What Do Women Want?
Feminism, like all utopian philosophies, promised a Garden of Eden. In this garden, Eve would be free from the manacles of patriarchal oppression. She would own her body and find her voice. She would decide her own fate, as Adam decided his. Shoulder-to-shoulder, equal partners in the enterprise of humanity. Where most utopias stumble at the first hurdle, feminism soared up and away. The sky was the limit, once you’d smashed the glass ceiling.
At first, universal suffrage gave women an inalienable voice in the public square. Then, second-wave feminism, thrust women into the workplace, demanding respect and equality of pay. Next, it made men consider female sexuality and not just their own. It banished backstreet abortions, freeing women from the anchor of their mistakes. Finally, swinging open the rusty doors of the universities, granting women the most valuable gift of all — an education.
You’d be forgiven for thinking these laudable advancements would have boosted women’s happiness. After all, they had freed themselves from the confines of their kitchens. Or so the story goes. Surprisingly, the exact opposite occurred: female satisfaction has been declining since the 1970s. Women today are the unhappiest they have ever been, according to four decades of surveys and statistics.
It brings to mind the old joke by the late great comedian Bill Hicks:
“I’ve learned a lot about women” begins the floppy-haired jester, a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “I think I’ve learned exactly how the fall of man occurred in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were in the Garden… and Adam said one day, Wow Eve, here we are, at one with nature, at one with God, we’ll never age, we’ll never die, and all our dreams come true the instant that we have them. And Eve said, ‘Yeah… it’s just not enough, is it?”
Apparently not. Many feminists will argue women are still oppressed. What we need is more feminism, not less. Yet, if five decades of female empowerment made women less happy, it’s hard to see how more of the same will be the cure.
Nor have women always been unhappy. Hicks was wrong on that count. Back in the ’70s, women had been the contented sex, and men the miserable oafs. Only lately has the trend reversed. This conflict between rising standards of welfare and falling standards of well-being is known as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, and it baffles social scientists to this day.
Do Women Want to be Men?
Sooner or later, the architects of utopia will find fault, not in their vision of perfection — which always glistens as if new — but in those tasked with living in it. Reality is often disappointing. Just as the ’60s socialists shunned the milquetoast working class in favour of more radical demographics, so too has feminism jettisoned a great many women.
Rebecca Walker, the face of third-wave feminism, admitted the movement had a recruitment problem. Women in the late 90s felt feminism was ‘something that was in the past’. ‘We were losing you’ she laments. In reaction, she rebranded the movement hoping to recruit new members from ethnic minorities and the LGBT community. Third-wave feminism was to be ‘more than gender equality, but all equality’ — to achieve this, they would need to deconstruct ‘the ruling class and hyper-capitalism’. Walker’s dream — that ‘there would always be feminism’. It had become an ideology, no longer a means to an end, but an end unto itself.
Eve’s apple had strayed very far from the tree. Yet, the rebranding worked, and for many, feminism became a cornerstone of their identity. However, the movement is not as popular as it first seems.
Across Europe, despite 80 per cent of people believe in the equality of the sexes, fewer than half polled identified as feminists, with results ranging from 8% in Germany to 40% in Sweden. Support for equal rights was the same for people across all income backgrounds. Still, feminism predominates amongst the top social grades — those in managerial, administrative and professional occupations, as well as amongst white women compared to women of colour.
Journalists and politicians, in the affluent class, decry the lack of female CEOs or engineering graduates. In an equal society, the argument goes, all social and economic groups would be perfectly bisected by gender. Women are to be given half of everything, and the totality of nothing.
The research paints a different story. Multiple studies show that as societies get more equal, women are less likely to go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) fields. A paper published in Psychological Science found that in countries where gender inequality is highest, women seek the easiest path to financial freedom. Engineering pays more than nursing, and so women follow the money. “Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states”, which allows women a genuine choice. And what if women choose to work less, or to work in lower-paid, though still essential, jobs. Are we to shun them as traitors to the cause?
Curiously, the countries with the highest level of occupational segregation (i.e. where nurses are mostly women, and engineers, primarily men) are Finland, Denmark, and Sweden, renowned for their egalitarianism. In contrast, Japan which is the most egalitarian on income is amongst the lowest for gender segregation.
Since the 1980s, we have known women are happier in roles which might pay less but are ultimately more rewarding. Half of women who earn MBAs drop out the workforce, limiting the pool of prospective CEOs, and those who stick it out, grow unhappier as the leadership pressures increase. It should go without saying that miserable people make lousy bosses.
Nor is this an artefact of claustrophobic stereotypes. A study spanning 76 countries, found gender differences in six key personality traits (altruism, trust, risk, patience, and positive and negative reciprocity) increased as society gets more equal. Women are more altruistic and trusting than men, whereas men are more patient and risk-taking. Women are more likely to repay a favour, but less likely to seek revenge.
