Gender, culture wars and 1996 presidential election : how are they interwound?

On February 13, 1997, Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority gave a talk at the National Press Club in Washington D. .C Reflecting back the presidential election of the previous year, she commented as follows: How sweet it is…finally at the end of the 20th century…women's votes have made the difference in the election of the United States President. If only men voted, Bob Dole would be president today. What the suffragists had envisioned at the turn of the centu巧hasnow happened at the end of the century. Women are influencing with their votes the agenda of the nation. The 1996 presidential election was marked by an 11 point gender gap with 54% of women and 43% of men voting in favor of Bill Clinton. This was the largest ever recorded in American history. The gender gap, the differences in voting behavior between men and women, has been fomented in the women's struggle over the Equal Rights Amedment (ERA) in the 70's and fortified by the abortion issues in the 80's. Although rather alien to the Japanese political situation, it has been the determing factor of the outcome in many elections for U.S. Senators, members of Congress and Governors in the past two decades. Accordingly, the emergence of the gender gap is closely related to the culture wars between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party. It is, indeed, no coincidence that the gender gap in voting emerged first in the presidential election of 1980, when the Republican Party platform and its presidential candidate, Donald Regan, came out against ERA and legalized abortion. As the New Right overwhelmingly dominated the Republican Party in the 80's and 90's, and the cultural issues such as abortion, ERA has become the adamant bipartisan issues, a large number of women swept from the Republican to the Democrat Party, making the gender gap in voting even more visible. The two presidential elections held in the 90's under these political environments of culture wars exhibited highly peculiar scenes in the American political world. It was in these presidential elections in which the cultural issues had first become the political agenda determining the outcome of the elections. In the current paper, therefore, an attemp was made to delineate how the political situation of culture wars has affected the victory of William Jefferson Clinton in the presidential election of'96. It is also an attempt to examine why American women could make a difference in national politics at the turn of the century.