Are women becoming unhappier?

Women everywhere are feeling blue, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked the mood of Americans since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, "women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier." Women felt exhilarated when in the early ’70s they were "breaking out of the domestic cocoon," but apparently all the new choices this made possible created a lot more stress.

It's not just American women, said Arianna Huffington in The Huffington Post. "Women around the world are in a funk." And this comes after four decades of women securing "greater opportunity, greater achievement, greater influence, and more money." The decline in "our collective state of mind seems to defy logic."

The declining happiness of women, said Pelle Billing in Men's News Daily, "simply means that the project to make men and women exactly the same is a futile one." The answer, of course, isn't to "go back in time and re-create stereotypical gender roles that offer little freedom to either sex." The best strategy is "to support men and women in their individual choices, and in having the lifestyles that they desire."

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