The Myth of the Miserable Housewife

T hese days, the trope of the miserable housewife is pretty much ubiquitous. Betty Friedan famously termed the lack of fulfillment among traditional mothers as “the problem that has no name,” but in more recent decades there’s been no shortage of people willing to name it; indeed, our media landscape never seems to shut up about it. Nearly everyone seems to take it for granted that traditional housewives and stay-at-home moms are as depicted in endless movies and television shows: bored, wretched, anxious, and often relying on some form of “mother’s little helper” — prescription or otherwise. One of Friedan’s most unchallenged victories is that the immediate stereotype of the traditional mother that comes to the modern mind is Mad Men’s Betty Draper.

Feminist commentator Jill Filipovic summed up this widespread assumption when she declared on X: “Stay-at-home mothers are psychologically and emotionally worse off than working mothers by just about every measure, from depression to anxiety to anger; they are much more likely than working mothers to say that they are struggling, and less likely to say that they are thriving.”

Well, now we have some new data on the subject, and it doesn’t agree with Filipovic or Friedan at all.

A study from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) flatly contradicts the media-created stereotype. In fact, it turns out that women who are stay-at-home mothers are less likely than other women of childbearing age to be on medication for mental issues, less likely to report serious depression, less likely to consider suicide, and less likely to be reliant on cocktails of any type to get through the day.

Some hard data: 10 percent of stay-at-home moms report having had a “major depressive episode” in the past year, compared with 15 percent of other women. While a shocking 38 percent of women who don’t stay home with children are on psychiatric medications, a marginally less shocking 32 percent of women who choose to stay home take them. Homemaker mothers were considerably less likely to have had suicidal thoughts in the past year than their childbearing-age counterparts, at 5 percent versus 8 percent. Even the “wine mom” stereotype turns out to have little basis in reality; stay-at-home moms drink alcohol less often and take fewer drugs than other women. These conclusions are drawn from a massive dataset of almost 150,000 women between the ages of 18 and 49.

(In a twist unpredictable only to those who insist men and women are interchangeable widgets, staying home with the kids shows the opposite effect on the mental state of fathers.)

None of this, of course, means that forming traditional families are some kind of impenetrable shield against misery. America has a terrible overmedication problem, and nearly a third of traditional mothers being on psychiatric medications is nothing to crow about, nor are the astounding use rates of these medications among women generally — a “solution” to suffering that increasingly extends even to children — something to celebrate. It’s a crisis especially acute among young liberal women, with the literal majority of those who describe themselves as such having received a professional mental health diagnosis — whether because being mentally broken is the chic thing for young leftists or because they are genuinely mentally unstable, and most likely a combination of both.

There’s a lot to be said about women’s “mental health,” a bloodless term that implicitly medicalizes the search for meaning and joy in life. But what the data actually indicate is that the Betty Drapers of the world are somewhat less likely to be miserable, broadly speaking, than other women.

“Fulfillment” is a word that comes up often in Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, and yet women escaping those “comfortable concentration camps” for the independent (and lonely) modern life seem to have the least of it. In more research from Brad Wilcox’s IFS, whether they stay home or not, married mothers report satisfaction and purpose at higher rates, not lower, than the unmarried or childless.

This picture may not be what’s depicted in Hollywood, but it fits comfortably alongside a longtime social-science finding often described as the “paradox” of declining female happiness since the 1970s, both absolutely and relative to men. As women entered the workforce en masse, were given more cultural sanction for sexual escapades, and achieved more parity with men across public domains, the percentage expressing satisfaction with their overall well-being has only headed downward. It’s called a “paradox” because liberal academics cannot explain why, as women’s lives became unambiguously “better” from the feminist perspective, women continued to report being less happy.

There is no magical life-choice ticket to happiness, which remains, as Dennis Prager has always reminded us, “a serious problem.” But what the data do say is this: Far from being the prime source of anxiety and unhappiness in a narrative sold first by feminist tracts, then by relentlessly negative social media, marriage and motherhood remain the most stable and achievable sources of meaning and joy available to the vast majority of us.