Marriage Makes Women More Conservative; Motherhood Makes Them More Liberal

Marriage makes men and women more conservative. Fatherhood also makes men more conservative. But political scientists Steven Greene and Laurel Elder found that mothers were more liberal than non-mothers on war questions. This is true even though those same women are likely to have been more conservative than single women when they first got married.

Far from producing "Security Moms" who vote for the most hawkish candidates to protect their babies, mothers seem to desire to avoid war and protect their own babies from fighting them.

(I thank Steven Greene for generously sharing this paper with me.)