WOULDN'T EVERYONE BE HAPPIER IF THE '70S HAD NEVER OCCURRED? (via Pepys):

Desperate Feminist Wives: Why wanting equality makes women unhappy. (Meghan O'Rourke, March 6, 2006, Slate)

In The Feminine Mystique, the late Betty Friedan attributed the malaise of married women largely to traditionalist marriages in which wives ran the home and men did the bread-winning. Her book helped spark the sexual revolution of the 1970s and fueled the notion that egalitarian partnerships—where both partners have domestic responsibilities and pursue jobs—would make wives happier. Last week, two sociologists at the University of Virginia published an exhaustive study of marital happiness among women that challenges this assumption. Stay-at-home wives, according to the authors, are more content than their working counterparts. And happiness, they found, has less to do with division of labor than with the level of commitment and "emotional work" men contribute (or are perceived to contribute). But the most interesting data may be that the women who strongly identify as progressive—the 15 percent who agree most with feminist ideals—have a harder time being happy than their peers, according to evidence that has been provided exclusively to Slate. Feminist ideals, not domestic duties, seem to be what make wives morose. Progressive married women—who should be enjoying some or all of the fruits that Freidan lobbied for—are less happy, it would appear, than women who live as if Friedan never existed.

From the Mets' World Series victory to the Men's Hockey win over the Soviets was a disaster and all of it a result of our not settling Stalin's hash in the '40s.

MORE:
The return of the happy housewife (Charlotte Allen, March 5, 2006, Los Angeles Times)

A new study by two University of Virginia sociologists concludes that stay-at-home wives whose husbands are the primary family breadwinners don't suffer from "the problem that has no name," as Friedan famously wrote in 1963. In fact, the majority of full-time homemakers don't experience any kind of special problem, according to professors W. Bradford Wilcox and Stephen L. Nock, who analyzed data from a huge University of Wisconsin survey of families, conducted during the 1990s.

Here are the figures, published in this month's issue of the journal Social Forces: 52% of wives who don't work outside the home reported they were "very happy" with their marriages, compared with 41% of wives in the workforce.

The more traditional a marriage is, the sociologists found, the higher the percentage of happy wives. Among couples who have the husband as the primary breadwinner, who worship together regularly and who believe in marriage as an institution that requires a lifelong commitment, 61% of wives said they were "very happy" with their marriages. Among couples whose marriage does not have all these characteristics, the percentage of happy wives dips to an average of 45.

Lest you think the statistics come out this way because tradition-minded women happen to like tradition-minded wedlock — or they're just brainwashed by their churches — you're wrong. In an unpublished second paper, Wilcox sifted through the survey data and discovered that even wives who describe themselves as feminists report being happier with traditional marital arrangements in which they stay home with the kids and their husbands provide for them.

"They might think of themselves as progressives and believe in gender equality, but the same pattern holds for them," Wilcox said.

One more surprise: Even for wives who work full time outside the home, the key to marital happiness isn't splitting household chores and child care down the middle with their husbands. It's much simpler: an affectionate and appreciative husband who believes, along with his wife, that marriage is forever.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2006 10:59 PM