Are we “less happy” because of feminism? Not a bit of it.

["Women, if you're happy and you know it..." by Ellen Goodman]

Not long ago a group of writers decided to publish a book of essays we called “Feminism Made Me Happy.” It was an in-your-face title, a deliberate attempt to counter the narrative we all knew by heart. The one that kept describing how the women’s movement had left us stressed out, discontented, wrenched from home, hearth, and motherhood to struggle and fail at doing it all.

Life and writers being what they are, we never did the book, but we have had some terrific lunches. Now we are due for another one, because we are in the midst of another dust-up over research published under the (too) provocative headline: “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.”

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, partners in marriage and research, dove into the data and came up with numbers suggesting a decline in women’s happiness or, to be more precise, in their “self-reported subjective well-being.” In 1972, women were four points more likely than men to describe themselves as “very happy.” Today they are one point less likely than men to check that box.

This is hardly proof of a mass depression, but the story fueled the predictable debates on websites and talk shows. The controversy pitted those who blame declining happiness on too much change against those who blame it on too little change. And those, of course, who just blame the  messengers.

Stevenson and Wolfers should have known they were walking into this propeller when they linked the women’s movement and happiness together. The paradox, as this pair framed it, was that despite all the improvements in women’s lives during the last 35 years, despite barriers that went down and opportunities that went up, women weren’t “self-reporting” greater happiness.

Our lunch group could have warned the researchers against one sentence that truly raised hackles. “As women’s expectations move into alignment with their experiences,” they speculate, “this decline in happiness may reverse.” Oh, goodie, lower your expectations and get happy, gals?

In fairness, the researchers didn’t pin the decline in happiness–oops, “self-reported subjective well-being”–on any specific ideology or social change. It affected married and single, parents and nonparents, working and stay-at-home mothers alike.

Indeed, Stevenson, a new mom, says she was surprised by the paradox. “I look back and think, ‘Oh my God, I have to be happier than my mother. I have so many more choices,’” she said. She and her husband pulled many strings to unravel the happiness conundrum. Have we doubled the areas in which women are expected to perform brilliantly? Are women now given more permission to express rather than repress unhappiness?

Women aren’t nostalgic for the old days. If anyone is, just watch a few episodes of “Mad Men” as an antidote, with its suffocated Mad Wife Betty Draper and its slapped-down Working Woman Peggy Olsen. If you prefer nonfiction, leaf through the early chapters of Gail Collins’s history of “When Everything Changed” to those magical yesteryears when a flight attendant was weighed, measured, and hired to be a flying geisha.

Going forward to the past won’t bring a grin to our lips–excuse me, a self-reported sense of well-being to our database. Happiness is a pretty elusive state and an even more elusive research subject. We are, as they say, happy as our least happy child and insecure as our retirement fund. As for linking happiness and social history, today’s flight attendant isn’t going to wake up every morning and assess her own well-being in comparison to her 1970s predecessor any more than I wake up grateful not to walk 4 miles in the snow to school. It doesn’t work that way.

Feminism made me happy? Not, I assure you, in a permanent state of good cheer. It opened doors. It opened our eyes–to everything including what still needs to be done. The women’s movement never promised us a rose garden or a warm bath of contentment. It offered a new way to understand the world, a lens on injustice and a tool to use in the pursuit of happiness. It’s a work in progress.

That’s happiness? Close enough.

“Poe properly buried, 160 years later”

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found near death in a public house in Baltimore and several days later succumbed to “congestion of the brain.” There is no definitive record of his movements in the several days before he died, and there are many theories as to the cause of his death. Some say it was alcohol poisoning, some say it was some other illness or heart disease that killed him. Because it was election day in Baltimore and he was not wearing his own clothes when he died, others suspect that he was a victim of “cooping,” having been taken prisoner by a political gang, beaten and forced to vote repeatedly. He was attended by Dr. John Joseph Moran at Washington College Hospital, where he was kept a virtual prisoner and allowed no visitors, for several days slipping between consciousness and delirium. Moran reported that his final words were “Lord, help my poor soul!,” just before he expired on October 7.

Poe’s funeral was the next day, a hasty 3-minute ceremony in the damp chill, so sparsely attended that the minister declined to give a sermon. He was buried without a headstone, because the monument his cousin had ordered was accidentally destroyed by a derailed train. He was exhumed and reburied, with a new tomb monument, in 1875, at a ceremony to which several leading poets were invited, but only Walt Whitman attended.

Now, 160 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe has been given a proper send-off in Baltimore—a “viewing” of his recreated dead body in the casket, a funeral procession accompanied by bagpipes, and a memorial service with eulogies delivered by actors in the roles of his contemporaries and colleagues, attended by more than 700 admirers and mourners. The “master of the macabre” has at last been laid properly to rest.

from The Baltimore Sun:
“A Proper Reburial,” by Robert Little (with video of the viewing and funeral)
“Edgar A. Poe, local author and poet of much renown, was laid to rest at Westminster Hall yesterday inside a simple redwood coffin, after a grand theatrical and oratorical send-off to usher him, as he once wrote, ‘into the region of shadows.’ Of course the true Poe remained buried beneath the monument on the northwest corner of the church grounds in Southwest Baltimore, near where his body was placed hastily in a family plot soon after his death on October 7, 1849. But yesterday the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe’s death was revived, so that the great poet could receive the eulogy that eluded him in the days following his demise.”

[via]

CHECK THIS OUTTTT

Adam Lambert’s cd artwork is officially released! It’s about the first Adam-related piece of information I can think of that wasn’t first leaked to the public early by sneaky people. (PS, you can preorder!) :]

 

I laughed out loud.

Can’t stop posting these, I just love ‘em.

A pair of shorts

THIS ONE IS ABSOLUTELY CHARMING. There, I warned you.

Oh no!

I was absolutely captivated for four and a half minutes by this singing 3-year-old.

Observe.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(By the way..I’m working on collecting enough versions of this song for a volume two of my infamous Puff the Magic Dragon mix cd. If you happen to have any, I’d love to receive them, haha. They make excellent–and free–all-occasion gifts..I’m especially looking for Seal, Bing Crosby, John Denver, Tom Chapin, the Kingston Trio, and Tori Amos, but I’m also happy to include *talented* lesser-knowns.) :]

On the other hand

I’ve lost my true love. My Mr. Darcy is dead. :( What that means is, my camera is broken, and it’s waaaayy too expensive and difficult to fix, to the point that it needs to be replaced. I’ll admit I cried..

Now we’re in the stages of searching the internet for a suitable Darcy II. It’s slow going. Once you weed out the ones with an unacceptable range of shutter speeds, you have to weed out the ones without a multiple exposure option, which is basically all of them so far. :/ I had no idea it was so hard to come by.

So anyway.