Despite a full 15 months left before the next presidential election, we already have an oppressively clear picture of the candidates, and are constantly subjected to the political themes they hope will resonate. For the Democratic frontrunners, the votes of women are crucial. The fact that women tilted only slightly for John F. Kerry in 2004--erasing huge majorities over the preceding three presidential elections--proved fatal.

The angle Democratic candidates are taking is that women lack freedom. According to John Edwards, "Today, too many women are separated from the opportunities of our country because of their gender." Hillary Clinton declares that the Bush "administration has acted to deny freedom to women around the world." The Democratic Party's Web site asserts that, "George W. Bush has said many times that he stands for 'freedom for all Americans' yet his policies and the policies of the Republican Party deny equal rights to women."

The examples we hear usually involve the workplace (women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men) or reproductive rights (Democrats will protect the freedom to have an abortion on demand at any point in a pregnancy, while the Republicans will not). These are mild versions of the more radical arguments, which claim that most of our social institutions--from families to churches--are designed to keep women shackled, and only a radical reordering of American society will set women free.

Freedom is important, of course, because of its relationship to happiness and the quality of life. According to the 2000 General Social Survey (conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center), people who personally feel "complete freedom" or "a great deal of freedom" are three times as likely to say they are very happy than those who say they don't feel free. Freedom over the important elements in our lives provides the control that we need to thrive. And this, of course, should translate into votes.

So how much less free are women than men? Debates between reasonable people rage on this topic, but we seldom stop to ask women how free they actually feel. When we do so, we get a surprise: It is women, not men, who feel the most freedom in America today.

Imagine a man and a woman who are identical in income, education, race, religion, politics, marital status and number of children. According to the General Social Survey, the man will be about 10 percentage points less likely to say he feels personally free than the woman. He will also be 13 points less likely to say that Americans in general are very free.

But there are more surprises. Intuitively, we would assume that the women who say they feel the most freedom should be the ones least encumbered by restrictive social institutions like traditional religion, marriage and family. The survey data indicate otherwise. 32% of women who never attend a house of worship feel less than a great deal of freedom, versus 18% of women who attend every week. And while women with kids do feel slightly less free than those without, married women are 10 percentage points more likely to say they feel free than single women.

Outside the Democratic base, the message of oppression appears to have little resonance. Republican women are seven percentage points likelier than Democratic women to say they feel free. And the mixture of gender and politics makes the freedom difference explode: Democratic men are two-thirds likelier than Republican women (29% to 17%) to say they do not have a great deal of freedom.

Religious faith might explain part of the freedom gap between men and women. Women are a third likelier than men to practice their faith regularly, and when asked about the experiences in their lives that make them feel freest, are nearly twice as likely as men to mention spiritual or religious experiences. That is, many ordinary women define freedom in a very personal, transcendental way--and not with respect to the glass ceilings and abortion rights favored by politicians. In essence, more women than men believe they hold the keys to their own freedom.

We could of course abandon evidence and take refuge in theory, as is the academic fashion. Perhaps, to apply the Marxist concept, American women suffer from "false consciousness." That is, they have been fooled into thinking they are freer than they really are by the material and institutional processes of capitalism. A similar argument is often used to explain why working people don't rise up against the rich folks in a country with increasing income inequality.

Readers can decide for themselves whether women feel freer than men because of their superior spiritual enlightenment, a false consciousness or something else. But either way, it appears most American women still haven't received the Democrats' memo that they aren't free.

Arthur C. Brooks is a visiting scholar at AEI.