What Makes a Woman Happy? Reading Hooked by Asako Yuzuki
Over years, my exposure to feminist literature and theories taught me to associate confinement as a major source of women’s unhappiness. I have likely believed that the pressing need of the society -to marry and to raise a family- as a major obstacle for a woman’s fulfilment. The domestic labour, absence of finances, familial restrictions are some of the prominent hindrances. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , there is a popular fable that answers the most sought question- “ what makes a women happy?”, the answer was the freedom to choose , the freedom of making a choice and executing it in free will. However, the clear solutions of education, financial independence and greater freedom of choice did not make the dissatisfaction in women disappear (or I think so). The modern predicament has merely changed shape. Reading Hooked by Asako Yuzuki , I was bothered by a different question- Why do so many of us continue to imagine that happiness exists somewhere else, in...