Many people understand, at least on some level, that gender and family structure play pervasive roles in American politics. Political scientists have documented, for example, how women tend to vote for more progressive policies and candidates than men do, and how marriage tends to correlate with more conservative preferences among both genders. And of course some family effects go beyond gender, such as the electoral boost of coming from a brand-name political family.
But the shape of American politics might owe far more to gender and family structure than is broadly realized. In our research into the Constitutional Convention of 1787, we recently discovered that these factors might have molded the institutional design laid out in the Constitution itself: The more sons a Founding Father had, the more that Founder supported a stronger, more centralized federal government; the more daughters, the less he did so.
It’s no secret that when the U.S. Constitution was first drafted, only men were in the room. That undoubtedly affected the document’s final form, but, though we might wonder how things might have gone had women occupied seats at the Philadelphia convention, speculation is the best we can do.
We do, however, have information on another way that gender seems to have mattered to the delegates at the convention: whether they had sons or daughters.
In the modern context, political scientists have observed that legislators and judges with more daughters tend to vote and rule in favor of women’s issues significantly more than their counterparts with more sons. We have no reason to believe that those sorts of effects are limited to the present day. The politics of the late 18th century were far different from ours, to be sure, but also far more defined by the rigid gender norms of the period.
As a result, political elites like the Framers would necessarily have had sharply divergent expectations for their children. Sons, by convention, inherited virtually all of the economic and political power of their fathers. These sons would have been expected to someday go on to hold public offices and be in other positions of authority. Daughters, by contrast, would have been expected to marry and remain at home to raise children. They might have gone on to exercise some (occasionally powerful) influence through their social networks, but that influence would have been informal and local. No American woman held federal office until Jeannette Rankin of Montana was elected to Congress in 1916.