During President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, a cartoon character named Julia was created to illustrate the life of an average American. Clocking in at just 14 panels, the “Life of Julia” followed a faceless white woman from the ages of 3 to 67. We see her go to preschool, graduate from college, dye her hair orange, get a job as a web designer, go back to her natural dark hair, have a child, start her own business, and then retire.
At every step of the way, the campaign was at pains to show how government programs made Julia’s life possible. At age 3, she enrolls in Head Start. At 18, she qualifies for a Pell Grant. At 31, she receives free prenatal care. At 42, she qualifies for a Small Business Administration loan. And at 67, she comfortably retires — because the evil Mitt Romney was prevented from cutting her Social Security benefits by 40%. (PolitiFact labeled this last panel false.)
What we never see in the “Life of Julia” is a man, let alone marriage to one. Thanks to government programs created by Democrats and expanded by Obama, Julia has no need for a husband. That’s because Julia is married to the state.
Nine years later, Joe Biden introduced a similar single woman named Linda intended to promote his “Build Back Better” agenda. Linda hails from Peoria, Illinois. When we first meet her, she is already pregnant.
Again, no man in sight. As we watch her raise her son, Leo, the proposed Biden agenda provides first discounted child care and then free prekindergarten. By the time Linda retires, the state is there for her again, this time footing the bill for subsidized elder care.
Whatever problems the Lindas and Leos of the world may face, according to the Biden White House, the solution is not a husband for Linda or a father for Leo. It is government-funded care for them both. Linda, too, is married to the state.
Gender-linked fate
Both Julia and Linda were created for the same reason: Democratic operatives know that single women are not only already one of the largest voting blocs in the party, outnumbering both black and Latino people, but also the fastest-growing. Inculcating single women’s group identity is a huge priority for Democratic campaigns … and it is working.
In 2012, among all women, Obama won by 11 points, 55% to 44%. But he lost among married women, 46% to 53%. He lost among married men as well. But where he cleaned up was among single women, whom he won by an overwhelming 67%-to-32% margin.
If Obama faced a 1960 electorate, in which single women made up just 5% of voters, married women would have carried the day for Romney. The only reason Obama was able to win in 2012 was that the single-woman electorate had grown to 25% of all voters.
Importantly, the gap in voting between married and unmarried women was not driven by race. Among all white women, Romney won 56% to 42%. But among unmarried white women, Obama won, 49% to 39%.
Biden continued Democratic dominance among single women in 2020. While then-President Donald Trump won married men by 55% to 44% and married women by 51% to 47%, respectively, Biden won single women by 63% to 36%. And the Democrats expanded that lead in 2022, winning single women by a 68%-to-31% margin.
As the gap in voting patterns between married and single women has grown, researchers have begun to theorize and study why. One recent paper that looked at a survey of more than 2,000 women found that single women, especially single white women, are more likely to identify with other women generally. Unmarried women feel that if women in general are doing well, then they, too, are doing well. The authors called this mindset a “gender-linked fate.”
Married women, on the other hand, are more likely to identify with the needs of their husbands and children. They are more likely to share income and resources with their husbands and are, therefore, more concerned with their husbands’ well-being than the well-being of women they don’t know.
Another study following women’s political preferences through the Youth-Parent Socialization survey from 1964 through 1996 found that women who once considered themselves liberal and voted for Democrats were more likely to vote for Republicans after they got married. Conversely, married women who had been Republicans and then got divorced were more likely to become Democrats.
Other studies show that having children makes both men and women more conservative. Since married women are far more likely to have children than unmarried women, the more unmarried women there are, the more possible childless Democratic women voters there will be.
That marriage and children moderate women politically makes sense.
Marriage binds men and women into a long-term project of cooperative care for each other and their children. Married women see their husbands’ interests and their children’s interests as their own. Single women do not have these personally created family bonds with other men.
Sure, they may have been born into a family with a father and maybe even a brother, but these are not men who single women chose to make the central focus of their lives. A married woman has chosen to make her husband and her children part of her identity. Single women, by contrast, feel a stronger amorphous “gender-linked fate” with millions of other single women they do not even know.
The triumph of “intersectionality” on college campuses has also greatly contributed to the rejection of marriage by white women in particular.
When law professor Kimberle Crenshaw first coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, she was specifically addressing the failures of both “feminist theory” and “antiracist policy discourse” to “accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender.”
