A Book Review by Jocelyn Crawley

How in the world were women convinced that doing laundry, preparing meals, and bolstering male egos and power would make them happy? In her important book The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed discusses happiness as a problematic issue for people in general and women and people of color specifically. The book is meaningful for feminist readers, given its presentation of multiple ways in which the invented concept of happiness precludes women from conceptualizing and achieving the experience of elation and satisfaction outside the parameters that patriarchy has prescribed for them. That the text has a feminist slant becomes evident at its onset. In the introduction to the book, Sarah Ahmed notes that “In describing happiness as a form of world making I am indebted to the work of feminist, black, and queer scholars who have shown in different ways how happiness is used to justify oppression” (2). She goes on to note that “feminist critiques of the happy housewife, black critiques of the myth of the happy slave, and queer critiques of the sentimentalization of “domestic bliss” have taught me most about happiness and the very terms of its appeal” (2). As the book unfolds, Ahmed presents the reader with multiple problems that unfold in the context of happiness, frequently contextualizing the issue of being happy within a feminist framework. 

In Chapter 1 of the text, Ahmed introduces the reader to the concept of happiness. Although a specific, definitive definition is not provided, one might argue that this is one of the greatest strengths of the book. Specifically, the lack of a clear, unifying definition of happiness affords feminist readers the opportunities to think critically about what it means to be happy and which social constructs have and continue to impact what we think states of elation should look and feel like. In generating discourse regarding this topic, Ahmed notes that happiness is directly related to things. Specifically, she notes that “I might be moved by something in such a way that when I think of happiness I think of that thing” (21). Ahmed goes on to provide individuals with several other frameworks through which to understand the nature and implications of happiness, including the notion that people are not always made happy by the same things; moreover,  a condition of freedom is the ability to independently choose which things make one happy. For example, she notes that freedom involves the ability to “be made happy by different things” (27), with this reality meaning that individuals will be uniquely impacted by the things they gravitate towards or away from. Ahmed goes on to point out that “Even if we desire different things we would have in common the desire for happiness” (30). In Chapter 2, Ahmed makes the feminist implications of interrogating happiness plain by opening with a reference to Betty Friedan’s discourse on the fantasy of happiness attached to the housewife. Specifically, Ahmed references Friedan’s assertion that “the happy housewife is a fantasy figure that erases the signs of labor under the sign of happiness” (50). Within the fallacious rhetoric of the happy housewife is the idea that women are happy performing domestic labor and immersion within the world of domesticity constitutes an act of volitional will and desire. This rhetoric removes the issue of women completing housework from its appropriate associations, including its connection to the perpetuation of economic inequality given that this type of gendered labor constitutes 1. an unequal distribution of labor as well as 2. unpaid labor. Specifically, women have traditionally completed the majority of housework and this work is generally unpaid, with the lack of pay oftentimes being justified with the rhetoric of it constituting a “labor of love.” 

As she draws attention to the fallacious nature of the argument that women derive sustained and profound levels of happiness from the world of housework, Ahmed juxtaposes Friedan’s awareness of this false claim to bell hooks’s consciousness of the problematic nature of Friedan’s claims. Specifically, hooks points out that at the time in which Friedan composed The Feminine Mystique, over ⅓ of women were working outside of their homes. This reality was accompanied by another significant one–many of these women wanted to be housewives but could not due to economic necessity. Moreover, hooks drew awareness to how Friedan’s solution to the myth of the happy housewife ignored other undesirable realities that the liberation from domesticity would entail. Namely, poor women of color would likely be the individuals who took over the domestic tasks of white women who exited their homes to enter the ostensibly liberating world of the workforce. In recognizing these realities, Ahmed notes that “when we track this figure of the happy housewife, we need to think of what the figure does, and how that figure works to secure not just ideas of happiness but ideas of who is entitled to happiness” (51). To paraphrase, readings of Friedan and hooks’s work could easily lead to the inference that happiness is extended to privileged white women within an ideological and material framework of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. 

