Too Many Choices, Too Few Opportunities

There is an incredible passage in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar about choice.  The novel’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is thinking about her future:

I saw my life branching out before me like a…fig tree…From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was an…amazing editor…and another fig was a pack of…lovers with odd names and offbeat professions…and beyond and above these were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing the rest.

This quote was the first thing that came to mind reading Maureen Dowd and Marcus Buckingham‘s recent columns suggesting that feminsim and women’s explosion of choice have lead to our increasing unhappiness since the early 1970s.  The funny thing is that The Bell Jar came out in 1963, about 10 years before one would expect to see the paradox of choice so eloquently described.

Perhaps women do have more choices than they did in the 1970s.  It has become vastly more socially acceptable to be a single parent, or a same-sex parent, or not a parent at all.  At the office, women are less discredited by virtue of gender than they have been in the past.  And certainly women have many more educational options than they did thirty years ago.

But there is a difference between choice and opportunity.  Just because we have a wider array of choices doesn’t make the outcomes any less depressing.  Just as in 1963, it seems that if we choose one fig, many of the others rot at our feet.  This may be the biggest reason why women with children (both stay-at-home and working) are less happy than their childless peers.  It is particularly that fig — of husband, home and family — that continues to limit our opportunities.

Marcus Buckingham and others respond to women’s decreasing happiness by offering pithy self-help info, and some of this can be useful.  But it seems to me that creating opportunities for women that allow them to pursue one life avenue without ruining their chances for success in another might be a more widespread solution.  In practice that means changing the corporate culture so that motherhood is no longer penalized.  It means social structures that allow women — and men too — to consider changing careers without fear of losing healthcare and other basic benefits.

It also means making our institutions of higher learning at the college, but especially at the graduate levels, accessbile to more people.  Between the cost of taking tests, applying and getting through a graduate program, only the very wealthy can meaningfully afford to gain the critical skills that would allow someone to change or enhance a career through education.  Women, nearly 40% of whom are the primary breadwinners in their households, are unlikely to be able to complete a graduate degree in a time-frame that would maximize the benefit of that degree.

As feminism has made great strides, government, academic and corporate structures haven’t adapted.  The choices are there, but any one of them still requires dramatic sacrifice.  I suspect allowing some of these options to co-exist comfortably in our lives would go a long way towards happiness.

Related links:

• Barbara Ehrenreich disputes the idea that women are getting sadder in The Huffington Post; the author of the study she attacks fights back on The New York Times Freakonomics blog.
• TIME Magazine explores What Women Want Now, and considers feminism and women’s happiness.
• Katha Pollitt’s take on the women and happiness brouhaha at The Nation.
• A Double X conversation between Kerry Howley, Sharon Lerner and Amanda Marcotte about women, happiness, children and the workplace.