[ CYPHER CODE #264]
Feminism promised freedom. It delivered mental exhaustion.

[ CYPHER CODE #265 ]
More rights didn’t bring more peace. Just more pressure.

[ CYPHER CODE #266 ]
Equality on paper doesn’t fix loneliness in practice.

BRIEFING

Grant here. For decades, we’ve been told that feminism has liberated and empowered women. But clearly, the facts, figures, and overall mood show that feminism isn't making women happier or more fulfilled... it's making them downright miserable. Let’s break it down.

A recent post on X is making the rounds, and it paints a pretty grim picture for women and their overall state of being right now. In the post it's highlighted that women’s self-reported happiness has fallen 83% since 1970. The female suicide rate is up 50% since 2000. Antidepressant use among women has climbed 250% since 1990. One in four women are on anxiety medication. Single motherhood has risen 700% since 1960.

Workforce participation has jumped 75%, but life satisfaction has dropped by more than half. College women are reporting record loneliness and depression. And according to multiple surveys, nearly 40% of women have engaged in some form of self-harm.

Clearly, somewhere along the way, feminism lost the plot...

SOURCE

* Women’s self-reported happiness down 83% since 1970

* Female suicide rate up 50% since 2000

* Antidepressant use among women up 250% since 1990

* Single motherhood up 700% since 1960

* Women on anxiety meds 1 in 4

* Female workforce participation up 75%, but life satisfaction down 200%

* College women report record loneliness and depression

* 40% of women have engaged in self-harm, ranging from cutting to suicide

Your wildest dreams have come true. You can vote and be promiscuous, and you’re unshackled from a man to take care of you and children to adore you.

Congratulations, you win. Yay, feminism.

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And there's much more than just this one social media post to back up women's mental health decline since the rise of feminism. The biggest one is a landmark study by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, which found that since the early 1970s, women’s self-reported happiness has fallen sharply across all age, income, and education levels.

SOURCE

By many measures the progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary: the gender wage gap has partly closed; educational attainment has risen and is now surpassing that of men; women have gained an unprecedented level of control over fertility; technological change in the form of new domestic appliances has freed women from domestic drudgery; and women’s freedoms within both the family and market sphere have expanded. Blau’s 1998 assessment of objective measures of female well-being since 1970 finds that women made enormous gains. Labor force outcomes have improved absolutely, as women’s real wages have risen for all but the least educated women, and relatively, as women’s wages relative to those of men have increased for women of all races and education levels. Concurrently, female labor force participation has risen to record levels both absolutely and relative to that of men (Blau & Kahn, 2007). In turn, better market outcomes for women have likely improved their bargaining position in the home by raising their opportunities outside of marriage.

Given these shifts of rights and bargaining power from men to women over the past 35 years, holding all else equal, we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness toward women and away from men. Yet we document in this paper that measures of women’s subjective well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively to that of men. While the expansion in women’s opportunities has been extensively studied, the concurrent decline in subjective well-being has largely gone unnoted. One exception to this is Blanchflower and Oswald (2004), who study trends in happiness in the United States and Britain noting that, while women report being happier than men over the period that they examine, the trend in white women’s happiness in the United States is negative over the period. We will show in this paper that women’s happiness has fallen both absolutely and relative to men’s in a pervasive way among groups, such that women no longer report being happier than men and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men. Moreover, we show that this shift has occurred through much of the industrialized world.

But it's more than just being thrust into the workforce that has women reaching for a bottle of Prozac faster than you can say "girl boss." At the end of the day, women are biologically made for bearing children and inhabiting a more nurturing role. Of course, there are plenty of valid exceptions, but at the end of the day, a woman's entire genetic makeup is that of a "nurturer." So, it's not surprising that in this day and age of "shouting your abortion" and treating men like pariahs, it isn't exactly contributing to higher levels of life satisfaction.

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Marriage rates have collapsed, single motherhood has exploded, and the nuclear family — once the emotional backbone of stability — has been replaced by isolation. The Brookings Institution found that single mothers are more likely to suffer from depression, financial stress, and burnout than any other household group.

SOURCE

As shown in Figure 1, 32% of single mothers experience moderate or severe psychological distress, compared to 19% of married mothers. Single mothers are also more than three times as likely to experience severe psychological distress than married mothers: Seven percent of single mothers reported signs of severe distress compared to two percent of married mothers.

Part of the mental health gap between single and married mothers is likely related to the psychological burden of living in poverty. Single mothers are more likely to live in poverty: In the 2016-2018 sample, 38% of single mothers lived below the poverty threshold compared with 9% of married mothers. Figure 2 shows that, among both married mothers and among single mothers, those experiencing poverty are more likely to face mental health challenges. It is also the case that single mothers living in poverty tend to experience more distress than married mothers in poverty, and single mothers of each major race/ethnicity group have higher rates of distress than their married counterparts (see Figure 3).

DEBRIEFING

The irony couldn’t be any clearer. For decades women have been promised liberation, but what they got instead was loneliness dressed up as freedom. The fight for equality gave them access to boardrooms and ballots but stripped away their sense of belonging.

Modern feminism told women they could “have it all,” but never mentioned that “all” now includes burnout, solitude, anxiety, and antidepressants. This movement has replaced real human bonds with careerism and further convinced women that dependence on "patriarchal ideals" like children, family, and legacy was a weakness to outgrow.

But the data here isn’t at all political. It’s personal. Every spike in antidepressant use, every statistic on loneliness, is a bitter reminder that this movement sold empowerment but only delivered emptiness.

NOW YOU KNOW

Women won the vote. But they lost the framework that made life worth living.