The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness

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.

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.

Our political and cultural priorities aren’t about making life more enjoyable but about getting ahead, attaining bigger and better things, “having it all.” But the system is rigged: Men have long been able to “have it all” because of free female labor.

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.

Of course women can’t flourish in a system that needs us as support pillars for someone else’s building. We’re here to prop it up, not to live in it. This is not a place that was built for us to thrive.

But of course the self-made man wasn’t actually self-made; not only did he benefit from a system that was built on the backs of, and systematically disadvantaged, people of color—because the self-made man was invariably white—he could always count on the free labor of his wife, who was expected to sacrifice her own self-actualization and independen

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.

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.

I hesitated because a series of unearned racial and social-class privileges makes my experience of American womanhood an overrepresented outlier, but also because I worried any woman who says she does things just because it feels good sounds entitled and not appropriately—and femininely—deferential and self-effacing.