These notes suggest the powerful interest that the delegates had in protecting their future descendants. Detailed notes from the Philadelphia convention show a number of references to delegates’ children or general posterity. While there were many different motivations that influenced behavior and voting in the Convention, family life was an important factor. “Gender effects change over time, but they play a much bigger role in politics than we think they do.” “Gender is important wherever you are in history,” Pope said. The study found that fathers who had more sons were more likely to vote for a stronger national government than fathers of daughters, who wanted a weaker national government with greater state authority. Applying that knowledge to historical politics, BYU professor of political science Jeremy Pope studied the delegates of the Constitutional Convention and how the gender of their children influenced their voting. Several studies have suggested that child gender affects parental behavior in the realm of modern law and policy. New BYU research published in the American Journal of Political Science suggests that when it came to drafting the Constitution, these family dynamics played a larger role than many people have realized. Many of America’s Founding Fathers were fathers of more than just a new nation: they were also literal fathers of sons and daughters.
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