March is Women's History Month. This is of most urgent interest, I'd guess, to middle school essayists, public television, and designers of educational posters.
However, thinking of the occasion did inspire me to browse my collection of yellowed "second-wave" feminist paperbacks, from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I bought most of them at used book stores in grad school. "Vaginal Politics," "Sappho was a Right-On Woman," essays such as Down with Sexist Upbringing, How to Freak out the Pope, The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies, We Are the Crazy Lady, I Want a Wife and How to Write Your Own Marriage Contract.
They feel like political antiques to me. Were feminists really this non-defensive and audacious, willing to churn up the foundations of their lives to follow the idea? It's hard to imagine in the less hospitable climate today when, among other things, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey proposes that we end the imagined abortion gravy train by reworking the definition of rape to exclude the date raped, drugged and unconscious.
You come across a lot of goals in this literature: autonomy, power, self-determination, equality, integrity, shackle-breaking, bra-burning and man-leaving.
The one thing you don't see is this: happiness.
It doesn't feature in the more mainstream documents, such as NOW's 1968 "Bill of Rights" for women, which spends no time on the Pursuit of Happiness, focusing instead on women's "control, dignity, self-respect, privacy," and the realization of their "full potential."
Happiness doesn't feature in the more radical agendas either, such as the New York Radical Feminists manifesto, which prescribed that women construct "healthy, independent, assertive" alternative selves, and lives. Robin Morgan saw liberation as an "oppressed people raising their consciousness toward something that is the other side of anger, something bright and smooth and cool." But not happy, per se.
Happiness isn't just a rare word. It wasn't feminism's backbeat or its implied manifesto, either.
Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," Surely there are many women in America who are happy at the moment as housewives. But happiness is not the same thing as the aliveness of being fully used."
Friedan's distinction was only amplified when feminism gained momentum in the early 1970s. Coming out of the new left crucible and student protests, it was a movement of subversion, dissent, resistance and struggle.
Over time, however, the prime directive of feminism seemed to get inflected from power to happiness, such that today, when individual women find themselves struggling with the opportunities that feminism secured (and we've all had that struggle at some point), they become walking indictments of feminism. "You see," the line goes, "feminism didn't make women happy, after all."
Part of the power-to-happiness inflection was the spirit of the times. By the mid-1970s, America was strung out on rage, and looked inward toward the I'm OK, You're OK, self-improvement, physical fitness mood. Maybe I've not revolutionized the world, but at least I can have awesome glutes.
Feminists themselves contributed to the inflection, as well. In the 1970s, they embraced the choice rhetoric, as abortion became the anchor of feminist politics, for better or worse. On the one hand, choice describes 20 brands of toothpaste. On the other hand, it describes the cause that liberals have taken thousands of political casualties to defend. Choice pairs the politically monumental with the rhetorically puny.
Since then, the choice-happiness faux agenda has grown stronger. "Wasn't feminism all about women having choices?" Not really. But you hear this rejoinder, for example, when feminists worry about women who "opt out" of career for childrearing. Linda Hirshman deftly challenges this notion of what she calls "choice feminism." Together, choice and happiness essentially re-privatize the personal realm that feminists worked so hard to open to political scrutiny (as they had to, because that's where so much of the struggle for women's lives was happening, and still happens).
In 2006 Bradford Wilcox published research that measured wives' marital happiness. He concluded that a "traditional" model of primary male breadwinning made women happier. The media gobbled it up. "Desperate Feminist Wives: Why Wanting Equality Makes Women Unhappy," Slate summarized à la mode.
The research itself was more complicated. Another researcher reviewed Wilcox's data, and found that a large number of variables that measured traditionalism in the marriage accounted for a mere three percent of the variance in wives' marital happiness, while two variables that measured a "husband's emotion work" had an explanatory power over 17 times larger.
But, more to the point, the headlines blame feminism for not achieving a goal that wasn't feminism's to begin with. It's like saying pole vaulting has failed to solve the healthcare crisis.
A larger happiness preoccupation in our culture only amplifies things. Happiness almost rivals food as a nonfiction topic. I suspect that there's something compensatory about both genres. The less happy and culinarily-fulfilled we are, the more we enjoy reading about happiness and food.
I like happiness. Really, I do. The pursuit of happiness and books about it aren't the issue.
But it's just not the feminist issue. To paraphrase a feminist canard, circa 1968: Feminists needed happiness like a fish needs a bicycle.
If not by a metric of happiness, then how do we gauge the emotional legacy of second-wave feminism in our lives? I'm not talking about the vast policy and legal victories that are easy enough to tally, but the emotional legacy.
Maybe a fairer metric would be "aliveness" over happiness, to recall Friedan, or a feeling of self-determination. You might not be happy but at least your life will be your own, which is a kind of peace. The better life isn't necessarily the happier one; the most happy life isn't necessarily the most fulfilling one.
Or maybe the point of feminism was to make the Aristotelian choice of virtue over happiness. Or, that you have the emotional pride of being someone who "represents," in the sense of being a good role model and standing up for your people, whether or not that makes you happy. Chances are it won't. Who knows, years later, you might experience a deferred happiness, inspired by the proud memory that you did it.
Other possible metrics: Did you have power? Did you contentedly exhaust yourself using up all of your talents and potential? Were you occasionally brave when you would have preferred the convenience of capitulation, silence or appeasement? Did you expand your imagination about how men and women could live? Did you enlarge your sympathies, become empathetic? Did you model a spirit of possibility for your children, however that could be achieved?