As many radical feminists have argued in context of the pseudo-solutions presented in response to the articulation of the “happy housewife” problem, the purpose and work of truly radical politics is not for white women to share power with white men within an inequitable capitalist economic framework in which attaining and maintaining power means amassing wealth to oneself and others who assent to embodying positions of privilege. Within that system, the majority of individuals continue earning minimal, laughable wages which ensure that they are just getting by or, as is the case for many, not getting by at all. This reality is made evident by ta few privileged white women escaping the sexist myth of a “happy housewife” to attain a certain level of autonomy and independence within the workforce. This “liberation” is actually a new, perhaps subtler form of the slavishness women have been acclimated to.  In this new form of subordination, white women are still treated like second class citizens within the workforce and the identity of poor women of color as subordinated individuals whose subjectivity is always in question is reinforced as their work life looks like caring for the houses and children of other people rather than attending to the betterment of themselves, their families, and any property or resources they may have been able to accumulate within the oppressive racist structure which systematically precludes black and brown persons from amassing wealth. 

As Ahmed’s text progresses, happiness is problematized in new contexts. Specifically, she reveals the role that prototypical, patriarchal happiness scripts play in dehumanizing queer people. In the chapter “Unhappy Queers,” Ahmed opens with a reference to the attempt of author Vin Packer to publish a lesbian pulp novel entitled Spring Fire. In order to publish the novel, the publisher insisted that the text not have a happy ending. Specifically, the publisher stated that the lesbian character’s lover had to be represented as sick or crazy. Additionally, the central character had to decide that she was not actually queer by the novel’s ending. In analyzing the publisher’s insistence, Ahmed notes that “Queer fiction in this period could not give happiness to its characters as queers; such a gift would be readable as making queers appear “good” (88). 

           In considering Packer’s dilemma and Ahmed’s assessment of it, the reader can infer that happiness becomes a political tool used to inundate people in specific ideological frameworks designed to engender various acts of conformance. In this case, the structure of a text is organized to teach readers two things. First, queer people cannot be happy if they are queer. Second, being queer is not good, which is why the gift of happiness is not extended to individuals who identify as such. In drawing attention to the role that happiness plays in enabling progressive thinkers to understand the political import of being happy, Ahmed enables the reader to grasp how it exists as a manipulative tool that works to ensure that the oppression of non-heterosexuals remains perpetual. In this case, oppression transpires through an ideological apparatus that involves denying queer people happiness if they choose to maintain allegiance to what heterosexual society deems nonnormative sexual practices and identifications. Although the reader might initially view the word “oppression” as an inappropriate interpretation of what transpires when an individual is denied access to the realm of happiness, its appropriateness is located in the reality that denying a person the ability to be happy transpires in context of the attempt to mute or mutate their identity. In this case, the reader is encouraged to question the viability of being queer given its inability to produce happiness; the questioning of the denial of happiness is designed to lead the queer individual back into the normative realm of heterosexuality where true happiness is proposed to exist in the “good” and “right” ways that it should. 

As Ahmed’s text progresses, she provides even more examples of how happiness is deeply imbricated within systems of oppression. In the chapter entitled “Melancholic Migrants,” for example, she argues that the British conquest of India reveals the role that colonizers play in justifying the subjugation of Indian people with the assertion that they are contributing to the development and proliferation of happiness. Specifically, Ahmed references how the imperial project of British conquest involves (re)educating natives. James Mill, for example, utilizes the language of maximizing happiness to support the imperialist project of subordinating India upon noting that the process of educating natives is conducive to constructing happiness. Within this educational framework, the colonial project is “imagined as a form of moral training or habituation” (129).  The morals and habits that natives learn under the umbrella of British colonization are thought to produce a happiness that is associated with being or becoming civilized. In noting this, Ahmed writes, “the education of the native became a matter of morality, of teaching the natives the path to happiness as the path to civilisation” (129). Within this framework, what constitutes civilization is contingent upon what the British regime says is civilized; the reality of the colonization of the natives is not subjected to forms of scrutiny which would render the uprooting of an entire culture and the habits and morality associated with it as uncivilized or problematic Yet this system of producing happiness through the colonizing process of replacing Indian culture and habits with a new educational system is both uncivilized and problematic insomuch as the process of producing happiness also involves erasing identity. Ahmed notes Macaulay’s assessment of this reality in his text “Minute on Indian Education.” In this text, he notes that, within the colonial education project, Indians were “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (129). In interpreting Macaulay’s interpretation of colonial rule and its impact, Ahmed concludes that “Becoming an individual thus means becoming English” (129). In other words, the British colonial project negated Indian identity in the process of creating a world of happiness which it deemed such in context of seemingly desirable sociocultural products such as being civilized. Within this framework of becoming happy by becoming like the English, the other “becomes happy not in the sense of feeling happy but in the sense of acquiring good habits, which might involve an affective disposition: you learn to be affected in the right way by the right things” (129). As Ahmed and other authors argue, this happiness is problematic for many reasons, including 1. the fact that whether the individual is actually happy is questionable and 2. happiness becomes as, Ahmed says, “a justification of empire” (130). 

