What's Happening to Women's Happiness? By Marcus Buckingham
Oprah.com   |   October 07, 2009 What's happening to women's
happiness? Imagine it is 1969 and we're in a thriving American
city. Let's choose Detroit. The '60s were good to the Motor
City, and the future would have looked bright as new chrome.
Now, imagine stopping a working woman on Detroit's Woodward
Avenue, perhaps a young bank clerk, and asking if she would cast
her mind forward, decades into the future. Not to picture the
flying cars and space-themed restaurants that always seem to pop
up in visions of the future, but to think about the role of
women at work, in business, in government, in life. What do you
think she would have said?  1969 was an intense, rousing time
for women in America. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine
Mystique a few years earlier, and had founded the National
Organization for Women in 1966. And Gloria Steinem had just
published the essay in New York Magazine that clearly separated
the modern Women's Movement from ot