Barbara Ehrenreich is now the latest to weigh in on the Female Happiness Conundrum

October 22, 2009, 9:26 pm

When We’re Equal, We’ll Be Happy

Barbara Ehrenreich is now the latest to weigh in on the Female Happiness Conundrum — the whole cultural brouhaha caused by the news from Wharton School professors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers earlier this year that despite all the objective improvements to their lives over the past four decades, women today appear to be less happy than they were in 1972.

It’s been a hot-button issue, this most recent iteration of Freud’s too-often-repeated question about what women want. The whole declining happiness thing has been spun into an indictment of feminism (the “triumphant: I told you so” as Ehrenreich puts it), sparking an angry response that those who claim women are unhappy post-feminism are nothing more than agents of an anti-woman backlash.

That accusation is often correct. But not necessarily in Stevenson and Wolfers’s case.

Wolfers defended himself in The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog last week, arguing that his and Stevenson’s study isn’t the only one to show declining female happiness since the 1970s. He and Stevenson further admit, in the course of their paper, that their numbers really don’t tell us anything clear about why women now report being more unhappy, only that they do. And whether that increased reporting of lesser happiness actually corresponds to a decline in lived happiness is another question that Stevenson and Wolfers are very open in admitting they can’t answer.

I appreciate this. I tend to have a problem with studies that measure nebulous emotional states and then compare them back to other nebulous states experienced at different moments in time. You learn a lot from them about how people answer surveys, but not so much about how they objectively felt. Happiness, after all, is hard to quantify; you can’t measure it in a blood test, or map it in a mathematical equation corresponding to patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. It also tends to be relative; we judge our happiness, at least in part, against our expectations of how we are supposed to feel and how good we think life is supposed to be.

These inner “supposed”s may well have changed for women since the early 1970s, as Stevenson and Wolfers more or less say, in fancier language. They suggest that the opening up, diversifying and expanding of women’s sphere of existence may have given them more things to potentially be unhappy about: “… the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy.” Entering the world of men may very well have raised the bar of expectations: “If happiness is assessed relative to outcomes for one’s reference group,” they write, “then greater equality may have led more women to compare their outcomes to those of the men around them. In turn, women might find their relative position lower than when their reference group included only women.”

In other words: if you expect less for yourself, you’re easier to please.
The early 1970s was a limiting time for women, but it was also, perhaps, a hopeful time. There was definitely a feeling in the air that women’s lives were changing in a positive way. There was a sense that everything was possible, that life for women was getting better, that if things hadn’t yet come together as well as they should have, they inevitably would. Down the line. Like, today.

Life for women has not come together. That, at least, is the very clear conclusion you have to draw after reading the essays contained in “A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” a book-length report released this week by the Center for American Progress. Despite its cheery-sounding title, the report conveys a bleak portrait of women’s non-progress in our day. The wage gap persists, particularly for mothers, who now earn 73 cents for every man’s dollar. Our workforce and education system is still sex-segregated, operating along generations-old stereotypes that steer most women into low-paid, low-status, low-security professions. Women pay more for health insurance than men, have more extensive health needs than men, and suffer unique forms of discrimination in their coverage. (Women may be denied coverage because they had a Caesarean delivery or were victims of domestic violence — both “preexisting conditions.”) Regardless of the number of hours they work, they continue to do far more caretaking and housekeeping work at home than do their husbands. And discrimination against mothers (but not fathers) in the workplace is all but ubiquitous.

These are not happy-making developments. And they’re not failures of feminism. They are instead indicators of all the ways in which society has failed women, most importantly — and this comes up time and time again, in every section of the report — by failing to address the needs of working families.

“What actually is troubling the American female population?” Susan Faludi asked in her 1991 best-seller “Backlash,” at another moment when much antifeminist hay was being made out of reports of female unhappiness. “In public opinion surveys, women consistently rank their own inequality, at work and at home, among their most urgent concerns.” Eighteen years later, this observation is just as true, and the limitations thrown in the way of women’s progress even more glaring.

“If the women’s movement raised women’s expectations faster than society was able to meet them, they would be more likely to be disappointed by their actual experienced lives,” Stevenson and Wolfers write. “As women’s expectations move into alignment with their experiences, this decline in happiness may reverse.” Let’s hope that’s never the case.

The progress that’s been made toward women’s equality, the many authors of “A Woman’s Nation” consistently assert, have made most people happy. The happiest marriages, the historian Stephanie Coontz reports in a chapter called “Sharing the Load,” are those in which a couple shares egalitarian values. Men in today’s world who have gone with the flow of changing roles and mores, the sociologist Michael Kimmel writes, are healthier, closer to their wives and children, happier and … having more sex. And for more on how more (male) vacuuming equals more sex, see this in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal.

Freedom, opportunity, respect, dignity, self-determination and equality — those universal human rights we somehow judge optional for women — do not make people unhappy. Only roadblocks to those entitlements do. Particularly when those impediments are packaged as what we “really” want.