The Sources of Our Discontent

On Happiness, Feminism, and Grandmothers

Well, I promised you a newsletter this month, and here is one, just under the wire. I had hoped to get this out yesterday, but the plague has descended on our house, and I didn’t want to send this out until my fever broke, and I could be quite certain I had written nothing in my delirium that I would regret. My hope is to get back to the regular newsletter schedule next week, but that will depend on the plague lifting from my husband and children. Either way, I’m looking forward to lots more newsletters in the months ahead. Being able to write here and share with you really is one of the great joys in my life, and I am so grateful to those of you who make this possible by being full subscribers. (And if you’re not already a full subscriber, today is a great day to become one. 😁)

P.S. I tried recording an audio version three times, but the plague is not letting me get through it, so this month, it’s print only. Sorry!

Over the past month, while I’ve been packing and unpacking boxes, the Catholic Internet has been fighting about happiness. More specifically, it’s been fighting about the happiness of our grandmothers (which apparently was greater than ours) and asking if women today would be as happy as our grandmothers were if we traded in our college degrees, voting rights, and pants for an apron and sourdough.

As I’ve watched from my box strewn sidelines, I’ve had a few thoughts, but no time to share.

This week, I have time.

Before I share, though, I want to make note of a few things.

First, happiness is a concept that can change as cultures change. How we understand happiness is not necessarily how our grandmothers did, and comparing their answers to questions about happiness to our answers can, at times, resemble comparing apples to oranges. Any helpful discussion on this topic has to take that into account.

Second, I am pretty sure both my grandmothers would have eaten their hats before telling a stranger that they were anything less than “very happy.” Confessional culture didn’t exist in 1972, when the data collection for the study at the heart of this fight began, and back then, far fewer women than today would have thought it proper to confess their unhappiness to a pollster. We can take the data as it stands, but I’m inclined to take it with a great big grain of sea salt.

Third and finally, we need to acknowledge that the most contentious conclusion drawn by some—that all women would be happier if we gave up paying work and worked only for our families— isn’t backed up by the actual numbers in the study being talked about.

According to the data, which started being collected in 1972 as part of the General Social Survey, the number of American women who claim to be “very happy” or “pretty happy” has declined across the board—for women who work and women who stay home, for women with college degrees and women without them, for married women and single women, for those who are mothers and those who aren’t. The only women who don’t show a marked decline in happiness are black women. Meaning, unless we’re black, we are all less happy than our grandmothers were (statistically speaking). Likewise, while married women with children are the most likely to describe themselves as “very happy” and “pretty happy,” there is currently no statistical difference between the happiness of mothers who remain in the home and those who are employed outside the home, so professional careers are not the happiness killer that some on the Catholic interwebs think they are.

But the Insta argument over women working or not working was really just a rabbit hole, a diversion from the larger point that Carrie Gress (in her new book, The End of Woman) and others have made about the data: that feminism has not delivered happiness for women, that, in fact, it has delivered unhappiness, leaving the women raised according to its tenets unhappier and less well off than our grandmothers.

That’s the real question at hand. Has feminism made women unhappy? Has it sold us a bill of goods and not delivered? Gress says yes. She also says the whole project was rotten from the start, that the goal of feminism was never simply equal rights for women, but rather the eradication of women. Or, more accurately, the flattening of women, the elimination of all that makes us unique from men.

I said I had time this week, but I don’t have limitless time, so today I mostly want to focus on the happiness question: is feminism to blame for women’ declining happiness? But I do want to first briefly address the question of feminism as a whole.