This behaviour appears to be biological and not cultural. A systematic review found “the consistency in finding sex differences in children’s preferences for toys typed to their own gender indicates the strength of this phenomenon and the likelihood that it has a biological origin.” Boys tend to be better at systemising — figuring out how things work -, and girls better at empathising — figuring out how people work, which is reflected in their toy choices.
This explains the preponderance of boys amongst the autistic population — a disorder of over-systemising. But as world-renowned autism expert, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen noted ‘Biological determinists don’t dismiss the importance of culture. They simply don’t deny the role of biology.’
By removing cultural and economic constraints on behaviour, biological factors become more prominent. Strangely, this is treated as a dirty little secret, better left ignored. So, we give women the freedom to choose, and then berate them for choosing wrong.
Women don’t actually want to be men. In fact, they rather like being women. Nevertheless, we will keep trying to reverse this biological fact. Perhaps afterwards we’ll try our hands at teaching a camel to swim, or a pig to fly.
The Death of Femininity
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is how we measure our wealth — the total monetary value of spending in a given year. But as Robert Kennedy lambasted in 1968, ‘It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl…it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’ In some countries, GDP even includes prostitution and the illegal sale of drugs. But nowhere does it include housework — the unpaid labour still dominated by women (though men are increasingly involved).
Phyllis Deane was hired in 1941 by economists James Meade and Richard Stone, to apply their newly devised GDP measure to present-day Malawi and Zambia. She argued the work of rural women who collected firewood or cooked meals must be counted. To ignore them, was economically ‘illogical’ and placed too great an emphasis on traditionally masculine roles.
Feminism concurred with the economics of Meade and Stone; Deane lost the argument. The home had been their cage, and they weren’t looking back. But many working-class women still toil there. They work hard for their families, and proudly so. As writer Marguerite Duras poetically put it, ‘The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it — can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself, but in the search for it.’
There are few things greater than a lovingly cooked meal, a freshly made bed, or a clean and tidy home. Such simple pleasures are criminally undervalued by a society more content with consuming than looking after one another. No one thinks this is all women are, or that men should not share the burden. But if women are doing this work, surely it should be recognised. Afterall, undervaluing people is not conducive to their prosperity.
The four-decade slump in female happiness does not correlate with age, marital status, income, or children. If the answer doesn’t lie with the measurable, we should look to the immeasurable.
Housework and GDP is but one example of the trampling of traditional female values. Women might have joined the workforce, but they left femininity at the door. As Germaine Greer witheringly put, ‘Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace, and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.’ She is not alone, as Sheila Jeffreys put it, ‘…femininity pertains to female subordination.’ Commonly, it is associated with meekness, shyness, frailty and fear. It is a servile characteristic. Or is it?
Traditionally femininity was defined as gentleness, cooperativeness, empathy and humility. Sad is the world which considers these traits superfluous. For if women do not bring them to the table, who will teach men? And in a society which values consumption over charity, and the callous over the kind, how can we expect women to be happy. We’re asking them to deny a part of themselves, and then put on a pretty face.
Motherhood, the last bastion of femininity, is now unhallowed ground. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone declared that ‘pregnancy is barbaric’. The source, not of female power, but of female oppression. She envisioned a mechanistic future of ectogenesis — embryos congealing out of gelatinous soup in artificial wombs. Birth as banal as opening a packet of microwave rice, with infants handed contemptuously to their insouciant mothers.
Today, motherhood comes up in fewer than 3% of papers, journal articles, or textbooks on modern gender theory. Resultantly, the maternal mortality rate in the United States has increased by more than 25 per cent between 2000 and 2014. Black women are three times more likely to die than their Caucasian counterparts. Despite advancements across medicine, post-partum depression or puerperal psychosis (a psychiatric emergency which can lead to infanticide) are poorly understood. Puerperal psychosis is thankfully rare, occurring in only 1 in 1000 pregnancies, yet is substantially more common than female CEOs will ever be. Yet, I’d wager you’ve never heard of it. If we had valued kindness and compassion a little more, perhaps you would have done.
Further down the lifeline, the West is marked by ageing populations. Soon (if not already) older women will outnumber their younger counterparts. Feminism has rarely occupied itself with trials and tribulations of the silver-haired. But as women live longer than men, and society grows evermore atomised, these ladies are destined to spend their twilight days in abject loneliness. Female independence matters little to an eighty-year-old in dire need of interdependence, a shoulder to lean on. Perhaps it’s because older women represent an epoch many feminists would rather forget, and that they contain ideas about gender long seen as archaic. Uncomfortable truths we might call them. Women destined to be the forgotten, alive, but absent from society. A sad fate.
Feminism is entering a transition period; a fourth wave is rising. It promises to be more active than prior waves, already striking a victory with the #MeToo movement. But at this inflexion point, the movement has a chance to reengage with ordinary women — the elderly, mothers, and the working-class. To do this, and to reverse the tide of female unhappiness, it must ask the oft-neglected question, What Do Women Want?
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