On the Daily Beast, I had my response to some new GOP polling showing they don’t do so well with women voters. Over at First Things, there was quite a different take on the same study. R.R. Reno writes:

“Thus we have the seemingly odd political instincts of a single, 35-year-old McKinsey consultant living in suburban Chicago who thinks of herself as vulnerable and votes for enhanced social programs designed to protect against the dangers and uncertainties of life. Why would a woman whose 401K already exceeds $1,000,000 and who owns a condo worth almost as much be so concerned to expand public support for in-home care of the elderly? It’s because she’s not married and feels as though she’s going to have to take on all the responsibilities of life on her own—a prospect that is indeed daunting.”

Reno defines this as the dilemma facing social conservatives. He goes on:

“Put somewhat more concretely, the single, 35-year-old woman feels “judged” when I oppose gay marriage, because she intuitively senses that being pro-traditional marriage involves asserting male-female marriage as the norm—and therefore that her life isn’t on the right path. She resents this implication. Her problem, however, is that (statistically speaking) she wants to get married and feels vulnerable because she isn’t and vulnerable because she’s not confident she can. So (by my way of thinking) she needs a pro-marriage culture, but rejects it, or at least rejects the social and political defenses of it.”

There is a conflation of political interests here. The argument flows thus: women who are unmarried vote for welfare programs because they’re vulnerable in that they have no husbands (and thus no husbands’ incomes); therefore they also approve of same sex marriage and so forth, because any emphasis on traditional marriage (even as a substitute for welfare) makes them feel ‘judged’ and renews their feelings of vulnerability.

It appears to me it would be just as easy to say women should oppose same sex marriage because the affirmation of the marital standard would arouse the same feelings of judgement. You can, after all, oppose the ‘couple form‘ altogether. Of course this all takes place in the realm of speculative non-falsifiable stuff, but it’s worth pointing out that the ‘abolish marriage completely’ position has existed at the radical fringes of feminism for a long time, and it has still failed to gain a lot of traction. I doubt, though cannot prove, that large scale single woman support for same sex marriage is linked to self-doubt at women’s own singleness.

But suppose Reno is right about the economics, and women who go for the Dems do so because they have no man in the house, or fear they may not. Suppose that women who vote for social insurance programs do so because they’ve got no husbands, and thus no protection from the uncertainties in life. Reno recommends a pro-marriage culture as the response to this.

But is just having a husband enough to protect women and their families from poverty?

No. This is because at the lowest levels of income — where vulnerability is the most severe – marriage can actually make a woman more vulnerable. As men’s wages at the lowest levels have dropped precipitously, they have become liabilities rather than assets to women in their communities:

“Declines in men’s income for this group also help explain why working-class and poor mothers are not getting and staying married as much as their upscale peers. Because they tend to pair off with men who are similarly situated economically as they are, working-class and poor women are less likely to see the men in their lives as marriageable or worth sticking with. Indeed, the research tells us that men’s income remains a strong predictor of marrying and steering clear of divorce court. So, men’s money still matters when it comes to forming and sustaining today’s marriages and, unfortunately, the eroding economic standing of lower-income men means that they are less likely to be deemed worthy of marriage.”

One way a husband can be a liability is to have so little income and such a precarious job situation (construction, contracting, yadda) that if his work stops, the burden of supporting him pushes the couple or family into poverty. Note that this situation brings with it a cascade of other horrifying factors — a man losing his job can heighten the likelihood that he will perpetrate domestic violence, and domestic violence itself can lock women into a cycle of poverty. Even if a husband keeps his income, supposing it is as low as his wife’s, the meager combination of two very low incomes can still monkey deleteriously with poor couples’ security:

“Our results indicate that two incomes could lift many mothers out of poverty, but, at their current earnings, 46% of unmarried parents would continue to earn below the FPL (not including taxes and transfers) even if they were to marry. This is especially important because the economic benefits of marriage must be weighed against the loss of many means-tested benefits that may result from marriage. With welfare programmes that make it more difficult for two-parent families to obtain support when the market fails, marriage for unmarried couples might mean more rather than less vulnerability.”

(I know, I know: ‘programmes.’ UK authors, but the study is on the USA.) So the point stands: for many women, husbands are not a bulwark against vulnerability; they might even be a further danger. So what do we do about this?

I say we work backwards. Are we nabbing benefits from poor couples due to marriage? Do not do this. Moreover, so much of the general ‘hustling backwards’ problem could be cured with universal programs, like universal healthcare, a child allowance, low cost or free daycare, and so forth. Living wage laws would seem to go a long way as well, judging from the havoc dropping men’s wages seems to have done.  You can get money to people through the market or not; no research I could find considered the outcomes on marriage rates differentiating between the different methods (to be fair, it would be a hard study to conduct.) But this is the right vein of policy to work in: making individuals more secure so that they can enter into life as a couple without increasing their vulnerability. These fixes would suck the air out of the pretty convincing incentives against marriage on the financial end of things for the poorest, most vulnerable couples.

For me, this is the politics of a pro-marriage culture. But it’s not clear how Reno would approach the matter, seeing as he appears to view support for security-producing welfare policies as intimately linked with social liberalism. Though we can see that the social programs of strong welfare states do produce more traditional outcomes in some cases (women in the Netherlands like to stay home with their kids, for instance, and they can) it seems the ideological push to establish a connection between social liberalism and support for social insurance programs is stronger than the push to actually legislate policy that supports pro-marriage cultures.