Why does happiness elude modern women?
By: Meghan Cox Gurdon
Examiner Columnist | 5/27/09 5:56 PM
Over the last four decades, American women have got almost everything the feminist movement promised. Lucky us! Are we happy now?
No, we are not. All across the industrialized world, wherever egalitarian feminism has sprinkled its fairy dust, women report that they are considerably less happy and satisfied with life then were their benighted, patriarchy-oppressed, apron-wearing sisters of yore.
“The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a new study conducted by Wharton academics Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, finds that the happiness of Western women has been steadily declining over the exact period during which egalitarian feminism has supposedly been delivering the goods.
Given the shifts “of rights and bargaining power from men to women in the past 35 years, holding all else equal, we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness towards women and away from men,” the authors write.
However, they have found, “measures of women’s subjective well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively to that of men.”
How can this be? After all, didn’t feminism achieve what it wanted? Women are today not just free to pursue education, but now actually outnumber men on university campuses.
Women are not simply going out to work, but are in a position to exude wisdom and empathy from the highest levels of government and commerce.
Women are not only able to control their fertility, as radical feminists demanded, but today girls too young to vote are considered old enough to prescribe themselves the morning-after pill.
And it turns out that all this success – or “success,” depending on your degree of irony – has not made women happier.
Nor, of course, has it satisfied the ever-complaining feminist-industrial complex so brilliantly mocked by critic Camille Paglia as “a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, apparatchiks, dough-faced party-liners, pie-in-the-sky utopians and bullying sanctimonious sermonizers.”
The study’s authors are cautious about drawing too-hasty conclusions from what they’ve discovered. Coincidence does not automatically miccionan causation. It’s also true that happiness is in some ways a mystical quality. Inner contentment derives not just from how cheerful we may feel but also from our position relative to the opinions and successes of others.
Yet the findings are striking. Before egalitarian feminism came along and substantially rewrote everyone’s ******s – in courtship, job expectations, domestic satisfaction, purpose in life -- women reported greater contentment than men.
Today, those positions are reversing. “A new gender gap is emerging,” conclude Stevenson and Wolfers, “one with higher subjective well-being for men.”
(The authors note the perverse effects of the sensual revolution sought by feminists: Men “may have been able to disproportionately benefit” from the “increased opportunities” yielded by the spreading social acceptance of children born out of wedlock, the use of birth control, abortion, and divorce.)
To conservative critics of feminism, and indeed to dissident feminists like Paglia, none of this will be remotely surprising.
The anecdotal experience of millions, along with the analysis by women such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Mary Eberstadt, Danielle Crittenden, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and Kay Hymowitz, all confirm what the Wharton academics discovered: Far from enhancing the lives of modern women, in many respects the feminist movement has diminished women’s happiness and satisfaction.
“The increased opportunity to succeed in many dimensions may have led to an increased likelihood of believing that one’s life is not measuring up,” Stevenson and Wolfers write.
“Similarly, women may now compare their lives to a broader group, including men, and find their lives more likely to come up short in this assessment. Or women may simply find the complexity and increased pressure in their modern lives to have come at the cost of happiness.”
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
Women are more unhappy despite 40 years of feminism, claims study
Women are less happy nowadays despite 40 years of feminism, a new study claims.
Despite having more opportunities than ever before, they have a lower sense of well-being and life satisfaction, it found.
The study, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, said the same was true for women of different ages and whether or not they were married or had children.
It said the results appeared surprising given that modern women had been liberated from their traditional 1950s role of housewife.
Instead, their earning power has soared, women are doing better than men in education and they are in control of decisions over whether to start a family.
The findings were released as Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Marks & Spencer, claimed that women 'have never had it so good'.
Insisting neither gender nor motherhood is now a barrier to career to success, he said: 'You've got real democracy and there really are no glass ceilings, despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time.
'Women can get to the top of any single job that they want to in the UK.
'You've got a woman fighter pilot who went on to join the Red Arrows.. Women astronauts. Women miners. Women dentists. Women doctors. Women managing directors. What is it you haven't got?'
Sir Stuart's comments in The Observer were contradicted by Dr Katherine Rake of The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for gender equality.
She said there was still 'no flexibility' for women at high levels of business.
'Women tend to have greater commitments at home and so need flexible working arrangements,' she said.
'While some organisations are prepared to enable this at less senior levels, many will not at the top.
'Second, there is no change at the top. Because the top of organisations are generally white and male, they stay white and male.'
The study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research found that while post-war era happiness surveys found women were noticeable happier than men, the difference had eroded to 'zero'.
Its authors, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania, found that in the U.S., women's happiness had fallen 'both absolutely and relatively to that of men'.
In Europe, they found people's sense of happiness has risen slightly, but less so for women than for men.
In 12 European countries, including Britain, the happiness of women has fallen relative to that of men.
The authors said there was a possibility women were more 'direct' about their levels of happiness than they used to be.
'Women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and have thus deflated their previously inflated responses,' they said.
However, Siobhan Freegard, founder of the website Netmums, whose own survey found levels of 'baby blues' have risen sharply compared to 30 years ago, said: 'We pushed so hard for equal rights, for having the right to work, for having equal status, we pushed so hard to have choice.
'But what we hear from many mums is: I have no choice, I have to work, I don't love my career, my childminder is taking half my salary and I'd rather bring up my children myself but I can't afford to.
'If you enjoy your job and it's a fulfilling career, that is a positive choice.. but if it's not, it's almost in some ways that we got it all, then found that actually it wasn't quite what we wanted.'
Erin Pizzey, founder of the charity Refuge, added: 'The hard-won freedom of choice has imprisoned women. I just see an exhausted generation trying to do it all.'
