I guess that's why they call it the "nanny state"

Women's vote started the free world on the road to big government and social micromanaging.

(...says Some Guy, who's got some kind of degree in something and has written a book...)

In your book, you discuss a correlation between granting women the right to vote and the growth of government -- could you explain?

John Lott: There's been a puzzle that's been around academics for decades about why government started to grow when it did. From the beginning of the country to the 1920s, the federal government had been about 2 to 3 percent of GNP. You'd have a war sometimes and it would go up. After the war was over, government would go back down to where had been previously. But it began to grow through the 20s and the 30s and 40s.

You see a phenomenon that's true around the world, during about 50 years of time in which government began to grow. I've noticed from looking around at these countries that the government growth seemed to coincide with when women were given the right to vote in these places.

I looked at where women were given right to vote in the United States from the first state in 1868 to the last state in 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. One of the interesting things here is that some states voluntarily gave women the right to vote, and some were forced to because of the 19th Amendment. ...Is it the fact that you gave women the right to vote that caused the government to grow, or is it that the state was more liberal and wanted to give women the right to vote at the same time they wanted government to get bigger?

The fact that you see this growth in the states that voluntarily gave women the right to vote before the ones that were forced to indicates that it was giving women the right to vote and not just some other factor changing at the same time.

The effect is dramatic. If you look at 10 years prior to when a state gives women the right to vote, you find expenditures and revenues were flat. Once women were given the right to vote, the next year you see an increase in government expenditures. It keeps going up dramatically. In 10 years, government expenditures and revenue doubled in real terms. That growth follows closely with the percent of voters who were women.

After that you basically get to the 1960s, and what happens then is you have a big increase in divorce, and divorce tends to make women a lot more liberal than they were previously. They are more likely to depend on the government for some safety net or protection. We see this in how women's political views change over a lifetime.

Young single women are more liberal than young single men. When they get married, about half that gap disappears. When they have kids, about half of the remaining gap disappears, so about 75 percent of the original gap. If they get divorced, they become much more liberal than they were to begin with. Men pretty much stay in the same place all their life.

When a woman is on her own, she's more likely to support a more progressive income tax. But if she gets married and has kids, she's more likely to oppose those sorts of taxes. There would be similar changes to other types of social programs. Women tend to be more risk averse and more likely to turn to the government for these government programs.

The discussion about divorce is itself driven a lot by government. One of the big changes we had in the 1960s and 1970s was the movement from at-fault to no-fault divorce. When you had at-fault divorce, women were much more protected. If a man wanted to get a divorce, he had to get the wife to agree to a divorce. He had to pay her off, and give her more assets to get her to agree. So her investment in maybe staying home a lot and taking care of the family were much more likely to be protected than they are now.

Now when you have no-fault, if a man wants to get a divorce, the woman almost has to pay him in order to stay in the relationship. Many women are more reticent to stay at home and take care of kids. In this case, they have a big incentive to (work) in case there is a divorce later on-they can have a job and an income they can depend on. Not only do these (divorce) laws, explain why women become more liberal, but they also explain why women are having fewer kids.