The feminist slant of The Promise of Happiness is made evident not only in the questioning of the “happy housewife,” but also in the questioning of the racist implications of the pseudo-solutions proposed. Radical feminist theory is grounded in anti-racist theorizing. The anti-colonial slant of the text can be situated within a feminist framework as well, given that feminism finds its home within an ideological framework that summarily rejects systems of domination that legitimate the subordination and erasure of people. This feminist slant is not confined to the examples I have provided thus far; rather, the text is replete with example after example of systems of domination subordinating individuals in ways that are continually articulated in terms of a rhetoric of happiness, even as they inundate subordinated people in a realm of being that is antithetical to it. 

At one point in the text, Ahmed mentions that, within the constructed realm of happiness, one’s wedding day is oftentimes considered the “happiest day of your life” (29). Ahmed’s inclusion of this quote draws attention to the feminist axiological framework, which recognizes how traditional structures of society–including weddings and the marriages they initiate and symbolize–are oftentimes antithetical to the vision of women existing as independent, autonomous beings who possess substantive levels of subjectivity. It is for this reason that the idea of a wedding being the happiest day of one’s life can be called into question. Specifically, a day that oftentimes represents and precedes a life of sexual servitude and unpaid domestic work does not constitute a temporal period connotative of happiness. Rather, it suggests the inverse–the onset of misery. 

Although The Promise of Happiness was written in 2010, it is still germane to issues that are unfolding in feminist communities today. In the 21st century, women are still pressured to have children and, as many female people attest, one of the arguments frequently utilized to legitimize the pressure is that procreating can and does make a woman happy. Additionally, many researchers still consistently produce findings indicating that married women are happier than single women. These findings suggest that women are still being inundated in rhetoric and empirical data which indicate that the paths feminists have oftentimes found to be saliently antithetical to happiness–marriage and motherhood–are still given the primacy and power necessary to shape our understanding of what it can and does mean to be fulfilled and joyful in a patriarchal world. Irrespective of the research that exists and the rhetoric that women are exposed to regarding the bliss associated with familial life, we still live in a world where the most significant threat to a woman’s safety is a man–oftentimes, an intimate partner. In other cases, a male family member such as a son. For this reason, women — especially feminists who are conscious of and receptive to the ongoing threat that men pose to their happiness —should be cognizant of the role that happiness scripts continue to play in constructing fictional worlds that promise bliss but often end in violence or other outcomes that catalyze deep dissatisfaction. When readers remember that happiness is a construct tied to political understandings of power and rhetorical strategies designed to maintain the status quo rule of white men, the dangers of allowing the promise of happiness to cloud judgment, catalyze conformity, and occlude subjectivity become evident.  

Jocelyn is a 40-year-old radical feminist who believes that male violence is the most egregious problem on the planet, particularly concerning manifestations of sexual violence against women and girls. When not writing about radical feminist topics, Jocelyn enjoys yoga and building community with like-minded individuals who are sick of patriarchy precluding us from having nice things.