ABSTRACT
Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique identifies a problem that has no name by evoking what lies behind the image of the happy American housewife. What lies behind this image bursts through, like a boil, exposing an infection underneath her beaming smile. Friedan proceeds by exposing the limits of this public fantasy of happiness. The happy housewife is a fantasy figure that erases the signs of labour under the sign of happiness. The claim that women are happy, and that this happiness is behind the work they do, functions to justify gendered forms of labour not as products of nature, law or duty, but as an expression of a collective wish and desire. How better to justify an unequal distribution of labour, than to say that such labour makes people happy? How better to secure consent to unpaid or poorly paid labour than to describe such consent as the origin of good feeling?
