Your Agenda: Modern Woman Woes

The happiness paradox: He's happy, but is she? Almost 50 years after "The Feminine Mystique" shed light on female disillusionment; why aren't women happier?

Guests:Margaret Wente, Kathy Buckworth, Betsey Stevenson, Anne Kingston

Producer: Navin Vaswani/Mike Miner

For more on our guests visit TVO.org: http://bit.ly/8205f

Read our blog post "How Happy Are You?" on TVO.org: http://bit.ly/1ti36G

Category:

Education

Tags:

• TVO
• TVOntario
• Ontario
• Canada
• Agenda
• Steve
• Paikin
• current
• affairs
• analysis
• debate
• happiness
• paradox
• Feminine
• Mystique
• disillusionment
• women
• Margaret
• Wente
• Kathy
• Buckworth
• Betsey
• Stevenson
• Anne
• Kingston

[Castaril]

Maybe women should just become housewives again whose duty it is to take care of the children. I don't think women are happier working dead end 9-5 jobs.

[TimeGod12]

It is not human nature to generally like a woman who tries to be a man.

Obviously if no one gives a masculine woman attention, she will become sad.

Plus, Canadian and American women are the least desirable women on the planet because of their adopted masculine lifestyle.

[ad17939]

Ok so there is pressure on all women to look like Angelina Jolie, then one would think that a lot of women would be striving to stay healthy and live an active lifestyle. However, we have the opposite, fat women everywhere, 75% of the population is overweight. What gives?

[embracingreality]

Women were unhappy with exhausting lives staying home all day while their husbands earned a living. Burdened with children (when they weren't at school 7 hours a day) American women were in slavery. Pushing those buttons on modern appliances, drinking coffee, watching television, talking on the phone for hours, agonizing! Fortunately feminism released the slaves to have careers of their own.

Turns out a career is just a fancy word for a life of drudgery in a mundane job.

Men already knew that..

[Eabranth]

I'm unhappy.

I can't grow old.

There's too much pressure.

We have more responsibility.

Men blah blah blah...

Ah you're a woman, Suck it up... life sucks.

(and don't say it's sexist. If I said Ah you're a man suck it up you wouldn't give a shit.)

[Lulmaarraak1]

21:30 This woman actually thinks the relationship situation in the west is benificial to women? My god where did she grow up? For a guy it's a hell of a challenge to get sex or a relationship. A woman can choose to have sex "today" or find a partner with much more ease. Yeah there are (slightly) more women than men, but the demand for women exceeds that for men by far. As for the topic: career =/= happiness, feminists have misguided women into chosing work over kids. It's all about the children.

[MRclutch3000]

no one forced women to get married!!!!!!!

[ir0nwarfare]

men will become happier as we age simply because we are built for this way of life and have lived so for centuries and as we age the more accustomed we are to this life. women have been forced to enter our world only recently, so they find it unbearable and the older they get the worse it is to contend in a male world which they are not built for. i will say this, the solution does NOT lie with modifying the male world to accomodate females, as is the case today, but rather this is the problem.

[TheAdept33]

I became less happy listening to these women, coincidence I think not.

[bweazel]

@000rockergirl And what "mission" would that be?

[bweazel]

@gamenode Well said.

[000rockergirl]

girls we will get there one day , dont rush we can be who we are, our daughters will carry out our misson i trust our young women