Zeal For Truth

It may come as a surprise to some to read that men are now happier than women. Scientific research is showing that the feminist revolution has appeared to yield depressing results. Two studies in particular indicate that perhaps we haven’t “Come along way, baby!”

It comes as no surprise that the reaction of the media is to uphold feminist values. According to a NY Times article, the real problem isn’t that women are finding their “equal” roles aren’t making them happy, it’s really that men aren’t pulling their fair share. However, a closer look reveals:

On average, women are less happy with their marriage than men and women have become less happy with their marriage over time. However, men have also become less happy with their marriage over time and thus, the gender gap in marital happiness has been largely stable over time.

It is interesting to juxtapose these trends in satisfaction in work and family life with time use data describing the commitment of men and women to the domestic and market spheres. Robinson and Godbey (1999) show that women decreased the time they spent each week doing housework and childcare by more hours between 1965 and 1985 than they increased their hours in the labor force. During the same period, men’s hours doing housework and childcare rose by 4 hours. Between 1985 and 2000, fathers continued to increase their time doing housework and childcare, while mothers’ time doing housework continued to decrease. Women still do more household labor than men, but they have been doing less every decade. ~ Stevenson & Wolfers, pg. 72

Similarly, Alan Krueger, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, recently completed the study Are We Having More Fun Yet? which focuses on categorizing and evaluating changes in time allocation for men and women using historical data collected from 1965 through 2005. The study reports:

For men, however, there has been a gradual shift away from activities that are associated with unpleasant feelings, primarily because of a downward trend in paid work and an upward trend in more “affectively neutral downtime” activities, such as “relaxing/doing nothing” and watching television. For women, a decrease in household chores has been accompanied by an increase in market work and in time spent in neutral downtime activities. ~Krueger, pg. 12 (emphasis mine)

By these accounts women spend less time at home doing “mundane” household chores and more time outside of the home in the workplace. Meanwhile, men have picked up some of the slack and simultaneously increased their leisure time. It would seem that women should be rejoicing over their escape from domesticity.

Yet trends in self-reported subjective well-being indicate that women are less happy today than they were in the 1970s.This finding of a decline in women’s well-being, both absolutely and relatively to that of men, raises questions about whether modern social constructs have made women worse off, or alternatively about the interpretability of subjective well-being data analyzed over long-time periods. ~Stevenson & Wolfers, pg. 20

Perhaps these trends relate to findings that report from 1965-66 to 2005, working-age American women increased the amount of time spent working for pay, watching television, and caring for adults while they reduced the amount of time spent cooking, cleaning, entertaining friends and reading books (Krueger, pg. 2.) However, the decreasing happiness of women has been found to effect more than the working-age woman.

Turning to the more specific questions, the common thread appears to be that 12th grade girls increasingly find themselves to be under time pressure, with both absolute and relative declines in reported satisfaction with “time for doing the things you want”, “the way you spend your leisure time”, and “the amount of fun you are having”. Interestingly, there is also a substantial decline in the proportion of these young women reporting satisfaction with “friends and people you spend time with.” The only domain in which girls experienced an absolute increase in well-being is in satisfaction with their personal safety. ~Stevenson & Wolfers, pg. 4

Both studies indicate that women have become increasingly unhappy with their current roles in society. Apparently, women young and old are no longer doing the things that result in personal satisfaction in their own lives. Despite the “progress” in decreasing the glass ceiling of wage gaps, educational attainment, fertility control, improvements in technological changes in domestic appliances, and more freedom in the market sphere, women are not any happier. Instead, career-women, failing marriages, neglected children, unkempt homes and general unhappiness are the hallmarks of feminism.

For decades the modern housewife or homemaker has been relegated to an afterthought. Most women today, feel that they don’t have a choice to stay-home once they have children, much less, when they are childless. All too often, mothers who stay at home with their children encounter the question, “well, what do you do all day?” My very dear friend, feels infuriated each time she is asked this question because what she does is provide her children with a stable, clean, nutritious, healthy home environment. She is the heartbeat of her home. Her job is endlessly important.

