It’s not just women’s ‘childlessness’ that alarms Vance and his ilk. It’s the fact that many are delaying marriage — or forgoing it altogether.
Senator JD Vance (R-OH) has had a rocky debut as Donald Trump’s running mate, forced to defend comments he made disparaging Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” and agreeing that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” was to care for grandchildren. He has also spent much of the last few weeks backtracking from earlier policy proposals that would have made people without children pay more in taxes and have less of a say in democracy than those who are parents.
His fervent pro-natalist beliefs have been derided as extremist, retro, and just plain “weird.” But Vance is not an outlier. Rather, he is part of a growing movement of conservatives who are in a panic over changing family patterns. And it is not merely the prospect of women’s “childlessness” that alarms Vance and his ilk. It is the fact that many are delaying marriage — or forgoing it altogether.
In the latest season of my podcast, White Picket Fence, we do a deep dive into the present-day marriage panic — why it’s emerging now and why we must take it seriously. For the better part of the past year, we have seen a growing chorus of conservatives wringing their hands over declining marriage rates and proposing marriage as a catch-all solution for all that ails society — a supposed way to promote happiness, mitigate loneliness, and enhance children’s well-being.
Who can object to the value of love and companionship — or the economic benefits that multiple parents can provide to children? But Vance’s political rise shines a light on the extremist ideology and policy agenda that lurks beneath the surface. At its core, the current marriage panic is a panic over the supposed weakening of the forces that compel people into it. And in response, we are seeing a renewed effort to incentivize marriage, punish single parenthood, and block or weaken laws and policies that enhance women’s economic autonomy and control over their family decision-making.
Married people receive more than 1100 rights, benefits, and privileges under federal law. The U.S. tax code has long favored married couples in which one spouse, typically a husband, works, and the other, typically a wife, stays home.
Project 2025, the conservative manifesto touted as the policy blueprint for a second Trump administration, calls for policymakers to employ a wide array of levers to “elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.” Essentially, it’s a call to increase the considerable economic advantage that marriage already provides.
Married people receive more than 1100 rights, benefits, and privileges under federal law. The U.S. tax code has long favored married couples in which one spouse, typically a husband, works, and the other, typically a wife, stays home. These provisions reinforce and perpetuate gender inequity, by discouraging married women from working, and racial inequity, by disproportionately rewarding white families whose structures, as scholar Dorothy A. Brown documents, are “most likely to fit its mold.”
As a complement to these efforts to incentivize marriage, Vance and his brand of social conservatives have worked to thwart the kinds of public investments in child care, elder care, and paid family leave — investments that Vice President Harris has leaned into in the early days of her presidential campaign.
When then-Senate candidate Vance tweeted that “universal day care is a class war against normal people,” he was attempting to mock child care as a preference of supposedly “elite,” dual-earner families, even though it’s poor single mothers who would benefit most from increased public support. Research has demonstrated the way that the U.S.’s lack of investment in child care and other public goods constitutes a “penalty” to single-parent families.
What spooks conservatives about a care agenda is that it would increase economic security for everyone, not just married people. And in doing so, it would provide women with greater freedom in how they structure their families. This fear of women’s freedom is also evident in the growing conservative effort to roll back no-fault divorce laws — legislation that has been proposed in four states and is an official plank in the Texas Republican Party’s platform. No-fault divorce emerged in the late 1960s as a way to simplify the divorce process and make it less legally contentious. But its women, overwhelmingly, have taken advantage of the more streamlined process, initiating more than two-thirds of all divorces.
When Vance derides people who “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” he is disproportionately taking aim at women and implying that it is they who are to blame for the “breakdown” of the American family. When he opines about the value of sticking it out in chaotic, and even violent marriages, he minimizes the very real threats to women’s safety. No-fault divorce has been associated with reduced rates of domestic violence, domestic homicide, and women’s suicide.
Their highly amplified rhetoric is producing some notable rapid shifts in public opinion, including a seven and five point rise in people who believe that single mothers and cohabitation, respectively, are bad for society.
Just as with the overturning of Roe, women’s health and safety is viewed as collateral damage in the conservative effort to resurrect a 1950s style of “traditional” family life. In many respects, this pro-marriage positioning is a familiar retread of the “family values” rhetoric that conservatives have been spouting for decades. But this time around, their highly amplified rhetoric is producing some notable rapid shifts in public opinion, including a seven and five point rise in people who believe that single mothers and cohabitation, respectively, are bad for society.
With a cohering policy agenda and support at the highest levels of the Republican party, the once fledgling marriage promotion agenda could soon become turbocharged, resulting in even greater economic disparities between married and unmarried Americans and real constraints on people’s ability to build the kinds of relationships and families that they desire.
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