“These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black women within an already established analytical structure,” Crenshaw wrote. “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
This was relevant to the study of law, Crenshaw explained, because only using the existing gender and race lenses often left black women unprotected. For example, employers may show they did not discriminate because they hired plenty of black men and white women, but such a defense left black women no recourse. Viewed through the intersectionality lens, in a hierarchy of victimhood, black women were at the top, above black men and white women, with white men at the bottom.
Intersectionality has since moved on from race and gender to include religion, disability, physical appearance, and, most importantly for our purposes, sexuality. A black straight woman faces compounded oppression due to her gender and race, but a black queer woman is oppressed due to her gender, race, and sexuality.
By adding sexuality to the hierarchy of intersectional oppression, white women are afforded a new avenue to distance themselves from the top of the privilege ladder. As a straight white woman, a person is just one step away from being the pinnacle of oppression, a straight white man. But by claiming to be queer, white women can now put two rungs between themselves and the source of all evil.
And that is what we see happening. Gallup has been tracking self-reported gender identity for years, and there has been a marked rise in Americans identifying as LGBT. But drilling down into the data, it quickly becomes obvious that the movement away from identifying as heterosexual is concentrated not only in the youngest generation but among young women in particular.
The percentage of people self-identifying as LGBT has grown from 3.5% in 2012 to 7.6% in 2024, according to Gallup. But while the LGBT identity of Generation X and above still hovers around 3.5%, it is the LGBT identification of Generation Z that has exploded.
Over a fifth of Gen-Z youth now identify as LGBT, a fad driven entirely by young women claiming to be bisexual. Almost 30% of Gen-Z women now claim LGBT identity, including 20% of Gen-Z women who claim to be bisexual. By contrast, among Gen-X women, less than 5% claim to be LGBT, and just 2.8% say they are bisexual. LGBT self-identification is also much weaker among Gen-Z men, as just 10.6% identify as LGBT at all, and just 6.9% say they are bisexual.
The celebration and consecration of LGBT identification by the progressive movement provides many lost young women searching for a connection to a new tribe to call home. This new identity, however, is deeply hostile to heterosexual marriage and encourages women to become clients of the Democratic Party’s expansive welfare state, a system that is designed to push single women as far away from potential husbands as possible.
That our government punishes marriage for working-class people isn’t widely known among college-educated Americans, but it is better understood among the working poor.
A 2016 poll by the Los Angeles Times asked men and women in poverty, “How often do you think unmarried adults choose not to get married to avoid losing welfare benefits?” Almost a quarter of respondents, 24%, answered “almost always,” while another 23% said “often.” Among all adults, the 2015 American Family Survey found that 31% of people knew someone who chose not to get married “for fear of losing welfare benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, or other government benefits.”
Anecdotal evidence isn’t hard to find, either. When the Institute for Family Studies recently conducted focus groups of working-class parents in Ohio, Atlanta, and San Antonio, one working mother told the discussion leaders, “Yes, I chose not to marry.” She explained, “I get a lot of assistance for my children for myself, so if I did marry or put any other type of income in, I would not qualify for anything.” Another working mother in Georgia said it was unfair for her to have “to choose between marrying a man she loves or losing the benefits that she has.” She is absolutely right. It is unfair.
Even the proudly single women in Rebecca Traister’s book All the Single Ladies acknowledge that marriage penalties play a role in their romantic decision-making. Emmalee, an employed mother of a toddler who lives with but is not married to the father of her child, told Traister she participated in the food stamp, Medicaid, and WIC programs.
“I’m able to survive. I get a little help from the government without being married,” Emmalee told Traister. “If I was married, I probably wouldn’t get that extra help from them.” Asked if the possibility of losing government benefits was “wholly” behind her decision not to marry, Emmalee responded, “Not my end result, but kind of yeah.”
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Traister, of course, immediately discounted Emmalee’s response by noting that cash welfare benefits have declined since the 1970s, which is true. But Emmalee doesn’t receive cash welfare benefits.
She gets food stamps, Medicaid, and WIC. These are all huge government programs that have only expanded in size and value since the 1970s. But for the welfare state’s jealous marriage penalties, maybe Emmalee would be married to the father of her child and not the state.
Conn Carroll is the commentary editor of the Washington Examiner. He is the author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy, from which this is excerpted.