Voting, Voter Registration, and Motherhood: Challenging the Dichotomous Parenting Variable

• In Event: 1283 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 12. Families and Social Institutions

Abstract

Quantitative academic work on the “motherhood shift” has defined two categories of women in regards to parenting: non-mother and mother. This understanding does not match the cultural reality of expectations placed on women as they enter motherhood.
Using Arnold van Gennep’s language of liminal stages, I examine how social forces affect women during the transition to motherhood. A liminal stage is a step of transition when one leaves a social category in a move toward another. Putting this theory in the context of motherhood, we could consider a woman’s first pregnancy to be a socially-observed liminal stage of transition between non-motherhood and motherhood in which a woman experiences different social expectations than she has or will face as a "non-mother" or as a "mother." Current academic quantifications of motherhood as a dichotomy miss this potentially important stage.
Yet much value is placed upon this understanding in answering empirical questions, such as for which presidential candidate a particular demographic will vote. In order to ascertain what empirical value a dichotomous theorization of motherhood may have, my paper relies on the existing literature which consistently finds that mothers vote less than non-mothers.
In this paper, I find that women who are experiencing their first pregnancy are quantitatively different from the non-mothers with whom they are usually categorized through an examination of the process of voting and voting behavior. Additionally, I find that much of this difference happens on the level of voter registration, rather than on the level of voting, meaning that the suggested answers as to why mothers vote less than mothers may be inaccurate. Overall, I conclude that a dichotomous understanding of motherhood is not representative of lived experience or even of statistically represented experience, and I call for research on parenthood to shift to a transitional understanding of parenthood.

Author

• Abigail Jorgensen, University of Notre Dame