Women's happiness isn't so mysterious after all
As I mentioned in my interview with her at Reality Cast, Ariel Gore picked the right time to write a book about women and happiness. Gore didn't start out writing Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness because of a study on women's subjective happiness relative to men---and a media blitz that took a relatively small shift between men and women and used it to argue that women, being small-minded creatures, would be better off without feminism, freedom and quite possibly literacy and the right to vote. But she had the fortune to release her book during this blitz, and boy, is it a breath of fresh air. Because Gore is a logical, reasonable person who actually bothers to read the research about happiness, and unsurprisingly, the idea that having more freedom automatically makes women less happy is a thesis she engages and quickly rejects. The NY Times-style mainstream media tends to think women aren't people, because women are the opposite of men in their reckoning, so if men are people, women can't be. But Gore and all the psychologists she engages tend to think that women are people like men are, and subject to the same pressures and psychological cues. They think this mainly because of evidence and common sense.