>this is also true of white women who are socially conservative about their
>own personal lives, but hesitant to impose their moralities on others. i
>can dig out the research, if you'd like.
In Britain women have consistently voted to the right of men. In 1985 Lisanne Radice could say that 'at no election had the labour party ever been able to command a majority of women's votes' (Lisanne Radice, Winning Women's Votes, London: Fabian Society, 1985 p5). Radice calculated a 'gender gap' between men and women's votes for Labour at the elections:
Feb 74 Oct 74 May 79Jun 83 Labour lead Men +7 +11 -3 -12 Women -7 -1 -12 -20 Gender Gap 14 12 9 8
Robert Worcester calculated the gender gap in the last five general elections:
1979 1983 1987 1992 1997 12 8 0 6 2
(Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimer, Explaining Labour's Landslide, London: Politicos 1999, p244)
It is true that the difference between women's and men's votes has lessened, but it is still the case that it was women who swung the election for Tory John Major in 1992. Even in 1997, where Labour had introduced quotas for women MPs, women still voted two per cent to the right of men. It appears that the gender gap is largely a European phenomenon, a consequence of the greater influence of the organised labour movement, influencing men in work to the left. In America, women voted to the right of men in 1952, '58 and '60, when men elected Kennedy but women Nixon. But since then men have voted to the right of women with the exception of 1976 when women reacted against Jimmy Carter's candidature, and in 1984 when, despite the endorsement of the National Organisation of Women for the Walter Mondale, Geraldine Ferraro ticket Republicans did almost as well with women's votes as with men's. With the declining importance of the European Labour movement, and a greater female participation in the workforce we can perhaps anticipate the disappearance of the gender gap.
Women's organisations have by no means been exclusively radical in nature. On the contrary, British women's organisations have included the Conservative Party affiliated Primrose League, the British Housewives League and the most successful of all women's organisations the Women's Institute. Many women's campaigners have been social reactionaries, like Phyllis Schlafly or Anita Bryant in the US, or Mary Whitehouse in the UK. Nor have women's organisations been exclusively pacifistic in their nature. Suffragettes were in the First World War instrumental in the 'white feather campaign' to shame men who failed to enlist. Today feminists like Catharine Mackinnon have been in the forefront of the campaigns for military intervention in the former Yugoslavia. In Britain the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child mobilised a greater number of women than did the National Abortion campaign (that was largely occupied with garnering support from 'patriarchal' Trade Unions).
Women are more religious than men are. Sixty Two per cent of women belonged to a religion in Britain in 1997, compared to 50 per cent of men (J Pullinger, C Summerfield (eds), Social Focus on Men and Women, Office of National Statistics, 1998). Indeed the organisation that most British women are likely to be a member of is a religious group (15.7 per cent), and after that a trade union (13.2 per cent). In fact women are around fourteen times more likely to be a member of either of these male-dominated institutions than they are a women's group (two per cent, J Church, C Summerfield (eds), Social Focus on Women, Central Statistics Office, 1995). British women are marginally more concerned than men about the environment in general. On average they are two per cent more concerned about ozone depletion, radioactive and chemical waste, acid rain and traffic congestion than men are. But they are much more concerned about fouling by dogs, sewage on beaches and livestock methods (J Pullinger, C Summerfield). British women are marginally less interested in politics than men (J Pullinger, C Summerfield), as are European and American women (P Ester, L Halman, R de Moor (eds), The Individualising Society: Value Change in Europe and North America, European Value Studies, Tilburg: University Press, 1993, p90). European and American women are also less morally permissive than men, especially in Portugal and Spain (Ibid., p63). British women are less permissive about sexually explicit and homosexual portrayals in the media than men are (R Jowell et al (eds), British Social Attitudes: 13th Report, Aldershot: Dartmouth Press, 1996). Fifty Six per cent of American mothers think that more lesbians and gays raising children is a bad thing, but only six per cent think it a good thing ('Motherhood Today -- A Tougher Job, Less Ably Done', Pew Research Center survey May 9, 1997). Twenty eight per cent of British women over 35 and twenty-two per cent of women under 35 think that immigrants taking jobs is the reason for unemployment (Helen Wilkinson et al, Tomorrow's Women, London: Demos, 1997).
On the whole, though, gender differences are becoming less important in social attitudes and most point to a trend to convergence between men and women's attitudes (see P Ester, L Halman, R de Moor). On one level this is because of the greater participation of women in the workplace, meaning that 'full time working women's attitudes [are] more similar to men than other women' (Helen Wilkinson et al, Tomorrow's Women, London: Demos, 1997, p96). On the other hand, men, especially younger men, have come to share some of the domestic and personal security preoccupations of women, i.e. men are becoming more like women (British Social Attitudes, Twelfth Report 1995/96, Dartmouth).
-- James Heartfield