“Because I can” is spectacularly freeing.

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.

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?

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.

Across the board, women are on a gerbil wheel, running to catch up—to their own expectations, to outside ideals, to men—and never quite making it.

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.

It is instead about all of the ways in which Americans carry, and our institutions reflect, a profound and abiding antipathy toward women’s day-to-day enjoyment and our broader fulfillment.

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?

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.