It turns out greater choice and rising expectations are an increasing burden on one's psyche. Many of our lives are much better on many objective measures, yet we're more and more unhappy. We're optimizing for the wrong things.
I think part of it is the old feminist theory of the "second shift" [1]; they have careers now, but they're working twice as much as they used to, doing the bulk of the housework and childrearing, and keeping a full time job. Men these days share more housework than their fathers, which mitigates the problem.
However, with the rise of living costs, now both partners need a full-time job, and the domestic labor is still there; more work needs to be done than before, despite technology making the individual worker more productive. It's not a surprise that fewer people are able to have children; they have more work and are still just barely paying the bills.
In the 70s, there was a movement called the "International Wages for Housework Campaign," which argued that women should be paid a salary for domestic labor, which is essential to society, and that this is an essential component of Women's Liberation [2]. It's interestingly contrary to the view that feminists are all liberal individualists who don't believe in men and women being different.
Or maybe life satisfaction has been going down for every gender because we live in a horrible system that asks too much of the individual? With women in the workplace now they also get to suffer under the stress of capitalism on top of also being expected to shoulder the majority of domestic and childrearing tasks in the household.
I don't see this as a "biology is destiny" issue, I see this as a women are still facing pressures from the past and facing pressures of the present.
By that logic, men should be getting happier if now they don’t need to do either the breadwinning or the child raising?
I don’t think biology is deterministic, but it is a factor, for both sexes. (Note that surveys show little to no difference between men and women when it comes to the question of whether they want children and how many.) My suggestion is instead that we have a market failure. People have choices, but not necessarily the ones that will make them happy. The solution to market failure is, of course, regulation of the market, but western individualists don’t want to hear that.
> By that logic, men should be getting happier if now they don’t need to do either the breadwinning or the child raising?
That doesn't follow from what they said. Men never had to do the child raising. Men probably do more childraising and housework than they used to do in the past, because they've been sharing domestic labor more as a result of the spread of feminism. OP is saying that the amount of work between a heterosexual couple has risen: before, it was the man doing a full-time salaried job, and the woman doing housework, cooking, shopping, and childraising as her full-time, unpaid job; and now they're both working full-time, and they have to split the domestic labor between them somehow, or, it's all on the woman and the man does no more than he used to do.
This is a bit oversimplified, though. There were always working-class women who worked as maids or in shops, or, in the 20th century, as teachers and secretaries. Those lower-class women just weren't paid that much. They always had a "second shift" [1], but since the 60s, it's spread to all women.
This is the worse kind of antifeminist argument. "Women say that they prefer the modern world to a more patriarchal system, but actually they are wrong and really would prefer the old ways."
You’re assuming that “women” asked for the full package of changes we ended up with. I’d argue that their focus was more on being able to vote and being able to have bank accounts, and the sexual revolution was driven more by liberal men than by a broad coalition of women: https://blog.ninapaley.com/2019/08/23/andrea-dworkin-on-the-... (“Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.”). The package of changes was “women get to be able to act like men, in the workplace and in dating,” without regard to women’s distinct realities and preferences in both spheres.
More over, the disconnect here isn’t between what “women” want and what they say they want. The disconnect is between the beliefs and attitudes of a minority of elite liberal men and women, and the average woman, especially the average non-college educated woman.
