“Feminism has made women happier”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Women have more options than ever and report being less happy. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers went through decades of American survey data and found women's happiness has fallen since the early seventies, on its own and compared to men. The authors don't pin that on feminism. Here's my read. Modern feminism told women that marriage and motherhood were a trap and a corner office was freedom. Now look at who says they're very happy. The General Social Survey keeps finding it's married people more than unmarried people. You'll say I want to take back the vote. Never. The Nineteenth Amendment was justice, and a woman's worth comes from God's image, not from a movement. So skip the trap story. Get married and have the kids. If the promise was fulfillment, where is it? Opportunity is a gift. It's just not the same thing as meaning.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

Women gained education, income and opportunity, and their reported happiness went down. The movement's gains didn't deliver the happiness it promised.
Stevenson and Wolfers found that American women's subjective well-being declined from the 1970s onward, both absolutely and relative to men, even as objective measures of women's lives improved.
Modern feminism sold family as the thing holding women back. The data on who is happy keep pointing the other way, toward marriage.
The General Social Survey has consistently found that married adults are more likely than unmarried adults to describe themselves as very happy.
A woman's equal dignity doesn't come from a political movement. It comes from creation, and it was there long before anyone marched.
Genesis one twenty-seven teaches that God created humanity in his image, male and female, so both have equal worth.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Feminism won women the vote, legal equality, access to education and protection from discrimination. You can't say all that made women's lives worse.

Nate: I never said that. The vote and equal treatment under the law were right, and I'm glad for them. My claim is narrower. The promise that a career would fulfill women more than a family hasn't shown up in the happiness data, and I'd tell any young woman not to buy it.

What he grants the other side

Winning the vote and equal treatment under the law corrected real injustices.

The lines

“Opportunity is a gift. It's just not the same thing as meaning.”
“Women didn't need a movement to be equal. They needed one to be recognized as equal, and that part was right.”

Sources

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness (2009)
NORC at the University of Chicago, General Social Survey (1972-2022)
U.S. Constitution, Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
The Bible, Genesis 1:27