Here’s a fun item to get your blood moving on this chilly morning (scroll down to “Let’s have grandchildren”):
Some studies have found that having more daughters makes people more liberal,” Kevin Lewis reports for The Boston Globe. “The theory is that parents perceive conservative policies as constraining the freedom of women. A new analysis by sociologists at New York University contests this finding. Controlling for gender, religion, age, education and marital status, the analysis indicated that having a higher proportion of daughters relative to sons was associated with being Republican or conservative. The authors of this latest study suggest that conservative policies ‘support the genetic fitness of women by capitalizing on each pregnancy, reducing male promiscuity and increasing paternal investment in children’ and ultimately maximizing the number of grandchildren, despite restricting the freedom of daughters.”
OK. I’ll bite: Aren’t those generally associated with an acute concern for the “genetic fitness” of women more worried about encouraging the “good” pregnancies over the “bad” ones, instead of “capitalizing” on each? Oh, and how is it that a desire to reduce male promiscuity and increasing paternal investment in children is considered bad and restrictive for women? By whom?








“Some studies have found that having more daughters makes people more liberal…”
Yet another study where no one asked the Mrozeks, that’s for sure.
Fancy studies aside, here is a definition of a conservative that was popular at one time:
a conservative is a former liberal whose daughters have become teenagers.