Elizabeth Debold

Bio & resources

It’s such a tired question—“what do women want?” When Freud first asked it, he likened women’s consciousness to a dark continent both unexplored and presumably unknowable. Countless exasperated male writers and far too many marketers have wondered the same thing. But the question is popping up again. In a recent New York Times op-ed column entitled “Liberated and Unhappy,” Ross Douthat reports on an analysis by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers indicating that across race, marital status, economic bracket, and even country, women’s subjective experience of being happy has declined both absolutely and in relation to men. Interestingly, in 1970—before the women’s movement dramatically opened so many women’s life options—women were generally more happy than men. So in the forty years since women in the West won their freedom to choose the lives that they want, they have become less happy. Fascinating, isn’t it?

The authors of the report, which is entitled “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” don’t come to any conclusion as to why this is happening, and why now. Of course, conservatives will undoubtedly argue that this proves women were better off in their traditional at-home roles before they were liberated into unhappiness, and progressives will counterargue that women’s dreams of liberation have been thwarted by institutions and customs that have not changed enough. Douthat doesn’t really offer any conclusions either. He only alludes to a connection between women’s unhappiness and the rise in single motherhood, suggesting that it is a result of living in a world in which there is no obligation for men to stay with the women who bear them children.

But Douthat’s argument is based on his sense that women’s lives are almost exclusively linked to, and perhaps most fulfilled by, bearing and raising children. And, therefore, that women’s happiness depends on being protected in that role. Yet this doesn’t seem to be what is happening with the younger generation. I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the bizarre twists our supposed sexual freedom has brought. An April New York Times Magazine article entitled “Keeping Up with Being Kept” presented a website that is a “down-and-dirty marketplace where older moneyed men and cute young women engage in brutally frank transactions.” Many of the young cuties are co-eds, trading flesh for tuition and shopping spree “perks.”

Then there is the beautiful young co-ed who tried to sell her virginity over the internet to pay for school. (The bidding apparently reached $3.8 million, although it doesn’t seem that the “transaction” actually ever happened.) This entrepreneurial virgin seems to be saying: “Hey, losing my virginity is supposed to be a moment that I will value forever, but it seems like what I am most valued for is my virgin body, so why not sell it? I’ll surely remember that!” She sees herself as a smart actor in a materialistic culture that trades human values for cash value. She’s not wrong. Certainly, Douthat’s picture of women raising children alone and young women selling themselves to pay for school isn’t a very happy one.

We women are at a strange point. Since the first hominids struggled upright, the role of women has been to bear and raise the next generation. Females have been charged with the survival of the species, and our cultures have elaborated on that role, protecting women’s capacity to bear children (and often prohibiting anyone but a woman’s sanctioned mate from bearing children with her). For how many thousands of years has a woman’s reproductive role been the source of her value and identity?

But women no longer have this unique role to play in culture. Bearing children has become optional—particularly for the most privileged among us. Being a mate and mother, which has been the source of our dignity and standing in society since tribal days, is no longer an imperative. We are freed of the necessity to reproduce—liberated from our biological role—but the choices we’ve won have left us unmoored. Who are we, or who should we be, now?

I’m obviously not the first person to note this. However, most voices expressing such a view come from the right, urging us back to the safety and familiarity of hearth and home. I’m providing this context not to suggest that this is our God-given role, but to explain why we would feel discontent, unease, and even a lack of simple happiness because we don’t have a clear, culturally sanctioned role to guide how we live our lives.

I’m arguing that we have further to go. Our ties to our biology are being broken, so that now, for the first time in femaledom, we can shape culture with men. It’s funny that we often tend to see men as lustful beasts, driven by their sexuality, when actually men as a whole are less tied to reproduction for their identity than women are. Think about it: From one hundred thousand to about seven thousand years ago, males and females of our species lived in kin networks and small tribes where both shared in the work of procreation and survival. The roles of men and women alike were tied to food gathering and rearing children. This was not some idyllic, egalitarian state of being as we often imagine—they didn’t have the capacity to do anything more than survive and procreate. The demands and needs of close cohabitation shaped their lives and options. But whenever life conditions changed dramatically due to such things as rapid climate change, invasion, and food shortages, men (because they do not suckle children and are therefore freely mobile) stepped forward to innovate and create the new. Women and their children were protected so that the tribe as a whole could survive. For the past seven thousand years or so, men by and large have continued on that trajectory and been the primary creators of culture, thereby forging an identity for themselves based on something other than their role in reproduction. Women, on the other hand, have continued to create children, which is, again, our role in reproduction.

It’s only been about fifty years since we women could control our fertility and begin to forge a cultural identity that goes beyond our biological role. Certainly, we’ve started down that path, but I’m speaking about something more profound and subtle. I don’t simply mean “having it all.” As important as that has been, what women have mostly done is to slot into the roles that already exist in culture in terms of work and family—usually finding themselves pulled in two directions, neither of which is wholly satisfying. But that’s not the half of it. It’s startling how many accomplished women who are doing important work—work that they themselves value—still feel that the true indication of their success as women depends on whether they have great mates and children. I’m speaking about really shifting our focus. Sure, we’ll continue to have intimate partners and children. But what about holding as our deepest priority the responsibility for embodying a new order of relationship, creativity, and innovation that could evolve culture to a higher level?

To me, it makes sense that women are less happy. We’re in a huge transition. There is no one really before us. The confusion, and even degradation, that women may find themselves caught up in are signs that the old is no longer working. It’s actually a tremendous evolutionary opportunity—an opportunity to focus on discovering something new. And if we don’t seriously engage with this potential, if we don’t step up to the plate of cultural innovation with humility and energy, too many young women will be left adrift in the marketplace, selling themselves short. That’s enough to make any sensitive woman unhappy.

Elizabeth Debold, EdD, senior editor for EnlightenNext, is a pioneering researcher in human development and gender issues. She is coauther of the bestseller Mother Daughter Revolution. For more from Debold visit enlightennext.org/debold.