The news must come as a shock to most, but it turns out that liberal women in the US are very unhappy. A recently released poll from the American Family Survey held in 2024 shows that only 12% of liberal women are satisfied with their lives and that they are three times more likely to experience loneliness compared to conservative women.
The data reinforces a number of surveys over the years which reveal a continuing plunge in relative happiness among progressive western women despite their admission that they have more independence than ever before.
Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and fellow at the Institute for Family Studies who analyzed the survey’s data, said he believes there are a couple of reasons why conservative young women are more likely to be happier than their liberal counterparts.
“We’ve seen in the research that conservative women tend to be more likely to embrace a sense of agency and to have the sense that they are not, in any way, the victim of larger structural realities or forces,” he told Fox News Digital. “They’re also less likely to catastrophize about public events and concerns,” and “more likely to think of themselves as captains of their own fate,” Wilcox added.
The survey also notes that conservative women are more likely to accept biological and social differences between males and females. The ideal was thought to be common sense for thousands of years but has come under fire from feminists in the past decade as a “social construct of the patriarchy”. The deconstruction of societal norms has been so pervasive, governments across the western world have tried to encode intersectional feminist taboos into law and punish people who remain skeptical.
One side effect of the rise of feminist authority that liberals apparently did not expect is the decline in relative happiness of women. The issue was fist noticed around 2009 when a study out of the University of Pennsylvania stunned the mainstream media – Despite decades of greater access to the jobs market, institutional influence and life options since the 1970s, young women have become increasingly less happy compared to their counterparts of past generations. Though the study avoids addressing the problem of feminism directly, it does suggest that modern constructs may play a major role in creating anxiety for women.
While men’s personal happiness has also been in sharp decline in recent decades, their financial opportunities have remained relatively static. For women, financial and social opportunity has skyrocketed (along with access to college education), but their decline in happiness is even more dramatic than men.
The American Family Survey helps to clarify the source of the happiness decline by separating out women according to their ideological leanings. It’s not conservative women that are dragging those numbers down, it’s leftist women.
It makes sense. Before the 1970s the role of men as breadwinners was well established while women’s primary concerns focused on the household and family. Men are more psychologically inclined to compartmentalize problems associate with risk and anxiety, especially when in the role of provider and protector. The thing that drives men to unhappiness is not hard work and sacrifice, but not being able to fulfill the roles they are designed for.
By extension, it may be that liberal women today are suffering from a similar affliction; they are unhappy because they are not fulfilling the roles they are biologically designed for. In other words, both men and women were happier under the “patriarchy”, when men protected and provided while women took care of the home and nurtured their children.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/15/2025 – 22:45
