Money Order

The Money Management Guide for Women

Gail Shapiro

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743215435
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Make Your Money Work for You
Thirty or forty years ago, most women depended on a weekly allowance from their husbands to run the household and care for children. Although today's women share the breadwinning with their husbands or support families on their incomes alone, their money management skills simply haven't kept pace with their earning power. It's time for women to embrace a new paradigm, doing away with the notion that control of finances is a man's job.
Like no other book on personal finance, Money Order offers a new model for managing your money, one that reflects women's constantly changing money needs and helps you develop real financial savvy and resourcefulness. Based on Womankind's grassroots Financial Literacy Project, Money Order covers all the basics, including how to

• Establish and maintain good credit
• Save for your children's college education
• Manage debt
• Finance car and home purchases
• Insure yourself and your property
• Prepare for retirement

But it doesn't stop there. Packed with insider tips from women financial experts, as well as real-life stories, exercises, and useful charts and graphs, Money Order is a comprehensive primer that teaches you to treat your money as your greatest asset -- not as an endless burden.
Once you have your day-to-day financial life on track, this book will provide you with new options to save, spend, and invest your money. Money Order encourages you to share your financial knowledge with other women and to make meaningful investments that will effect real economic change in your life and the lives of others.

1

Changing the Way Women Think About Money

Contributing Authors:
Barbara R. Honthumb and Gail R. Shapiro

“There is no liberation for women—or anybody else for that matter—without economic independence. If you want control over your life, you have to support yourself.”

—ISABEL ALLENDE, WRITER

WHY DO WOMEN HAVE SUCH A HARD TIME BEING comfortable with money? Why is understanding money literally “the next frontier” for women?

We have been asked, “Why a book just for women? Are men and women really so different when it comes to dealing with money?”

Womankind’s founder and executive director Gail Shapiro answers, “I know plenty of people—men and women—who cannot balance a checkbook. I have yet to hear a man giggle about it!”

The point is that our culture expects men to be knowledgeable about and “good with” money—whether they actually are or not—and does not have a similar expectation of women. This societal expectation is not men’s fault. It is not necessarily a conspiracy against women, but rather a reflection of a male value system. In our culture, money has not been women’s traditional area of expertise—so it is not surprising that many of us have been uncomfortable with or afraid of what we do not understand.

It’s about time we got comfortable.

Let’s begin with how this value system came to be, why it is prevalent today, and how we can respond in a way that benefits both women and men.

THE ROOTS OF THE SYSTEM

From the beginning of time, men’s and women’s roles were very different. Women bore and raised the children, prepared the food, spun yarn and wove cloth for clothing, tended the elderly and the infirm, and literally kept the home fires burning. Men were the hunters, brought home the food, and, being bigger and stronger, offered security and protection from predators. We could not have survived without each successfully filling our respective roles. This even exchange worked quite well for millennia, until the Industrial Revolution began to blur the biological-based differences between women’s and men’s work.

In the introductory chapter of her landmark book, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics,1 New Zealand economist and former member of Parliament Marilyn Waring explores the basis of Western economics. At the root of our financial system is a very basic bias, indicates Waring. Work that is done directly to produce things needed for the everyday care and feeding of families, raising children, and so forth generally is unpaid work, while work that is done to produce “tokens” that can be used to obtain things needed for the everyday care and feeding of families is generally paid work.

Simply put, for centuries, women were not accustomed to being compensated for our work. If compensation was involved, the work then became the province of men. Conversely, if a woman was compensated for her work, it was because she had entered the traditional province of men.

We can look to the economics of health care for an example. Through much of the history of civilization, women took care of the health needs of each other and our families. Wise women and midwives attended to the sick and laboring, and saw to basic preventive care. With the rise of the scientific method and the evolution of Western culture, men became the “owners” of knowledge and the dispensers of scientific medicine. These wise women were then labeled witches, midwives were replaced by obstetricians, and the work that once was simply a part of the fabric of women’s life became the source of financial gain—big gain in many cases.

