Political labels and women's attitudes

Abstract

This thesis is an exploratory study of women's attitudes to political issues. The thesis poses the broad questions of what is the range of women's attitudes to specific issues, what patterns are there to women's attitudes and how well do traditional political categories describe women's attitudes? Attitudes of women to five civil rights or moral policy issues censorship, corporal punishment, the death penalty, abortion and homosexual law reform - are examined and the way women identify themselves in terms of feminism and the left-right spectrum is also discussed. A feminist approach is adopted and focus group interviewing is the methodology which is used for the study. Some of the labels used to describe attitudes to political issues and political identification are discussed. The way the women interpret the labels of left and right and feminism are examined and patterns of self-identification with these political terms are looked at. The attitudes expressed by the women to the five policy issues are categorised according to libertarian, liberal, conservative, neo-conservative, authoritarian or humanitarian labels. The patterns of attitudes and identification are explored. The findings are that diversity and plurality characterise the women's views. Their opinions cover almost the whole range of views on the five issues, they respond differently to the use of the left-right spectrum and the label of feminism, and almost every woman demonstrates an ideological profile which is uniquely her own. There are some similarities among the women, but patterns cannot be easily identified using the traditional political labels. There is also an assessment made of the value of the focus group methodology which has been used rarely in political science. The thesis ends by posing more questions. The adequacy of the liberal and conservative categories for classifying attitudes is raised and there are questions about whether the focus group interview method is gender specific.