Split Thread Are post-feminism women happier?

[Meadmaker]

Analogies are always dangerous, but here goes....

Many years ago (early '90s?) NPR did a week long segment on black and white relations in the South prior to the civil rights era, pre 1960s. At that time, the people who could remember those days, even remember them as adults, were not ancient.

A major part of the segment involved interviewing people about how life was. The white people being interviewed inevitably said that things were simpler and everyone was happy, and the got along great with the black people. The black people inevitably said things really sucked and they hated the white people, but they couldn't say anything because they would lose their jobs, or worse.

The people who are on the top of the social heap are always convinced that their servants love them and are happy with their benevolent leadership.


Now, I have to admit that shutit has provided at least some data that might suggest people were actually happier, but I am taking it with a grain of salt. I suspect that the data wouldn't survive scrutiny of the collection methodology.

 

[shuttlt]

In this thread, males decide that females would be happier with less autonomy and agency.

The fact that the females in the thread disagree, is apparently irrelevant.

It isn't very relevant. You think you are happier now than you would be in some other life. I agree that having grown up in the soft liberal west, you would be unsuited to many other ways of living that, had you grown up in them would suit you fine.

You don't have a connection with some essence of woman you can commune with to tell you whether the life of a peasant in late 14th century england would happier the life you have had.

I showed you that women's reports of their happiness show that it has declined since the 1970s. All you do in response is point to your feeling that women must be happier now, and feminist theory that women ought to be happy now. What if the data is correct and they aren't happier. If Feminism is "true" you would have thought there would be some stark indications of women getting happier. That data doesn't exist... even HuffPo acknowledges it.

You want women to be happy in a particular vision of an egalitarian liberal society for ideological reasons. It's like the discovery I mentioned in the other thread by marxists in the 1920s that the proletariat didn't really want the revolution and had to be made unhappy so they could be freed. I do wonder slightly whether, given how many of the 2nd wave feminists were marxists, what we aren't seeing is that to activate women politically, they had to get women to be unhappy with men, unhappy with their lives.... and they were successful.

 

[shuttlt]

Analogies are always dangerous, but here goes....

Many years ago (early '90s?) NPR did a week long segment on black and white relations in the South prior to the civil rights era, pre 1960s. At that time, the people who could remember those days, even remember them as adults, were not ancient.

A major part of the segment involved interviewing people about how life was. The white people being interviewed inevitably said that things were simpler and everyone was happy, and the got along great with the black people. The black people inevitably said things really sucked and they hated the white people, but they couldn't say anything because they would lose their jobs, or worse.

The people who are on the top of the social heap are always convinced that their servants love them and are happy with their benevolent leadership.


Now, I have to admit that shutit has provided at least some data that might suggest people were actually happier, but I am taking it with a grain of salt. I suspect that the data wouldn't survive scrutiny of the collection methodology.

You would have thought it would have been well debunked by Feminists if that was true. Instead you have papers on The Paradox of Female Happiness and the HuffPo saying it's weird and counter intuitive, but well established. There are quite a lot of graphs and tables in there, so you may spot some critical flaw I haven't. I'm partly posting it as a jumping off point if you are interested as there do seem to be some good references in there.

Incidentally, if you haven't read it.... along the same lines as your opening example, there are interviews with the last surviving slaves, then in their 90s, in the early 20th century. I think it was collected by the library of congress of something... anyway it's called "Born in Slavery: Narratives from the WPA Slave Narrative Collection". The weird thing is the introduction where they prepare the reader for quite a lot of the former slaves having positive things to say about life on the plantation. It's not really a subject I have spent any time going into, but my recollection (+/- 10% on all the values) was that about 1/3 of the stories remembered those times as better than their lives after, 1/3 were kind of mixed, and 1/3 thought life was much better. Much of that seemed to have to do with how utterly ruined the South was for decades afterwards.

Anyway, I recommend that as an interesting read rather than to make an argument based on it.

 

[Paul2]

No, indeed.... a certain amount of deviation from the norm is tolerated in all societies. However, functioning societies are geared towards the interests of the norm, since they are the ones that keep society going. I suspect the more counter to the interests of the norm some deviation is, the less tolerated it will be in a functioning society. A society that privileges the deviant over the norm is engaging in cultural suicide.

Hi Shut! Long time!

That study about reduced female happiness since the 60s - I can't find the link, but I wonder if you know what definition of happiness they used, and would that definition allow comparison to similar data from other times?

 

[Olmstead]

Nostalgia and relativity. What's the point of asking the elderly whether life was better in their youth? What's the point of comparing the happiness of two completely different scales? People used to be happier with less, because they had less.

 

[Meadmaker]

Of the links shutit provided, I only read the Huffington Post article.

