Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness

Abstract

In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife. In the television commercials the pretty housewives still beamed over their foaming dishpans ... But the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported ... although almost everybody who talked about it found some superficial reason to dismiss it. It was attributed to incompetent appliance repairmen (New York Times), or the distances children must be chauffeured in the suburbs (Time). (1) Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique identifies a problem that has no name by evoking what lies behind the image of the happy American housewife. What lies behind this image bursts through, like a boil, exposing an infection underneath her beaming smile. Friedan proceeds by exposing the limits of this public fantasy of happiness. The happy housewife is a fantasy figure that erases the signs of labour under the sign of happiness. The claim that women are happy, and that this happiness is behind the work they do, functions to justify gendered forms of labour not as products of nature, law or duty, but as an expression of a collective wish and desire. How better to justify an unequal distribution of labour, than to say that such labour makes people happy? How better to secure consent to unpaid or poorly paid labour than to describe such consent as the origin of good feeling? You could say that images of happy housewives have been replaced by rather more desperate ones. I would argue that there is a diversification of affects tied to this figure, which gives her a more complex affective life, but that this does not necessarily dislodge the happiness that is presumed to reside in 'what' she does, even in descriptions of relative unhappiness. After all, explanations of relative unhappiness can also function to restore the power of an image of the good life. As Friedan shows, the unhappiness of the housewife is attributed to what is around her (such as the incompetent repair men), rather than the position she occupies. Unhappiness would here function as a sign of frustration, of being 'held back' or 'held up' from doing what makes her happy. It is hence far from surprising that a recent study on happiness in the US suggested that feminist women are less happy than 'traditional housewives', as the American journalist Meghan O'Rourke explores in her aptly name article, 'Desperate Feminist Wives'. (2) Unhappiness is used as a way of signalling the need to return to something that has been lost: as if what we have lost in losing this or that is the very capacity to be happy. Happiness becomes in other words a defence of 'this and that'. As Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex: 'it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them'. (3) Happiness functions as a displacement of a social wish, and a defence against an imagined future of loss. It is important to note here that the political question of what makes people happy has acquired some urgency. Commentators have described a 'crisis' in happiness, where the crisis is announced through a narrative of disappointment: the accumulation of wealth has not meant the accumulation of happiness. For example, Layard begins his science of happiness with what he describes as a paradox, 'as Western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier'. (4) What makes this crisis 'a crisis' in the first place is of course the regulatory effect of a social belief: that more wealth 'should' have made people happier. In his book, Layard uses an evolutionary model to suggest that 'what makes us feel good (sex, food, love, friendship and so on) is also generally good for our survival'. (5) Survival here involves not just reproduction of the species, but also social reproduction: through marriage, core values are transmitted, as values that provide the foundations for a good life as well as the biological materials for new life. …