Much has been made of a study which claims that feminist women are less happy than non-feminist women, and that women of all ideologies are happier in more traditional relationships. I’ve been hesitant to write about this one, because so many of the reviews of it have been so simplistic and silly. But this Slate article is quite good:
What’s really going on here? The conservative explanation, of course, is that the findings suggest that women don’t know what they really want (as John Tierney implied in the New York Times, and Charlotte Allen suggested in the Los Angeles Times). Feminism, they argue, has only undermined the sturdy institution of marriage for everyone.
Which, of course, is bullshit — individual women want what they want. There isn’t a universal key to happiness (and if there is, I don’t think John Tierney will be the one to give it to us). No one ever asks, “What do men want?” because men, we recognize, are diverse individuals with differing values, desires, needs and goals. I’m sure if they did similar exhaustive studies on men, they would find that particular classes of men were less happy than others. Ok. But I doubt anyone would be using that as “evidence” that there’s a single way of life that is best for all men, or that a particular ideology has led them all astray.
What is left out of both lines of argument are the strange ways that rising expectations play into happiness. The sexual revolution tried to free women and men from set-in-stone roles. But the irony turns out to be that having a degree of certainty about what you want (and being in a peer group that feels the same way) is helpful in making people happy. Having more choices about what you want makes you less likely to be happy with whatever choice you end up settling on. Choosing among six brands of jam is easy. But consumers presented with 24 types often leave the supermarket without making a purchase. In much the same way, the more you scrutinize a relationship, the more likely you are to find fault with it. The study’s authors, W. Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock, speculate that fault-finding on the part of wives makes it hard for men to do the emotional work that stabilizes marriages. Meanwhile, traditionalist women—a significant portion of whom are Christian—expect less emotional work from their husbands, Wilcox and Nock speculate, which makes it easier for them to shake off frustrations, and less likely to nag. Whether or not any of this is the case, we do know that traditional marriages have the advantage of offering clearly defined roles. And traditionalist wives have a peer group fundamentally in agreement about what it wants and expects from husbands, creating a built-in support system.
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