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It’s hard to take seriously, but I’m doing my best. I couldn’t stop myself from doing a Google search on it; one of the first hits was this blog quote:

Yes, there really is a Journal of Happiness Studies — which could either be wonderful news or yet another sign of our imminent demise.”

I’ll buy that.

So anyway, apparently they have just published a study that proves that just like we all knew it would, feminism has destroyed the future happiness of all womankind!!! Naturally, I am paraphrasing–the actual abstract goes like this–

Aspirations, along with attainments, play an important role in shaping well-being. Early in adult life women are more likely than men to fulfill their material goods and family life aspirations; their satisfaction in these domains is correspondingly higher; and so too is their overall happiness. Material goods aspirations refer here to desires for a number of big-ticket consumer goods, such as a home, car, travel abroad and vacation home. In later life these gender differences turn around. Men come closer than women to fulfilling their material goods and family life aspirations, are more satisfied with their financial situation and family life, and are the happier of the two genders. An important factor underlying the turnaround in fulfillment of aspirations for material goods and family life is probably the shift over the course of the life cycle in the relative proportion of women and men in marital and non-marital unions.

Delaying childbearing til the less-fertile years. No-fault divorce. The War Against Boys! Just like all those wise folks have predicted, oh, you may be having fun NOW slutting it up, affirmative-actioning great jobs right out from under the noses of more deserving men, and failing to stick out your marriage because you want to “find yourself,” but just wait til you get old!! Then all those fine young men you screwed over will be sailing their yachts and living in McMansions with their 25-year-old mail-order brides while you sit alone in your assisted living condo bitterly feeding your cats.

Now, I do only have access to the abstract, so perhaps I’m mistaken, but it appears that the authors of this study seem to think that the only thing that changes as people age is the people; as in, the culture and society surrounding said people has been static and identical from the day they were born til the day they reached old age. If that were the case, then certainly you would have a leg to stand on if you attempted to explain all happiness imbalances in simplistic terms of who is married and who isn’t, for instance. However, I think it’s really safe to say that the world of my grandmother’s birth was excruciatingly different than the world that existed when she was a young woman in her twenties in terms of what was offered to women and men respectively, and also from the world that a young woman in her twenties today was born in, and also the world of today, this moment, when my grandmother would be in her seventies.

My grandmother was born in 1933. Actually, that was quite a year as far as world events went–Franklin Roosevelt took office, the first concentration camp was opened in Germany, and the original King Kong movie was released starring Fay Wray, among other things. However, I want to look at this from the perspective of how the world has changed for women, so:

When my grandmother was born, women had only been allowed to vote in the United States for thirteen years. There was no Planned Parenthood; birth control information was legally considered “obscenity.” Many states had laws mandating that if men were available, women couldn’t legally work, or if a woman’s husband worked, she couldn’t, which meant that she either lived at home, unemployed, or she married, period. If she did work, it was almost always at a very poorly paid job with little to no hope of advancement. Less than ten percent of women held college degrees and the vast majority of colleges, especially the most prestigious, forbade women to apply for admittance. My grandmother’s twenties were spent primarily in the 1950′s. The FDA still had not approved birth control pills for sale in the United States, to any woman, married or not. Many jobs were still restricted or outright banned for women to hold. Many colleges, especially Ivy League and other prestigious universities, still forbade women to apply for admittance.

A woman in her twenties, now, was likely born in the 1980′s. At the time of her birth, the Civil Rights Act forbidding discrimination based on sex in job hiring and pay was nearly twenty years old. Abortion had been legal and Title IX had been around for over ten years and there were no legal restrictions on birth control pills. By 1985 every state had adopted no-fault divorce. Marital rape had been legally acknowledged to exist and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act has been passed. And now, in the new millenium, when she is actually in her twenties–31% of women her age have at least a bachelor’s degree, more than the number of men with degrees. Over 60% of women are in the job force, only 13% less than the number of men. Nearly half of all women of childbearing years are childless, the majority by choice.

So–a woman near the end of her life, today, was given virtually no opportunities for higher education or a career, choice in how many children she had or when–marriage was clearly the best choice for her, rather than any particular man being presented as the best choice for her. A man her age, however, had many more options. The chances of him finding himself, at the end of his life, in the situation he wants to be in is going to be correspondingly higher; hers are going to be overwhelmingly much more a matter of chance.

But a woman in her twenties today–a woman who will have financial means and choices both now and near the end of her life, who if she married and stayed married, likely did so because of the man, not because of a lack of choice, who was able to choose how many or if any children she had–I suspect that there will be a strong shift upward in terms of the level of happiness these women display near the end of their lives. Hopefully the Journal will still be around and studying away, and maybe will have lost its rather unfortunately obvious agenda in terms of interpreting study results in the process.