What are "women's issues," anyway?

Women (and men) have come a long way since the 19th century, when women stressed their biological uniqueness as an argument for civic participation. They reasoned that their roles as wife and mother made them especially qualified to execute certain tasks and public programs, such as health and education. They weren’t wrong, but that early emphasis served to ghettoize women and confine them to a particular set of issues. Fast forward to the 1960s, and reproductive rights were a natural add-on to the list of women’s concerns. But just as men care what happens to fetuses, especially their own, women care about what happens to the contents of their wallets…

For years, politicians have been proclaiming that all issues are women’s issues. If that maxim is true, then the Democratic Party may want to figure out why its candidate in Virginia only wants to talk about two or three of them.

Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom that the Democratic Party is the women’s party — and the GOP the men’s — may need reconsidering. To be sure, abortion rights have been a segregating factor, but data suggest that the issue is no longer a defining factor for a growing portion of women.