Last weekend, at a friend’s house for tea, we made competitive cupcakes and discussed the big stuff (children, nits, work, getting old, the Lakeland catalogue) while husbands and offspring frolicked outside. Pouring cake mixture into dinky moulds, my friend — publisher, mother of three, four if you count the spouse (which we do) — paused to lick her fingers. “Do you ever wonder,” she said, “whether our generation of women has got it all wrong?”

Funny, that. On Monday, I awoke to reports of a new study from America claiming that modern women are miserable. A long and impenetrable scientific tome (insomniacs, download it), the basic conclusion of The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness is that, despite unprecedented access to jobs and objective improvements in the quality of life, American women are markedly less satisfied than their 1970s counterparts.

Ordinarily I would dismiss such a thing as dreary anti-feminist propaganda. Then I remembered my friend’s words. Perhaps we really have got it wrong. What if I had given up work to look after my family? I pictured fondly the plumped-up cushions, the idyllic smiling faces, the neatly organised sock drawers.

Then my higher brain functions intervened: the endless coffee mornings, the loneliness, the intellectual invisibility, the simmering resentment, the gin-soaked afternoons; and I thought, not in this life. I may be considerably more grumpy and a lot less groomed than if I had been born a few decades earlier; but at least I’m not off my head on tranquillisers, or drowning at the bottom of the dishwasher. I can, and do, have a better life than my grandmother.

It’s tricky, I’ll admit, and I don’t often get it right; but I am mistress of my own life, and there are plenty of women who are not. For them, just being able to turn on a tap and have clean water is a daily delight — which is not to say no one is entitled to the occasional grumble; but it does pay to keep a sense of perspective.

The fact is, emancipation is not a one-way street. As with all complex progress, there’s a price to pay. In the case of women, it’s this: with no more barriers (the patriarchal conspiracy, corsets, the Pope) to hold us back, there is really no one left to blame but ourselves when life doesn’t turn out quite the way we had expected. Our choices are now our own; and so are our mistakes. That is the flipside of feminism: responsibility, uncertainty and a whole lot of self-doubt. A slightly panicky feeling of “what if” is common to all modern women, especially working mothers. I get this feeling a lot, especially at this time of year, when professional and family life collide in a mess of tears and missed deadlines.

Despite multiple wall charts and electronic reminders, I simply cannot keep up. In the next six weeks alone I’ve got two school fairs, one church fête, a cake sale, two parents’ evenings, two sports days and a ballet performance to applaud — not to mention endless meetings to organise/discuss the above. Quite how any of this is going to happen I have no idea. I just know it must.

While most people look forward to the balmy month of June, the working mother dreads it as the busiest time of year. Not even Christmas compares to this. That’s just a couple of nativities and maybe a charity quiz night: easy. Summer is hardcore.

Worst of all is the yawning chasm that opens up between the mothers who do, and the mothers who don’t (work, of course). Even at the best of times this tension is palpable. In the run-up to the summer holidays, it intensifies. It’s there in the party invitations (last-minute e-mail for working, handwritten scroll for non), in the pace back to the car (hurried semi-jog for working, chatty amble for non) and, crucially, in the level of parental participation. (Q: What do you mean you can’t take a day off to go on the class school trip? Don’t you care about your child’s education? A: Of course I do. It’s just that, you know, I have this little prior commitment. IT’S CALLED A JOB.) Most terrifying of all are those mothers who have given up careers to “grow” their children, very much in the manner of small businesses. Discussions about the precise location of the cake stall take on the tone of Prime Minister’s Questions; decisions regarding the pricing structure for the face-painting require at least one focus group, if not two. Not a piece of stray popcorn escapes their forensic eye. They make Sir Alan look like a part-timer.

Hardest of all is reconciling the twin masters in your life, your boss and your children. The one wants you in the office for a meeting at 3pm; precisely 20 minutes later you’re expected on the start line for your humiliation in the mothers’ race. The disappointment in your child’s eyes when you arrive sweating, late and wearing inappropriate footwear is as nothing to the disapproval of the headmistress as she (yet again) catches you checking your BlackBerry under cover of a lemon sugar pancake.

So yes, it’s by no means perfect. Maybe we were sold a bit of a pup with the whole work/life balance thing; maybe equality is not quite the deliriously ecstatic state we imagined it would be. But if we are unhappy, at least it’s an unhappiness of our own making. And that, when you consider the history of womankind, is progress indeed.

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