The Political Consequences of Motherhood

Notes

235 Notes Chapter One 1. Though many political attitudes are largely stable after early adulthood, there is evidence that the events that typically structure the life of an individual can drive attitudinal change across a variety of dimensions. Thus, attitudinal change is possible even after the impressionable years. 2. Parenthood also alters levels of marital satisfaction (Belsky 1985; McLanahan and Adams 1987; Nomaguchi and Milkie 2003). 3. The parenting experience and the impact of parenthood on one’s political views are a product of one’s circumstances and one’s intersectional identity. While I do not explore all of these points of variation in this book, I acknowledge that they are important to understand. Chapter Two 1. The Republican Party was the strongest advocate of gender equality prior to 1940, but by the 1980s, the Democratic Party was the sole ally of feminists (Wolbrecht 2000; Sanbonmatsu 2002). 2. Alphonso (2010; 2011) thinks of these two uses of family as “hearth” and “soul.” Hearth refers to the conception of family as an economic unit that benefits from progressive policies. Soul refers to an ideology of family as a natural, self-regulating, and moral unit. She argues that while the Democratic Party made primary use of the soul perspective on family during the Progressive Era and the Republican Party emphasized the hearth perspective, the parties have swapped approaches. Today, the Republican Party relies heavily on the soul framework of family, with its emphasis on small government, and the heterosexual family unit as a vehicle for moral values. The Democratic Party, while making use of a different conception of family as a moral unit, relies more heavily on the hearth perspective as it advocates for policies that help families through governmental programs . 3. In 1964, moral activists achieved a foothold within the Republican Party and began a process of reorienting the party as a whole (Rymph 2006). This initi- 236 notes to pages 13–17 ated a movement toward moral discourse within the party, which was complete by 1980. 4. For example, discourse around welfare that emphasized the need to have intact traditional nuclear families is an example of a moral use of family though the policy itself is connected to economic needs. 5. Alphonso finds that the focus on the family is high during this period, but I distinguish a family focus from a motherhood focus because in the former, women are not always central to the discourse. In the latter, they are. 6. I use the term frame to refer to “the words, images, phrases, and presentation styles that a speaker uses when relaying information to another” such that “the frame that the speaker chooses may reveal what the speaker sees as relevant to the topic at hand” (Druckman 2001, 227). When a candidate uses an appeal with a “motherhood frame,” the candidate communicates that motherhood, mothering, or mothers are relevant to the political issue discussed. For example, appeals to women about war may have a motherhood frame because they tie a mother’s loss or a mother’s pride to the discussion of war. Note that this use of frames is more general than Gamson’s (1992) “issue frames,” which are “alternative definitions, constructions, or depictions of a policy problem” (Nelson and Oxley 1999, 1041). My use of frames merely sets forth an issue such that motherhood is at minimum relevant to an issue, and at most, at the core of an issue. Frames are important because they have the potential to prime or make salient considerations that may in turn shape political attitudes (Zaller 1992). As such, the use of a motherhood frame in a political appeal about war could make considerations connected to motherhood (such as protecting one’s child from harm) more salient in the formation of an attitude towards war. 7. The New York Times newspaper coverage of the campaign was gathered in a systematic way (collecting every article that used the words “woman/women” and “campaign” and the name of one of the two major presidential candidates that was published during September and October before the election), and analyzed qualitatively. The New York Times is an appropriate primary media source for this project because of its historic and continued prominence. 8. This analysis does not represent a comprehensive investigation of primary sources in all presidential libraries, nor the archives that hold the materials of challengers. Rather, some primary materials were obtained from electronic archives , such as the American Presidency project at UC Santa Barbara, the...