What Women Don't Want

The social position of women has changed from generation ago. These changes have huge implications for both the substance and the style of politics -- but not always obvious implications.

A few days back, Ann Coulter told a Canadian television personality that Canada was welcome to have me back -- that American conservatives had no use for me. That stung, coming from an old comrade: I have known Ann for a decade and a half, back when she was still a lawyer, not yet a comedian.

Yet to do her justice, Coulter had a point. A lot of what I've been saying in U.S. political debate recently does reflect the experience of Canadian -- and also British -- conservatives. Canadian conservatives wandered for 13 years in the federal political wilderness after the implosion of 1993. British conservatives still await the end of their post-1997 exile. Both groups have had to think through how to advance center-right politics in the 21st century in a more adverse environment.

What makes that environment so adverse? Let me focus on just one thing for now: the changing social position of women.

A generation ago, women in the United States, U.K. and Canada had on average attained lower levels of formal schooling than men. Today, a majority of new university graduates in all three societies are female.

A generation ago, most women in these societies lived most of their lives in marriage. Marriage rates in all societies have sharply declined: The majority of U.S. households for example are now headed by unmarried persons, either single or cohabiting.

These changes have huge implications for both the substance and the style of politics -- but not always obvious implications.

John McCain looked at those trends, for example, and decided that the answer to his problems in the 2008 presidential campaign was a female running mate. But after an initial burst of enthusiasm, women voters soon turned on Sarah Palin. Palin remains to this day significantly less popular with women than she is with men: Even among Republicans, half of all women regard her as unqualified for the presidency.

By contrast, U.K. Conservative leader David Cameron runs strongly among women. Before his recent slippage in the polls, Cameron was outperforming Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown among both men and women. Even now, Cameron faces the smallest gender gap of any British Conservative leader since before Margaret Thatcher's time.

Here are three lessons American conservatives could learn from other people's experience:

- Tone matters. Harshly divisive rhetoric and attempts to draw lines between "real Americans" and "other Americans" will intensify the right-of-center party's in-built deficits among women voters. When Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, some U.S. conservatives attacked the president for suggesting that "empathy" was an important qualification in a judge. There were many legitimate qualms to express about the underwhelming Sotomayor--but the attack on "empathy" was almost perfectly targeted to offend women voters.

- Cultural issues must be handled with caution. There's a lot of conservatism among women voters. They tend to be more pro-life than men, for example. But the kind of "things are going to hell" nostalgia offered nightly on Fox News can backfire mightily among women voters. While some surveys purport to show that women feel less happy today than they did a generation ago, these numbers should not be relied upon too heavily: The methodology of the underlying polls is very far from solid. What we do know is that women voters react against politicians who seem hostile to the social changes of the past 40 years. In the recent Virginia governor's race, for example, Republican Bob McDonnell was battered by negative ads about a very conservative academic thesis he had written 15 years before. He was rescued in part by an ad campaign that showcased his daughter's military service in Iraq.