The women’s movement, as I have said before, was about anger not happiness. In a book that I wrote some years ago called, “Sisterhood Betrayed: Women in the Workplace and the All About Eve Complex” we identified a problem that persists even today, “success addiction.”
Women wanted to get ahead in the workplace and when we interviewed women to see how they helped each other to succeed, we were saddened by the findings. Women were blaming the men for keeping them from getting ahead, but once women achieved success, they became the star at the top of the Christmas tree. Very few women helped others shatter the glass ceiling said top executives and educators.
The findings were such that I reported them on “The Today Show.” Unlike boys who learned to play together in team sports, women were just learning to adjust to their new roles.
As such this new TIME magazine piece, “What do women want now” is a fascinating read. The Rockefeller Foundation and TIME together “conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess how individual Americans are reacting.” The survey results alone are encouraging. The State of the American Woman
The article asks these questions:
- Is the battle of the sexes really over, and if so, did anyone win?
- How do men now view female power?
- How much resentment or confusion or gratitude is there for the forces that have rearranged family life, rewired the economy and reinvented gender roles?
- And what, if anything, does everyone agree needs to happen to make all this work?
Here are the results of the TIME survey in Men, Women, and Society:
- The Argument About Women Working Is Over
- Men and Women Have Similar Life Goals
- Marriage Is More Important to Men Than to Women
- Growing Female Economic Power Is Widely Accepted
- Who Has Benefited Most?
- Working Mothers Are Broadly Accepted…
- …And Yet, People Hold On to Traditional Visions for Family Life
- Daily Life Is a Story of Diplomacy Under Stress
- Men and Women Often Disagree on Who Is Doing What
- Both Men and Women Want More Help
Some answers. Many questions. But the solution to the problem of happiness still evades us. I am reminded of a story told by Emmet Fox, whom Annie Lamont “Bird by Bird” and “Tender Mercies” often quotes. It appears that there was an unhappy King in a far off land. He ordered his servants to find him the happiest man in the kingdom so that he might ask the man for his undershirt, hoping that happiness would rub off. The King’s men searched far and wide and at last found the happiest man. But to the King’s dismay, the happiest man was so poor that he did not even own an undershirt.
For more about happiness, here is an earlier piece I wrote: Facebook is tracking happiness, our priceless commodity
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Copyright 2009 Rita Watson