According to a Huffington Post columnist, women the world over are less happy nowadays than at the start of the Second Wave feminist movement in the US...
Ladies, do you think he has a point, or is he completely off base? If times seem unhappier for women on average, why is this so?
Well, I'm not a "lady," but I've been itching to reply to your post, and since ZeaLitY stepped in, I'm not not gonna! =P
Of course it remains to be seen whether the columnist's claims are actually true, but, if they are--and I would not be surprised if they are--I think we can actually call it a good thing. Why? Because as females gain rights, education, and social standing, they also gain a wider perspective, opening their eyes both to new problems and to the realization of how very far we have yet to go. This is a problem that also affects people with high intelligence and people with liberal convictions. In the process of learning about how the world really is, you're apt to find it most depressing--even if you're highly privileged and have everything going for you, and all the more so if you're not--unless your psychological temperament or specific knowledge of the world is such that you can digest the injustice as a challenge, or else see the big picture arc of our civilization and identify a positive long-term outcome (but not too long-term; victory must remain within sight). Many people can't do that; they get caught up in the misery and the woe, and woe is them.
Sajainta mentioned recently that intelligence and reason can be curses to a slave; I think that's what we're seeing here. The fact of the matter is that sexism is still hugely entrenched even in our relatively advanced society. Sexism is and remains the deepest, most intractable form of bigotry. There is
so much disparity, so much injustice, that, as females are gaining in power and thus are awakening age old ambitions long dormant, they are running into all kinds of problems. Free people have the luxury of opening their mind, and caring, and desiring. This is a tough world for that, if you're female, because you're still obstructed at every turn. You're hit on, objectified, denigrated, and told that you shouldn't do whatever it is you want to do--either because it's male stuff, or because the males are so much better at it. If society and most of those in it keep telling you the same thing, you're likely to accept it.
There's still a great deal of sexual segregation, even within the wider context of integration. Some of it is momentum from the female rights groups: females banding together because that's what's worked for them in the past. But most of it is socially pressured based on our mores and folkways, and the remainder is pure exclusionary practice by males.
The reason I see all of this as a
good thing is that, in order to have achieved this new level of suffering, it suggests just how much progress we have actually made. In my mind there is no doubt whatsoever. I am close to certainty as I ever come on social issues that sexual equality and female rights in particular have made incredible steps forward, at least in America and Western Europe, from whatever beginning time interval you want to specify. We're ahead of where we were in the early 1990s. We're way ahead of where we were in the 1970s. We're practically galaxies ahead of where we were in the 1950s.
It may not always seem so, when you look at what passes for literature or art or video games or films or television programs. It may not always seem so, when you listen to the hatred and activism coming out of the conservative side of the nation. It may not always seem so, when you look at the status of female issues in government, both in many states and at the federal level. Nevertheless,
all of these things are counterstrokes, backlashes, to the progress that has been occurring and continues to occur at a level underneath everything: the level of the social fabric itself. If females are being denigrated in grotesque new ways on television, and if their rights to medical self-determination and a comparable wage are under political attack, and if people on the street are saying that feminism is over and anything the feminists have left to accomplish is part of some radical anti-male agenda, it's only because females are moving closer and closer to males in everyday life in their exercise of everyday roles.
The backlash is inevitable, and it itself is a bad thing, but the very existence of it is an unambiguously good sign. This is victory, I am sure of it. The only problem is that "victory" will continue to consume decades if not centuries, because, like I said at the beginning, we have so very far yet to go, and all of our gains are relative to that massive chasm of enduring inequality.
Many feminists will not talk very much about these huge victories, because it's vulnerable to being counterproductive when there is such work left to do. Some people don't even see the progress as progress, because the problems which remain are so significant. These people are, no doubt, among the ranks of those who are less happy than their 1970s-era counterparts. I for one think it's crucial to recognize and acknowledge the progress we've made, because this whole enterprise would seem hopeless otherwise. The final victory is outside any of our lifetimes, and that's just here in America. In much of the world, females are living in their own special dark ages, and many countries are backtracking as the result of Islamic, Christian, and Hindu religious extremism. There is plenty to legitimately be depressed about, and those who have the character for it are in their rights.
Women already do work an awful lot to rear children and maintain the home, and to add conventional work and survival burdens on top of this makes being female even harder. In the United States, this concept is called "second shift" (as far as I'm aware; we haven't studied it too much). Done with your first shift at work? Time to start your second at home! You need to manage groceries, personal finances, parenting, child appointments and schedules, utilities, laundry, cleaning, etc. all in addition to your own personal appointments and upkeep requirements.
Ah, so true. Those surveys of how male and female free time changes upon marriage are quite telling! In this society, and most others, males are given every opportunity to transfer menial work to females, and females are given every opportunity to take on this work. Marriage, as it is often practiced, is just one more instrument of inequality.
