Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Surprise! People With Low Expectations Tend to Be More Content With Their Lot In Life

Well, yea.

That's why you don't teach women to read. Or slaves. Or anybody else you want to control. They might realize there's something else out there. They might start thinking things could be really different.

1 comments so far. Got something to say?

Anonymous said...

I see this study didn't take into account whether unattached progressive women are happier than their married counterparts.

It sounds like the researchers started from the presumption that the ideal state of a woman is "wife", and went from there to find out how she can be most happy in that state (by resigning herself to traditional gender roles). The big white elephant in the living room is the various studies indicating that marriage is for men: men in unhappy marriages are less prone to depression than single men, while even unhappily single women are less prone to depression than married women.

Maybe the solution is not for women to resign themselves to being homemakers, but for women to stop letting themselves get tripped up by marriage. (I offer this not as "the right conclusion" but as one that's as valid as any of the short-sighted ones offered by the researchers or the article you linked to.)