My immediate thought on reading it was that in the pre-feminism days, there was an awful lot of pressure on women to not complain about their lives. They had a husband and children and they ought to be happy with that. I think one possibility to explain the data from that question is an increasing permission to say that, actually, they weren't very happy back then, but they felt more pressure to say that they were.

I don't have any confirmatory data on that.

I do think there is a great deal of well documented data on unhappiness of women related to choosing career over family, after they had that option. Simply put, many women are unhappy that they chased career and wished they hadn't. However, that's a very complicated issue, and even among people I know who might say that they would have been happier had they emphasized children more and job less, not one of them would say that they wished they had not had the choice.

 

[shuttlt]

Hi Shut! Long time!

That study about reduced female happiness since the 60s - I can't find the link, but I wonder if you know what definition of happiness they used, and would that definition allow comparison to similar data from other times?

Indeed, good to hear from you again.

See the link in the post before yours on the paradox of human happiness. That seems to be the paper to begin with. If you search for HuffPo you'll find the original article I posted which is the easier on the eye overview. I think the data is back to 1972 rather than the 60s. There is some data going a bit earlier, but it makes little difference and I can't find it at the moment.

 

[shuttlt]

Nostalgia and relativity. What's the point of asking the elderly whether life was better in their youth? What's the point of comparing the happiness of two completely different scales? People used to be happier with less, because they had less.

Indeed, but then is it worth upending society to have more if you are just as happy with less. Was feminism about making women happier, or some OCD compulsion to have everything equally distributed across the sexes? We surely didn't change the whole of western society merely in a quest for symmetry.....? I think it's an important question because the same case that feminism made gets repeated over and over.... this thread started on a discussion of trans inclusion in women's sports. The assumption is always that inequity is intrinsically a bad thing. Feminism made things more equal and women are less happy. I don't say that equality is necessarily bad, just that it isn't necessarily good.

 

[Meadmaker]

By the way, shutit, at the end of the HuffPo article, the author said she had a very good explanation for the data that she would reveal in her next article. Do you have any idea what it was?

 

[shuttlt]

Of the links shutit provided, I only read the Huffington Post article.

My immediate thought on reading it was that in the pre-feminism days, there was an awful lot of pressure on women to not complain about their lives. They had a husband and children and they ought to be happy with that. I think one possibility to explain the data from that question is an increasing permission to say that, actually, they weren't very happy back then, but they felt more pressure to say that they were.

I don't have any confirmatory data on that.

I do think there is a great deal of well documented data on unhappiness of women related to choosing career over family, after they had that option. Simply put, many women are unhappy that they chased career and wished they hadn't. However, that's a very complicated issue, and even among people I know who might say that they would have been happier had they emphasized children more and job less, not one of them would say that they wished they had not had the choice.

Thanks for the response. I have now had 2 gins, so be warned.

Given the claims of feminism, don't you think it's kind of odd that it's not relatively easy to say that women are happier today than they were in 1972? I'm just a guy in front of a computer. They are the ones who have had all of this funding to make these changes, run all these advocacy organisations, created all these academic department to spread feminism. They can't even show after all that that women are happier? If that wasn't the entire point of feminism, what was it? Playing the hatchling for a moment, one would have thought that this would cause feminists to question their basic assumptions.

I'm sure most of the tiny number of people reading this will be aware already, but there is a phenomenon in economics called stated and revealed preferences. Basically, people say they like one thing but when you actually look at what they buy, they spend their money on something else. I think the argument I am edging towards is something like that. Feminism is like a stated preference, and yet loads of women I know read 50 shades of grey.

As to pressure on women to report particular results in surveys. Maybe. Again, if feminism was about women's happiness, you would have thought they would have found a way past that in 50 years. I believe women are more susceptible than men to social desirability bias. Having said that, do you think there's pressure for some woman in a career who is doing everything that lean in feminism tells he she should to say she is happy, when maybe she isn't?

As to your friends. That is a big regret to articulate. Particularly when it expresses kind of a trad desire for aspects of pre-feminism femininity.

Again, I go back to where I started. Society in the West has been upended. Countless billions have been spent, presumably to make women happier...? And the only graphs we have go the wrong way. Are there any failure criteria for feminism at all?

 

[shuttlt]

By the way, shutit, at the end of the HuffPo article, the author said she had a very good explanation for the data that she would reveal in her next article. Do you have any idea what it was?

No, but in the paper they give some reasons.... like women still feel the burden of the home while when men do housework they feel they they are being uber progressive. Housework depresses women and makes men happy.