Most twenty-something women, don’t consider being a stay-at-home mother an important or worthy career. In fact, they claim they don’t consider it a career at all. Yet,these same women are considered the “working wounded” because, as one article puts it, they don’t have a choice. The term,” working wounded” correctly interprets the way in which many working-mothers feel.

The Pew Research Center recently released a survey that shows mothers who work full time rate themselves lower on the question, “How good a job do you feel you’ve done so far as a parent?,” than mothers who work part time or who stay home.

Society has strayed so far into feminism that today women feel they don’t have a choice due to the economy. For many it seems virtually impossible to own a home or raise a family on one income. In fact, most young women today are not willing or even prepared for motherhood, often leading to Mommy Shock, in which they are unhappy with juggling daycare, full-time careers, marriage and motherhood. The result, according to Reuters National Marriage Project, is a decline in lasting marriages and a loss of child-centeredness for the nation. They report:

Marriage has fallen by the wayside, in part, because it receives less and less social recognition and approval. Any norm of behavior requires for its maintenance the continuing support of the community, including active social pressures to uphold it. When social approval and pressures wither, the norm weakens.

Is it any wonder that housewives and stay-at-home moms are disappearing? Southern Baptist Theological Seminary considers the problem important enough to establish a new homemaking course of study.

“We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God’s word for the home and the family,” Patterson said at the denomination’s annual meeting in June. “If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.

The homemaking program endeavors to prepare women to the model the characteristics of the godly woman as outlined in scripture. It includes courses on hospitality, interior design, cooking, sewing, child rearing, and culinary arts. Programs such as these offer young women who may otherwise not have an opportunity to study the seemingly lost art of creating a home.

As an elementary school teacher in the public education system, I am required to join the local (OEA) and national (NEA) teacher unions. Recently, the NEA celibrated “150 years in education,” and all of their “accomplishments” as a union and how far the United States has come in the past century in terms of educating children. Quite frankly, I was dumbfounded. Recent history alone has shown that Americans are increasingly appalled at the state of education in our country. So much so, that President George Bush ran on an education platform in the 2000 election and won the presidency promising to enact the “No Child Left Behind” legislation.

Since that legislation, debate has raged in favor of improving public education through federal law or de-federalizing education to a certain extent through the use of vouchers and other school choice options. It is fair to say that parents are often unhappy with the level of education their children are recieving in the public education system.

Recently a trial voucher program was piloted in the District of Columbia in Washington D.C. The Washington Post reports that this voucher program provides $ 7,500 vouchers (about half the average public expediture per student in the D.C. area) to 1,800 K-12 students who live in the D.C. area and come from low income families to transfer to private schools and escape the troubled D.C. public schools. A study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences was released recently. The report studied five key outcomes of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program: school differences; academic achievement; parental perceptions of school satisfaction and safety; student reports of school satisfaction and safety; and the impact of using a scholarship.

Key findings of the report include:

• After one year, there was no clear evidence of a statistically significant difference in test scores between students who were offered a scholarship and students who were not offered a scholarship, over the seven month school year.

• Overall, students who were offered the scholarship were performing in math and reading at levels comparable to students not offered a scholarship;

• The study’s results showed a positive impact on math achievement for two subgroups of students: students who had not previously attended a D.C. public school classified as in need of improvement and students with relatively higher baseline test scores.

• The Program had a substantial and consistently positive impact on parental satisfaction and their perceptions of school safety.

• Of the parents whose child received a scholarship, 74% gave their child’s school a grade of “A” or “B” compared to 55% of parents whose children did not receive scholarships.

It would seem then, looking at these facts, that the voucher program was sucessful in its first year because students maintained reading scores, gained in math scores, met parental expectations, and managed to do this in a period of seven months. Remember, this was done with approximately half the funds that would have been spent of these students in the same year in public schools.

Others, such as Washington Post reporters Amit R. Paley and Theola Lab disagree, their article cites voucher programs as being irrelevant and goes so far as to suggest that vouchers programs have recieved a failing grade.