The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness

As we so often repeated, what we need is more time, more money, not more work. And we need day care centers, not just to be liberated for more work, but to be able to take a walk, talk to our friends, or go to a women’s meeting.

More recently, the ideal woman has been whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure—of “lifestyle.”

recognizing hidden care and domestic labor in economic life, • prioritizing human well-being alongside other metrics of wealth, • correcting for unequal access to authority and agency, • asserting the validity and inescapability of ethical judgment, and • intersecting gender analysis with that of race, class, and other forms of identity.

Consider what Kuhn famously argued: that a paradigm shift happens when we encounter anomalies that can’t be explained by the paradigm responsible for progress thereto. So here’s our anomaly: that industrial-age wealth hasn’t neatly powered lives lived meaningfully well; that near-term profit, gross product, and hyperconsumption haven’t produced a f