Happiness

[porphyry]

Today on NPR I heard part of an interview with two economists who had just conducted a survey that was part of a program of surveys going back to the 1960s in which people are periodically asked how happy they are. I won’t go into the preposterousness of asking such a question and expected to treat the answers as objective scientific data, but rather will say that the main finding they talked about is that women are much unhappier now than they were in the 1960s.

They dismissed out of hand the possibility that the feminist project was all wrong and that the traditional gender-typed social roles that existed for thousands of years actually made people happy. ‘That’s just crazy talk. We know that feminist ideology is true and simply have to interpret the data to support it.’ They suggested as answers the possibility that women were happier in the 1960s because they knew the feminist revolution was starting and its fulfillment now couldn’t possibly make women as happy as the exuberance of its beginning. Or again, women lied in the 1960s about how happy they were because they knew they were supposed to. But whatever the reason, the economists knew it couldn’t be because today women have to work outside the home for the family to make as much as money as the husband alone could earn in the 1960s and they still have to do almost all of the housework and child care duties—it just couldn’t be that.

What I’m still trying to figure out is why Anne Sexton, whose husband in today’s dollars made about a quarter of a million a year, who had to look after the house and children with the help of a maid and nanny, who had the free time and disposable income to go to therapy and take graduate seminars in poetry composition, was so unhappy.

Comments

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

Good question about Anne Sexton. Some people are just unhappy, maybe, no matter how much money or household help they have?

There are things about feminism I appreciate. When I started engineering school in the late 1970s, I was "mentored" by a couple of older women who got degrees in mathematics rather than engineering, because the engineering colleges within the universities would not let them in. I remember having to talk my way into a student job as a janitor at college; I was the first female student to be hired (I wanted to do it because it was the second-highest paid job on campus. The first was nude model for art classes - no way!)

So I guess I strongly separate out equality in jobs, etc - the "civil rights" stuff - from the idea that "gender" and "gender roles" are just a "social constructions" which we can re-program at will. The first makes perfect sense to me; the second not so much.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have minded being a janitor myself (I like to clean, oddly enough) but I did do the modeling gig--horrified my poor mother to no end. It wasn't so bad--a bit cold and drafty, and it was never good to have a person who suspected her boyfriend of liking you draw you!

I tried to explain to Malkhos that Anne Sexton, were she alive today, would have been diagnosed as seriously manic depressive, just like Plath would have been, though possibly Sexton's case was even more serious than Plath's, in my opinion; probably Sexton bordered on psychosis at times. He doesn't seem to understand that the outward trappings of success seldom make you happy, much less well.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

LOL, I was too shy to model.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

In theory there should be no problems with women who want them having jobs. But as it is with women almost doubling the work force wages have been drastically reduced by comepetition. Or so it would seem. I don't want to argue against the idea that evil coroporations lower wages at every opportunity in order to subjugate their workers more completely.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

That is true; if you effectively double the labor force, you do dilute wages. Plus there's the observation that lines of work which experience influxes of women also see wage declines.

Where I part company with the feminists is in the idea that these substantial, fundamental differences (which economic conditions reflect) can be wished or "deconstructed" away.

[larvatus.livejournal.com]

A surplus of time conduces to unhappiness that stems from navel-gazing.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

The answer to your last question is surely that money can't cure mental illness, and that a status-seeking moneyed lifestyle might actually make it worse.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I agree. I constantly am pointing out to my students that the famous, moneyed people whom they idolize seem to be no happier than we are and, in many cases, worse off than we are. Add mental illness to that, and you have a hopeless case. Money and fame can't make you well or happy--on your side of the pond, look at Princess Diana. We might well wonder why she seemed so miserable, but she was often unhappy... and she was a princess!

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Diana just inspires nausea in me.

Here's a cheerful story of millionaire mental stability, much in the news here this week: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/shropshire/7598151.stm