What Women Want Next

by Susan Maushart

What Women Want Next is a guide to the perplexed of both genders. It reviews the evidence on women’s well-being, at the same time examining the barriers to happiness that feminism forgot, especially women’s extraordinary capacity to carry guilt and accept blame. With warmth, humour and unblinking honesty, What Women Want Next sweeps out the accumulated cobwebs of forty years of feminist rhetoric to discover the eternal secret of what makes women really happy…for now.

"When I was a teenager, I thought love would solve everything. In my early 20s. I thought sex would solve everything. By my late 20s, I thought a career would solve everything. At age 30, I thought marriage would solve everything, and then…when it didn’t….I was sure that motherhood would. By my late 30s, following a brief period of certainty that therapy would solve everything. I became convinced that divorce would solve everything. At 40, I saw how absurd this all was and decided to renovate.’

There have been many rallying cries associated with feminism’s first forty years – from ‘equal pay for equal work’ to ‘take back the night’. But ‘forget your troubles, come on, get happy’? Hardly. In her groundbreaking and eloquent new book, Susan Maushart is on the trail of the holy grail: happiness. Maushart turns her trademark passion, razor-sharp wit and unerring sense of style loose on the essential elements of a woman’s life – love and sex, marriage and motherhood, friends and family, career and chocolate. Creating a life of fulfilment and meaning, Maushart argues, is within the grasp of almost all of us.

So what do you really want? More and better sex? Less sex? A stellar career? True love, a big fat wedding, children? Are you still trying to Have it All, or would you settle for five minutes of peace and quiet you can get by locking yourself in the bathroom once a fortnight? " Dr Susan Maushart

Genres: Personal Development

259 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Columnist, author and social commentator Dr. Susan Maushart is a mother of three teenagers. For over a decade, her weekly column has been part of a balanced breakfast for readers of the Weekend Australian Magazine. Maushart is heard regularly on ABC Radio's popular online series 'Multiple Choice', and is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her four books have been published in eight languages, and her essays and reviews have appeared in a host of international publications. She holds a PhD in Media Ecology from New York University. Maushart's first book was the award-winning Sort of a Place Like Home, a history of the Moore River Settlement (later depicted in Philip Noyce's 2002 film classic Rabbit-Proof Fence). The bestselling The Mask of Motherhood was hailed by the London Times as "a feminist classic," and Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women started arguments right around the globe. Her book, What Women Want Next, looks at the question of feminine fulfilment in a post-feminist world.
She moved to Perth, Western Australia from New York 19 years ago but insists she is only passing through.

Reviews

[Elyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book because the author used her own struggles with seeking (and failing to find) fulfillment to explore what women want, what makes them happy, and what prevents them from finding contentment. She cites numerous research and studies to make her case. It was interesting to see the differences between genders and the challenges for women to create a meaningful life on their own terms rather than continually trying to adapt to the values of a dominant male culture.

In the final analysis the book did not deliver what I had hoped. I was seeking some clear cut solutions to the problems and issues that the author so expertly outlined. Maybe there are no easy answers, but I think greater focus (or more of an attempt) toward solutions might have helped. Also, like most contemporary books about feminism, the focus was mainly on middle and upper class women and not those women who really lack the luxury of so many choices.

[Frangipani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just love Maushart's irreverent humourous style of writing.