Are women unhappier than they were in our mom’s day?

Maureen Dowd sure thinks so; in a recent column, “Blue is the New Black.,” the New York Times columnist cites a few studies, including the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, all indicating that women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

Then she questions if “the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?”

Leslie Morgan Steiner, editor of Mommy Wars and author of Crazy Love, challenges Dowd in a recent Mommy Track’d column:

“You and I and most other American women born after 1950 have had many choices and legal protections our mothers may have silently believed in, but never enjoyed themselves. Shutting up, or being shut up, brings its own private unhappiness that no survey can ever capture.

 And anyway, I don’t really care about ‘unhappiness.’ It’s not such a bad fate. Lack of any real choices — and no ability to bitch about it —  is much worse.”

I agree that I’d rather have choices — and the ability to bitch about them — than no choice at all, and that’s what our mothers had (I am more aware of that than ever now because I’m in the middle of reading Ruth Reichl’s memoir of her mother, “Not Becoming My Mother,” in which she talks about her mother’s frustrations with what was expected of her — getting married! — versus what she truly wanted — to be a doctor.)

But I also see that our many choices have created a lot of anxiety for women; a survey of 1,000 moms in Parenting magazine's January issue, "Mad at Dad," indicates more than half of them are pissed off at their husbands because, among other things, having “children has turned our lives upside down much more than theirs.” And if I read another article or book about work/family balance, I think I’ll puke.

“How does she do it?” headlines scream.  I don’t know how “she” — meaning we working moms (although it's often messy and frenetic)  — does it, but I know why. Because we want to or, in the case of women like me, divorced moms, we, uh, don’t have a choice.

What I find particularly interesting is that men don’t seem to have been “liberated” the way women have. I mean, how many men contemplating marriage also wonder if they’ll work part time, full time or not at all once they get hitched? And yet, men say they’re happy.

What do they know that we don’t?