Look, I don't doubt there are partial explanations like that that have some level of truth in them. However, after 50 years and this huge social change.... women are less happy. Was that what we were sold at the start? Is it even the story we are sold now? Look at Emily's Cat, she is convinced women are happier today and points to feminist ideology as her reason for thinking that. Is there a point where the assumptions ever get questioned? For sunk cost reasons, I'm kind of doubtful. It's not as if feminism was ever empirically founded, it's an ideological project.

 

[Olmstead]

Indeed, but then is it worth upending society to have more if you are just as happy with less. Was feminism about making women happier, or some OCD compulsion to have everything equally distributed across the sexes? We surely didn't change the whole of western society merely in a quest for symmetry.....? I think it's an important question because the same case that feminism made gets repeated over and over.... this thread started on a discussion of trans inclusion in women's sports. The assumption is always that inequity is intrinsically a bad thing. Feminism made things more equal and women are less happy. I don't say that equality is necessarily bad, just that it isn't necessarily good.

If your entire goal is to maximise dopamine levels in the brain, we might as well hook the population on some really good drugs.

Besides, no one has actually measured dopamine levels or any other objective metric in the past, so all you're left with are subjective opinions that would be just as susceptible to your example of stated and revealed preferences. We can't know how happy people in the past were in an objective way.

And again, even if it were true that dopamine levels were higher, why is that a worthwhile goal?

 

[shuttlt]

If your entire goal is to maximise dopamine levels in the brain, we might as well hook the population on some really good drugs.

Besides, no one has actually measured dopamine levels or any other objective metric in the past, so all you're left with are subjective opinions that would be just as susceptible to your example of stated and revealed preferences. We can't know how happy people in the past were in an objective way.

And again, even if it were true that dopamine levels were higher, why is that a worthwhile goal?

If we are going to be like that, what is the point of anything? Why was fascism bad? Why was communism bad? If Feminism succeeded in achieving true material equality, but left women miserable then it would surely have succeeded.

The reason I am referring to happiness is that I think that that is the root of the moral claim that feminism makes, and indeed liberalism. What is the point of equality if achieving it makes everybody miserable? Likewise, what would be the point of liberty if we did not enjoy it? Ultimately, I think materialist ethics is about different schemes for maximising happiness and minimizing unhappiness, isn't it?

 

[Paul2]

If we are going to be like that, what is the point of anything? Why was fascism bad? Why was communism bad? If Feminism succeeded in achieving true material equality, but left women miserable then it would surely have succeeded.

The reason I am referring to happiness is that I think that that is the root of the moral claim that feminism makes, and indeed liberalism. What is the point of equality if achieving it makes everybody miserable? Likewise, what would be the point of liberty if we did not enjoy it? Ultimately, I think materialist ethics is about different schemes for maximising happiness and minimizing unhappiness, isn't it?

Rather than happiness, at least one author says that, fundamentally, liberalism makes an ethical claim:

The major task of an adequate liberal theory is to give an account of why human beings should adopt a liberal organization of their society rather than some other way of living together. There are two broad approaches to this task. One attempts to show that liberal forms of living together are the only ones that meet the fundamental requirements of ethics. In other words there is no ethical alternative. The second allows that there are various ways of meeting the fundamental ethical requirements but that liberal forms of collective life are better than any known alternative.

Liberalism - The Basics, by John Charvet.

 

[TomB]

If we are going to be like that, what is the point of anything? Why was fascism bad? Why was communism bad? If Feminism succeeded in achieving true material equality, but left women miserable then it would surely have succeeded.

But that hasn't happened yet.

The reason I am referring to happiness is that I think that that is the root of the moral claim that feminism makes, and indeed liberalism. What is the point of equality if achieving it makes everybody miserable? Likewise, what would be the point of liberty if we did not enjoy it? Ultimately, I think materialist ethics is about different schemes for maximising happiness and minimizing unhappiness, isn't it?

Beyond the point that happiness is a ridiculously vague thing to try to measure, let alone try to calibrate a scale that is consistent over time, I'm not even sure that happiness even means the same thing in different time periods.

Expectations.

When I grew up, there were no cell phones and, until I was around 10, cable television wasn't a thing. We didn't miss either one. We were perfectly happy without either one and felt nothing was missing.

Now we have cable TV, internet and cell phones. Our expectations have increased and if these things are absent we miss them. I'm not sure it's true to say that I was happier in 1978 without cable or cell phones than I would be now if those things were unavailable. But knowledge of their existence, of the possibilities makes me re-calibrate so that what I called happiness then is at a lower place on the scale I use now.

It's kind of like "the more money you earn, the more money you need." Our needs calibrate to our expectations. So does the happiness scale. If one does not know of the existence of points on the scale above 7, 7 looks like a ten.

So, women are closer to equality with men. But they are not there. Men still make more. In most relationships, the man's career is still the one that drives relocation of the family. Women have gained responsibilities formerly reserved for men (and gladly), but men have not picked up as much of the load of responsibilities that were reserved for women.

