go from 52 to 45 percent Democratic in 1994 to 49 to 45 percent Republican in 2023. That's a 11-percentage point swing to the Republicans. The numbers of college-educated women are also growing from 13 percent of the Democratic vote in the late 1990s to 30 percent today.
College-educated men have also shifted toward the Democrats during the last two decades, but less consistently and dramatically. College-educated women's support for Democrats has hovered around 60 percent since 2008. A majority of college-educated men only began identifying as Democrats in 2017, and as late as 2022, a majority had reverted to identifying Republican and Republican-leaning. Together, college-educated men make up only about 17 percent of the Democratic vote. In other words, in terms of sheer numbers, the key to the Democrats becoming the party of the college-educated lay in the women's vote.
The shift of college-educated women answers the most puzzling questions about the diploma divide. Political analysts have often attributed the divide to a division over class, but many voters without a college degree, particularly among minorities and workers who belong to labor unions, continue to vote for Democrats. There is little evidence, too, that these voters prefer Democrats because they associate the party with the college-educated the way a New Yorker might prefer the Yankees because it is the hometown team. But there is an obvious reason why college-educated women have shifted to the Democrats.
According to a Pew poll in 2020, 72 percent of college-educated women see themselves as "feminists." The poll simply asks about the name, but one can safely assume that in this instance, feminism refers to support for women's equality in the home and workplace and holds a special appeal for women who work outside the home in occupations where they compete with men for advancement. It would also include support for abortion rights.
Up through the 1976 election, Republicans could claim some support for feminism. Ford backed abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. But in the late 1970s, led by what was called "the new right," conservative Republicans sought the support of conservative evangelicals who opposed the ERA and abortion, and in 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan opposed both. In that election, the gender gap emerged with a vengeance, and college-educated women began their journey away from the Republicans to the Democrats. It has continued. The decision of the Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, to overturn Roe v. Wade reinforced college-educated women's tie to the Democrats.
There are, of course, a host of other reasons why these voters have supported Democrats. Analysts point to women's support for national health insurance and gun control and their opposition to armed intervention abroad. Some women who oppose feminism still support Democrats. But what stands out over the years is college-educated women’s' support for feminism. That is, by and large, the reason for the shift in women's vote.
There is no similar kind of social movement that accounts for the shift in the vote of college-educated men. There are a host of issues—from concerns about climate change and tax giveaways to the wealthy to a rejection of the religious right and, most recently, of the culture of MAGA—that have at times allowed Democrats to win a majority of college-educated men. But in the absence of a driving social movement, their support has been and remains more fickle and less central to Democrats winning elections.
Young Women Voters
Even since the 2008 presidential election, when Barack Obama won 66 percent of the vote from 18 to 29 year olds, Democrats have been touting the importance of the youth vote. It was an integral part of what Democratic consultants and activists called the "rising American majority." These voters did help the Democrats in the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 congressional vote, but, overall, their enthusiasm for the Democrats and their support for Joe Biden seems to have cooled. That has led some noted analysts to brand the progressive youth vote a "chimera."
Upon closer examination, however, what has happened is that young men have lost enthusiasm for Biden, the Democrats, and liberalism, but young women have remained steadfast. In the Spring 2024 Harvard Youth Poll, which surveys 18-29 year olds nationwide, females (when leaners were included) identified as Democrats by 55 to 24 percent, while males identified as Democrats by 40 to 34 percent. Thirty-eight percent of young women identified as "liberals" compared to 24 percent of young men. In a two-way matchup between Biden and Donald Trump, young women favored Biden by 49 to 32 percent, while young men were divided at 41 percent each.
The Harvard poll doesn't compare Democratic support among college-educated young women and those without a degree, but the comparison between the college-educated men and women, with 31 percentage gaps between Democrats and Republicans, and those without a degree, with only an 11-percentage point difference, suggests that college-educated young women are sustaining the youth support for Biden and the Democrats. (For a survey of all the polling on the gender gap among young voters, see Elaine Kamarck and Jordan Muchnick, "The Growing Gender Gap among Young People.")