I pull out Gloria Steinem's 1973 essay, Sisterhood, from my private archive. She wrote, "I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words."
Cool. That beats happy any day.
Feminism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Women, feminism, and happiness - The Week
Are You Only as Happy as Your Spouse?
He's Happier, She's Less So - New York Times
Women's Happiness More Recession Proof Than Men's | Nielsen Wire
-Bonnie Leonard, EdD, CLC
What makes wimmin happy are specifically non-feminist things (eg competent husbands) --according to whatever study.
(FYI, feminist social engineering and "competent husbands" can't happen at the same time. Just trust me. Only by torturing definitions and inventing santa clause cult --christendom/liberalism/democracy/blank slate-ism-- will that be untrue.)
BTW I understand the article and agree that feminism never promised you a rose garden, therefore lack of one should not be the measuring stick used to decide whether "feminism" did its job or not. And two I hope feminism makes wimmin unhappy.
I simply assert that the commentators don't get stuff. (And that is all part of santa cult.)
I think more today than ever young girls can grow up feeling that they have the option to be whatever they want to be, according to their talent. So, when they attain their goals it's not constantly groundbreaking (eg, "the first female fill-in-the-blank"). It's just them reaching a personal goal and perhaps having an opportunity to then revel in the accomplisment. Believe me, men have enjoyed this comfort a long time. Regardless of political leaning, think of Bill Clinton, white male. Regardless of what you thought of his presidency, was there any doubt that the guy loved being President? He was clearly happy to have attained that place. He wasn't being used as a yardstick for a whole race or gender. It was just him.
So, sadly what I'm opining is that many successful women today are not only not reaching personal happiness, but maybe never will. They are, however, paving that route for future generations who will be both happy and successful.
But I would argue that earlier generation feminists have to remember that this "3rd generation" grew up under very different world circumstances. I'd be surprised if the current generation did see things the same as those before.
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1996fall/f96hoffman.php
Revolutions are not for fun. Which is not to say that one cannot or should not have some or even a great deal of fun while in them. The idea that the continuing feminist revolution was and is about making individual women happy and fulfilled is a continuing error. If some feminists involved in the movement were personally unhappy but the movement achieved even some of its goals of freeing women from violence, oppression, and the tragedies of half-lived lives, it would be a success.
Anything that encourages or excuses us from being less than all we can be IS a feminist issue.
The authors mentioned didn't have the opportunity to read the results of our research, the Happiness Blog or explored the Happiness Habit. Here's our definition of a happy life:
A Happy Life Is:
Pleasant & Pleasing
Purposeful & Productive
Prosperous - meaning whatever you're working on is bearing positive rewards
& Spiritually Successful - meaning living by the highest and best values.
Why would any woman not aspire to these goals? The fact that they were not mentioned prominently in feminist literature does NOT mean they are unimportant or inconsequential.
Michele Moore - HappinessHabit.com - HappinessBlog.com
Happiness is achieved in part by removing what impairs it. That approach to happiness is predicated on the notion that we spontaneously tend to happiness when allowed to blossom freely. But whether it is "aliveness" or "contentment" that defines happiness will depend on individual temperament. One thing is clear: discontented women cannot be happy, whether they are complacent or ambitious.
Feminism was never an end in itself, but a socio-political movement of consciousness raising that aimed to level the playing field and empower women. Its initiatives were undertaken in order to remove reasons for discontent (discrimination). Feminism was in this sense a search for greater happiness from the beginning. Women felt they were not flourishing as they had the promise of doing. What's needed is a distinction between the proximate and ultimate goals.
It makes sense that once women made their professional advances the focus would change from political to moral-spiritual ideals. That reflected in part the correction to the movement made from within by women who's self-esteem was not dependent upon the kind of driving ambition to prove themselves that the movement encouraged. It reflected a growing need to integrate diverse voices into the chorus of women.
Because when you force someone to do what makes you happy nether you or they will find it. They will long to do what they truly want and you will be upset that they are not happy. So feminism had it right when it came to helping those women that found happiness in things that were off limits to them. It failed miserably in trying to make women into men. It failed when it judges women that find happiness in being a housewife as less worthy.
power or control over your life and your being are real, can be objectively measured and observed at least by certain standards, and is not a state of mind but a state of being.
Americans put too much stock in their transitory moods and their temporal conditions without examining the foundation of their being - the freedom of action, word, and thought.
stop worrying about being "happy" and get liberated! it will ultimately lead you to a higher and more sustained feeling of "happiness" that you can control instead of having your mood shaped by others.
All the other things, like happiness, freedom and choice stem from this one monumental goal. I think the 2nd wavers understood this. The third wavers don't seem to have a clue.
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You inadvertantly nailed the problem your essay circles around.
The reality is, fish don't need bicycles. In fact, fish have no use for bicycles and no desire for bicycles.
But happiness is a fundamental desire for all human beings - whether they're feminists or not.
Feminists have had a tough struggle to get the equality they deserve in our society. Without such equality, happiness is really hard to find. All oppressed groups desire equality for that very reason.
But once the yoke is thrown off, people are still people. And people want to be happy. Freedom, autonomy, equality don't make people happy. They just create the conditions where people can pursue happiness undistracted by someone else's oppressive agenda.
So now it's 2011, and guess what? Fish still don't need bicycles...but feminists really do need happiness, just like everyone else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYQZSDOWwww