Up until that point, I had spent most of my life doing things right.

But in those nighttime hours speeding down the East Side, I would look at the outer borough lights and the imposing bridges and this impossibly bright city and remind myself to grasp at the one thing that made me happy: at least you're here. I would slump back, gaze out, and silently calculate how long I had to sleep before I had to be back in midtown Manhattan. It was usually dark, maybe 11 p.m., maybe 3 a.m. I took that drive probably a hundred times. I would look out the window across the river at the lit-up Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens, then the Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, and finally the three bridges-Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn-the last of which would take me home. Ultimately the greatest service a woman can do to her community is to be happy the degree of revolt and irresponsibility which she must manifest to acquire happiness is the only sure indication of the way things must change if there is to be any point in continuing to be a woman at all.į OR THREE YEARS of my midtwenties, the happiest I felt was in the backseat of a car, late at night, driving down the FDR on the east side of Manhattan. Here, she provides an outline for a feminist movement we all need and a blueprint for how policy, laws, and society can deliver on the promise of the pursuit of happiness for all. If our laws and policies made women’s happiness and fulfillment a goal in and of itself, Filipovic contends, many of our country’s most contentious political issues - from reproductive rights to equal pay to welfare spending - would swiftly be resolved.įilipovic argues that it is more important than ever to prioritize women’s happiness-and that doing so will make men’s lives better, too. And never before have the requirements for being a “good mother” been so extreme.

Never before have the standards of feminine perfection been so high. Never before have women at every economic level had to work so much (whether it’s to be an accomplished white-collar employee or just make ends meet). In this world of unfinished feminism, men have long been able to “have it all” because of free female labor, while the bar of achievement for women has only gotten higher. In The H-Spot, Filipovic argues that the main obstacle standing in-between women and happiness is a rigged system. What do women want? The same thing men were promised in the Declaration of Independence: happiness, or at least the freedom to pursue it.įor women, though, pursuing happiness is a complicated endeavor, and if you head out into America and talk to women one-on-one, as Jill Filipovic has done, you’ll see that happiness is indelibly shaped by the constraints of gender, the expectations of feminine sacrifice, and the myriad ways that womanhood itself differs along lines of race, class, location, and identity.

The H-Spot by Jill Filipovic