Women?s lib crib

Careful about reading this one. After all, an editorial on Women?s Day quoting a study that suggests that feminist ideals have made women in general ?unhappier? is likely to get the rolling pins as well as the brief cases out.

Careful about reading this one. After all, an editorial on Women’s Day quoting a study that suggests that feminist ideals have made women in general ‘unhappier’ is likely to get the rolling pins as well as the brief cases out. But 43 years after Betty Friedan tried to wipe out the engraved-in-stone roles of men and women in The Feminine Mystique and three decades after the Seventies took her advice about egalitarian partnerships seriously, a University of Virginia study states that traditional role-playing not only work out better for men-women relations, but also make women — the alleged loser in the battle of the sexes — happier. That sounds ominously like the findings of a Republican Party-funded study or a manifesto of the Stepford Wives or both. But is it true?

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In the study conducted between 1992 and 1995, 52 per cent of homemakers considered themselves ‘very happy’. Also, 41 per cent of all the working wives surveyed said they were ‘happy’, compared to 38 per cent of working wives with feminist ideals. So are housewives not as desperate as their liberated soul sisters think of them to be? Feminism has, in its various shades and attire, demanded that women unshackle themselves from ‘womanly duties’ so that they can be equal in the eyes of men. In an attempt to be treated as equal, feminists have eschewed the role of, say, the homemaker, instead refashioning themselves according to the image of men. In exchange of ‘liberation’, however, the 15 per cent in the study who agree most with feminist ideals have a harder time being happy than their peers. This happiness seems to have less to do with division of labour than with the level of commitment and ‘emotional work’ men contribute.

Political correctness will find such a ‘revelation’ disturbing, and if misunderstood or misused, it could create a backlash the same way Nazi eugenics put people off genetic research. There well may be complex ‘political’ reasons why feminists are ‘unhappier’: they do expect more out of the world that’s still ostensibly run by men. But it could also mean that instead of pitying them, our women’s libbers should realise that homemakers and non-feminist working women too have made a choice and come a long way, baby.