This kind of happiness, of pleasure fulfillment and fulfillment of purpose, is missing for a great number of American women. That’s not because women don’t pleasure-seek or fail to find meaning in their lives; it’s because even though the concept of happiness is written into the founding document of the United States, it wasn’t meant for us.

Often, you’ll see this billed as “choice” or as women pursuing personal happiness because the language of feminism has been neatly co-opted by a strain of peculiarly American individualism.

If we focus on what makes women’s lives happier, healthier, better, more fulfilling, and more pleasurable, many other progressive goals will naturally follow, and we will have a new language with which to frame and advocate for issues of fundamental fairness and egalitarianism.

No one has ever suggested it is her right to be happy. Instead, she hears she should be appreciative, and maybe a little bit sorry for availing herself of help.

Our identities are too often defined by our relationships to other people—wife, mother, daughter—and prominent politicians defend women’s rights by describing us relationally to men.

The answer isn’t to simply try to be better at the limited tasks set before us. The answer is to ask, What would we make if we had all the tools? What do we want?

The answer isn’t to simply try to be better at the limited tasks set before us. The answer is to ask, What would we make if we had all the tools? What do we want?

Conservatives saw welfare and poverty alleviation programs as undermining the nuclear family, allowing women—and black women in particular—to be government-dependent heads of households instead of husband-dependent domestic helpmeets.

What could topple the most stubborn roadblocks is a feminism and a politics that reorient themselves away from simple equality and toward happiness and pleasure.