Goodbye, Soccer Mom. Hello, Security Mom

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Women reacted to 9/11 in ways that were both more practical and more profound than men's responses. They were the ones who scrambled to pick up the kids from school that day. They stood in line for bottled water and duct tape, fretted over whether the eighth-grade field trip was worth the risk, wheeled their strollers through security to get to tot swim classes. Polls in the weeks after 9/11 found far more women than men reporting that they were depressed, losing sleep and fearful from the news coverage they had watched. "All the polls showed women feeling much more personally vulnerable, much more personally threatened," says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "I don't want to play to some stereotypes, but it just comes screaming out of all of the data." One result was that women's support for defense spending--even for expensive, untried concepts like a missile-defense system--shot up to levels roughly equal with men's. Another was the doubling in the number of women signing up for the National Rifle Association's courses on how to handle a gun. Those behaviors were new.

Even today, the disparity in anxiety level between the two sexes continues. In last week's TIME/CNN poll, for instance, a healthy majority of men said they were more fearful about an economic downturn than another terrorist attack (56% to 37%); women, on the other hand, were marginally more worried about terrorism (47% to 43%). And 59% of men said they are more concerned about national security than they were before 9/11, but 71% of women are. Among moms with children under 18, the figure is 76%.

All of this doesn't necessarily mean that President Bush has a lock on these women or that there are no opportunities for Democrats. "On all kinds of measures, women are more worried than men," says Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. "They're worried about their personal security, but that doesn't mean soccer moms aren't still concerned about education, health care and social security." The latest TIME/CNN poll indicates that while 63% of Americans continue to approve of the job President Bush is doing overall, only 42% think he's doing enough about unemployment, and just 40% believe he's handling the budget deficit as he should. Kerry Baldwin of Grand Rapids, Mich., says her vote in 2004 will ride on economic issues. "The economy has me much more concerned right now," says Baldwin, who knows many people who were laid off from Steelcase as the Michigan office-furniture company cut thousands of jobs in the past two years. And some are worried about what domestic security measures are doing to the civil liberties that make the U.S. unique. "In some cases, a lot of innocent people have been held without enough facts," says Gena Maddox, a 42-year-old mother of three in Little Rock, Ark.