Are women really less happy now?

Feminism has not made women unhappy. Expectations have risen, says stephanie coontz

A recent study shows that, on average, American men now report themselves happier than women do. This is the opposite of what polls found in the early 1970s, when women tended to report themselves happier than men.

The study has been greeted like manna from heaven by people who want to return to "traditional" gender roles, and has had the immediate effect of raising the happiness quotient of one group of Americans: Conservative radio talk show hosts who gleefully claim that it proves the feminist movement has made women less happy with their lives.

Of course, for the past 15 years, these very same people have been contending that women's empowerment has come at the expense of men, eroding their self-esteem, and decreasing their marital satisfaction as they have been forced to do more housework.

Women today are far less likely to report low self-esteem or depression than in the 1950s to 1970s

The new study finds that, on the contrary, today more men report themselves very satisfied with their lives than in the early 1970s. Researchers have discovered the same trends in women's and men's relative happiness in many industrial countries, including Britain. So perhaps the woman's movement has helped men more than women, relieving them of the burden of feeling they must be the sole breadwinners for their families and introducing them to the pleasures of less rigid definitions of masculinity.

But before we conclude that the feminist movement has made women less happy than they used to be, we need to recognise one important point. Self-reports of happiness vary according to people's expectations of how much satisfaction they are entitled to, making them much more subjective and variable than other measures of wellbeing.

Women today are far less likely to report low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness, poor health or severe depression than in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. So when we hear