One makes the best of the life that is available to them. Suggesting that pre-feminism women were happier is kind of an "ignorance is bliss" assertion. "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'"

 

[Meadmaker]

No, but in the paper they give some reasons.... like women still feel the burden of the home while when men do housework they feel they they are being uber progressive. Housework depresses women and makes men happy.

Look, I don't doubt there are partial explanations like that that have some level of truth in them. However, after 50 years and this huge social change.... women are less happy. Was that what we were sold at the start? Is it even the story we are sold now? Look at Emily's Cat, she is convinced women are happier today and points to feminist ideology as her reason for thinking that. Is there a point where the assumptions ever get questioned? For sunk cost reasons, I'm kind of doubtful. It's not as if feminism was ever empirically founded, it's an ideological project.

Was that what we were sold? I was pretty young, so I probably didn't understand exactly what was being sold, but I don't think happiness was being sold.

So, I'm not sure that that was the goal, and I'm not sure the unhappiness isn't an artifacd. And I'm fairly confident that the vast majority of women don't wnat to get rid of it.

Meanwhile, I look at pop culture portrayals, and outside of TV sitcoms, I see an awful lot of improvements in women's lives. For example, I'm old enough to remember a standard trope in movies. There's the middle aged or old woman talking about her husband, saying, "He wasn't perfect, but in 20 years of marriage, he never laid a hand on me." In other words, lack of beatings was enough to be cited as a positive. In general, problems with husbands and being stuck in dismal marriages was a really common problem. So, today, poverty after divorce is a problem, but in my childhood, being trapped in an abusive relationship was a problem. Regardless of how they fill out a survey, I think they are better off.

 

[Roboramma]

In this thread, males decide that females would be happier with less autonomy and agency.

The fact that the females in the thread disagree, is apparently irrelevant.

I was more agreeing that changes in society since the 70's have made us all less satisfied in general.

As I said, I don't think the problem has been changes in autonomy and agency (and I was applying this view to both men and women).

I don't think people being free to make choices about their own lives is a bad thing, and to reply to your post specifically I don't think women being free to make choices about their lives is a bad thing.

 

[Puppycow]

I really don't know, and I'm not entirely sure that it matters.

A quick google search turned up this:
The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness*

Here's the thing though. Women (or men) could be happy or unhappy for reasons that have nothing to do with feminism. A lot of things are different than they were 50 years ago. Maybe it's social media that's making people less happy. Thus, the reason could have very little to do with feminism.


Let me pose a separate but similar question: Do you think if people 200 years ago, or 800 years ago were surveyed, that they would have reported much less happiness than they do today? If it turned out that people in the past were actually happier than people are today, would you switch places with them? You would have to give up your iPhone, your television, your refrigerator, hot water maybe, modern toilets, antibiotics, and so on. You might have to worry about things like small pox or the bubonic plague, or terrible wars (yes, wars still happen even today, but not as often).

I think it's somehow baked into the human nature to never be happy. You could be objectively much better off, but still be unhappy. Surely we've all heard stories of rich, famous people who commit suicide. It sometimes leaves me scratching my head: Why would Robin Williams kill himself? Why would Anthony Bourdain kill himself?

People are genetically programmed to be dissatisfied, regardless of how well-off they are from an objective standpoint. As soon as you get something good, you take it for granted. Seriously, every day we should be thanking our lucky stars that we own a refrigerator and a flush toilet and a computer and 100 other things. But nobody does because we already take those things for granted.

 

[theprestige]

Honestly who **** ing cares if women are happier? The whole point of feminism was to make women equal partners in the suffering that is providing for human existence. Sure they're no longer slaves or concubines, but so what? It's still a daily chore to secure food and shelter. You think many women are going to be happy about that?

 

[Roboramma]

I also think it's hard to disentangle a lot of things there. Our lives have changed in many ways in the past 50 years, and while feminism is certainly a major change, it's not like the rest of society has stood still. Are changes in overall happiness related to feminism, or the cost of housing? Liberalism, or declining fertility rates (and if those are related, which is the causal factor in happiness here)? Declining religiosity? Diet? Outdoor activity? Changes in what we do for employment? Divorce rates? Norms around parenting and child safety?

Schlutt, I think, has at thesis that some of these things are caused by liberalism, and it's thee root cause of each of the things that have affected happiness (not necessarily the ones I listed, which was a random list and I'm not actually endorsing it).

I'm not entirely convinced that we're less happy, but even to the extent to which I agree that some of these things have made us less happy, I think we can strive for both personal liberty, and a social culture that upholds ideals that lead to strong community relationships and guides people to lives aligned with their actual drives.