Why are modern women miserable?

"Why are modern women miserable?" was a topic of heated debate on this mornings "The Wright Stuff" on channel 5 (U.K), unfortunately I don't know what they based their premise, that women are miserable on. Implied in the question is the idea that in the past, pre-feminism, women were not miserable, but I doubt that suffragettes would have, in some cases given their lives, if they were perfectly happy. But maybe this is just a minority, maybe the majority of women would be happier in their original role? Surely the point though is that women have the choice to do either, they can in fact do anything they want.
What if it actually means that women are more miserable than men? If we assume that this is the case and that this can indeed be measured, which I really doubt, why would women be more miserable than men? Put in a different way, is there some external (i.e not internal -hormones! )factor that affects enough women that makes them significantly less happy than men or less modern (pre-feminism, suffrage), that we can generalise to the statement "Why are modern women miserable?"

My first instict is to look at a case study, myself, a women about whom I am an expert. I am not miserable. I work in a field that as a non-modern woman would have been unavailable to me, I work while my partner stays at home and looks after our children, also something that would not have been something I could have done easily in my Grandmothers generation, possibly in my mothers generation. I can not even imagine not being able to do these things, I believe they contribute to my satisfaction with my life but I can not be sure that they are things without which I would be happy. But I can say without doubt that being unable to make my own informed decisions about my life would have made me extremely unhappy.

I also believe that I am happy enough compared to men, I like my job and have a great home life, my kids are all happy and do well in school and my partner and I are very happy together. I don't seem to have more problems than my colleagues, who are mostly men and I am not more miserable than them, in fact some have occasionally expressed envy, for instance that I can leave my young family to go to conferences, where their partners do not wish them to.

Perhaps I give the wrong impression, that I live a perfect charmed life, this is very much not the case. I feel a lot of pressure from work, I would like to see my children more (like any parent, regardless of gender) I argue with my partner about how the home work-load should be shared, this last point has been a particularly sore point recently. In fact I was really angry and if things hadn't changed it could have a serious problem. It seems that this particular problem, house-work, can be a particular problem for many women, in my case I consider it to be the job of the person at home, the working person should of course help, but it is the person at homes job, along with child care; my partner didn't agree. I think many women end up taking it on, I decided that no matter what problems it caused us I was not going to get lumbered with working and all the house work, I would have stuck it out to the bitter end, whatever the outcome was. Anyway it turned out he needed guidance on how to tackle it, once he realised I was so determined and unhappy, I showed him how I would manage, and he has done really well since, after all it really isn't that difficult!

On a bit of a tangent about house work, Tony Blackburn, who was on the program that led to this post, said his partner didn't like him to do the shopping, as he did it wrong. I hear this often, and it is quite simply the most idiotic thing I have ever heard. House-work IS NOT something women have an intrinsic affinity for, we do not "see more dirt" or whatever weird thing people come up with, men and women, to explain why women often end up doing it. It is a silly excuse, and it makes men look like complete morons, I mean really, is being unable to use a hoover something you should admit to?

Anyway, I am obviously a bad case study, I can not believe that women are miserable because men won't do the house-work well and women won't make them.
My instict is that the problems arise when people have children, perhaps because women have children. However equal we are, we are not the same. The feminist revolution is recent and we can hardly expect to get it right straight-away, I think that there are probably more changes necessary, particularly when it comes to two parent working families.