These young women, like older college-educated women, identify as "feminists." According to the American Enterprise Institute Survey Center on American Life, 61 percent of Generation Z women (born in 1995 or later) identify as feminists. The percentage among the college-educated is even higher. Like their elders, they have a host of different concerns that drive their vote, but they are the generation that came of age during the controversy over "me-too," Donald Trump's Hollywood Access tapes, and the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. They appear particularly sensitive to discrimination. Sixty-six percent of the young women who identify as "liberal" say they experienced gender discrimination. It's likely that their vote, like that of their college-educated elders, is shaped, if not driven, by feminist concerns.
The growing prominence of young women and college-educated women in the Democratic electorate and the growing number of prominent women politicians—and the importance of feminist concerns of these voters and politicians—has helped to redefine the Democratic Party. It has also contributed to redefinition of liberalism itself. Once a political ideology defined primarily by concerns with economics and democracy, it is now often identified with social and cultural issues. That's partly a result of the feminist revolution that has taken place within the Democratic Party. I mean that as a fact not as a criticism or commendation. The feminist revolution is part of Martin Luther King's moral arc of history.
I am leaving important political questions unanswered. To what extent has the Democratic identification with feminism driven men (and some women) to support Republicans?
There was certainly a backlash in the 1970s and 1980s that conservative Republicans exploited. Republican analyst Jude Wanniski used to call Democrats the "Mommy party" and Republicans the "Daddy party." Hillary Clinton probably lost some votes in 2016 by running as a women candidate who, if elected, would break the glass ceiling. And the new crop of Republicans, led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, has attempted to brand the left and by extension the Democrats as anti-male.
There is also some survey evidence that is suggestive. According to a Pew poll, 38 percent of men who identify as Republican say "women's gains have come at the expense of men." According to a Brookings study, 45 percent of the men aged 18 to 29 say they face discrimination as men. The backlash certainly exists, and it is one of several factors that have turned some men away from the Democratic Party.
The "war of the sexes," as we used to call it, is one of those insufficiently appreciated undercurrents in American political life.
John B. Judis is author of The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism and, with Ruy Teixeira, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
This makes so much sense! I feel like a light bulb just went off in my head. Feminist women have taken over the Democratic Party to an extent. There's definitely some feminization going on in the party that is familiar when I think about it this way. As a woman, the victim mentality, the "bossiness," some of the manipulation (especially of language and emotions), the kind of mothering/smothering instinct...these are all stereotypical of women (for a reason) Maybe that's what has turned me off. It's kind of like, "Look, I already had a mom. I don't need another." I'm not trying to dump on women, but just speaking on maybe having a psychological reaction that we might not be understanding. Plus, I have around me at all times a husband and 2 grown sons. When I feel like men are getting short-changed, my mothering instinct kicks in and I feel the need to vote with them to defend them. I know, I'm a little kooky. Haha.
Anti-feminism has been a huge driver of recent younger males’ disaffection from the Democratic Party. I started following the Jordan Peterson/Joe Rogan/Sam Harris space around 2017 at the recommendation of some much younger friends (I’m currently 76), and I noticed that criticism of “feminism” was an absolutely central theme. This was something that had been brewing for years - I remember its tiny beginnings back in the 1970s with such things as the Men’s Right’s Association out of St. Paul, Minnesota, but the movement was always fairly subterranean and unheard. There’s always been a great deal of legitimacy to the complaints - this wasn’t t mostly a criticism of “equal rights” per se but was rather directed at the hypocrisies and questionable claims of feminism - women constantly “marrying up”, a lack of acknowledgment that men “genetically” tended to choose the difficult and dangerous jobs and thus get paid more, certain “outrageous” divorce settlements, and the like. Democrats generally brooked no tolerance of “feminism” whatsoever and so the movement, so to speak, just grew and grew to the point where it’s now very widespread and politically significant in terms of male party-switching, yet organs like the New York Times, the New Yorker, etc., continue to dismiss all manifestations of it as the product of “incels”, “toxic masculinity”, “misogynists”, etc. We’re still a long way from the official Democratic Party acknowledging the legitimacy of many of these sentiments, so the Party will continue to bleed male support for some time to come, and it will continue to cost them elections.