Does feminism make women happy?
Thanks to Alternet for directing us to The Happy Feminist’s refreshing take on the question of whether feminism makes women happy. Or rather, why ask the question to begin with? “To frame the effectiveness of feminism in terms of whether it makes women happy is just one more way of patronizing women,” she writes. “It smacks of, ‘Oh, but the slaves are so well-fed and content on the plantation’ or ‘you’ll be so much if it [sic] happier simply accepting the status quo rather than challenging it.'” The discussion was sparked by Slate’s recent reporting on a study which, among other things, found that “women who strongly identify as progressive — the 15 percent who agree most with feminist ideals — have a harder time being happy than their peers.” (Not surprisingly, the New York Times’ columnist John Tierney covered the same study, which Broadsheet covered here.
