In Michigan playwright Kitty Dubin’s newest work, The Blank Page, novelist Amy Kaplan puts her career on hold to marry and have a child, only to find herself caught between the needs of her family and a looming deadline.

Kaplan is a professional Everywoman, in her angst and sleepless nights, her relationship and parenting failures and her struggle to achieve that mythical state of Balance. Her life mirrors the picture painted by “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, published in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2009. The authors note that over the past 35 years, women’s lives have improved, but women have grown less happy over that same period of time.

This steady erosion applies in all areas – personal, work, family, marriage, home, community – despite apparent objective gains in all those areas. Economic upheaval aside, most of us would see ourselves as much better off than our mothers and grandmothers. Cultural expectations are far less restrictive; women no longer attend college just to get their “Mrs. degree”. We have the power of choice at the ballot box, in the workplace, at the grocery store.

But something’s wrong, in a way that sounds to me like Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”.

In a discussion at Friday’s “Women in Leadership Summit,” presented by the Oakland County Employment Diversity Council, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs for MGM Grand Detroit Juliette Thorpe Okotie-Eboh noted those who came of age in the 1970s were told women could have it all – the great job, the beautiful home, the perfect family. “We just had to learn to multi-task,” she said. “I think the veneer has worn off that a little bit. I think a lot of women in my generation worked themselves to death.”

Is it any wonder women are less happy? Stevenson and Wolfers examine a number of studies that shed some light on women’s lives. One of the most interesting conclusions came through the research in The Second Shift, an exploration of how work affects women’s and men’s home lives:

Women, they argued, have maintained the emotional responsibility for home and family; a point that is, perhaps, best exemplified by the familiar refrains of a man “helping” around the house or being a good dad when “babysitting” the kids. Thus, even if men are putting in more hours, it is difficult to know just how much of the overall burden of home production has shifted, as measuring the emotional, as well as physical, work of making a home is a much more difficult task.

That ”emotional responsibility,” I think, weighs heavily on women and makes their choices difficult. The unspoken parenting expectation  falls almost exclusively on mothers, from conception forward.

Consider that men can delay having a family, while women are born with biological clocks that tick away in the decades during which they are also expected to be building a career. Consider that the majority of workplaces mirror and support the structure of men’s lives, not family life.

In theatre, challenges and conflict are resolved in short order, within the characters themselves. Amy Kaplan finds her peace, and to be sure, we are all responsible for our own happiness. At the same time, it seems counterproductive for a culture to remain unchanged when we know it creates obstacles to the success of more than half our nation’s population.

Doesn’t it?

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