Despite the Oxford English Dictionary’s description of labor as “the pains and effort of childbirth: travail,” the woman in labor—the reproducer, sustainer, and nurturer of human life—does not “produce” anything. Similarly, all the other reproductive work that women do is widely viewed as unproductive … yet the satisfaction of basic needs to sustain human society is fundamental to the economic system. By this failure to acknowledge the primacy of reproduction, the male face of economics is fatally flawed.2

The social exchange of services, which is the giving and receiving of services within social networks of relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, is also regarded as economically unimportant and remains unacknowledged.3

Given Waring’s examples above, it is easy to see why women might not like, or might be uncomfortable dealing with, money: money has relatively little historical connection to the labor and lives of women. In fact, economic structure pretty much removes women, and the very things women value most, from the financial equation.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have lost much understanding of our own value to ourselves and to society. By the nineteenth century, as work became more industrialized, women’s lives became easier, but at the same time, our work became less critical for basic survival.

We can look at the way women have tried to reclaim meaningful work during the past several decades as a continuum of less-than-successful experiments. We kept house with a vengeance in the fifties, questioned it all in the sixties, tried to do it all in the seventies and eighties, and began reexamining and redefining the meaning of success in the nineties.

Many older women grew up feeling that they had no choices. Their roles were defined: until the middle of the twentieth century, most women either married and had children, or worked in one of the few jobs “appropriate” for women: nurse, teacher, secretary, waitress, or librarian.

The necessity for women in the labor force during World War II lured women out of the kitchen and into factories, munitions plants, and construction crews. Popular opinion and the media gave support and credibility to these strong, patriotic women, who filled in for our brave boys overseas. Writing in 1943, Nell Giles says:

As more men go off to war, more women must take their places. This we all know. The career girl has a better choice of top-of-the-ladder jobs than ever before. She can squeeze into places where position and money, to this time, belonged only to men.4

Working gave women not only a new sense of purpose, but also newly found self-esteem. Giles comments:

It is good to see an improvement in the appearance of the girls who are making money for the first time in their lives … a pay check of one’s own helps.5

When the war ended, soldiers returned home, wanting and expecting their jobs back. Suddenly, it became “unfeminine” for women to work outside the home. Women’s magazines began publishing articles by experts on the benefits to the family of the stay-at-home wife and mother. “More Babies—More Fun!” and “Find Your Community Work” encouraged women to focus on the domestic front.

Today, as a hundred years ago, a good wife must be a competent homemaker…. Just as it remains basically the husband’s responsibility to earn the living, it remains basically the wife’s responsibility to run the home. It is to be hoped that, as her grandmother did, she recognizes her responsibility.6

Some advice on how to be a “good wife,” circa 1950:

Do not regard him as a kitchen helper, errand boy or handy man … if he offers to dry the dishes, thank him for the favor, rather than regard it as your right. Indulge his whims when possible, even when they seem foolish to you…. Bringing up children is never an easy assignment, but the rewards are great. If your situation demands bringing up father, too, the problem is increased—but so are the incentives.7

Our models of virtuous womanhood—June Cleaver, Donna Reed, Harriet Nelson—came from television, which began to shape the opinions and beliefs of most American families. We watched TV and saw cleaner floors, lighter cakes, brighter wash, and fresher breath. We saw polite children, handsome husbands, and women content to keep everyone else happy.

Then came Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich, and others who wrote about the reality of women’s lives, telling the truth as they saw it. We heard that women were being “held down by a patriarchal society,” our potential limited by society’s beliefs and expectations.

No wonder women—and men—were confused.

The sixties, a tidal wave of change, washed away old values, ideas, and limitations. We raised our consciousness, fought for women’s right to control our own lives, entered college and the workforce in record numbers, and delayed or omitted marriage and childbearing.

Nearly forty years later, we still are struggling to find new roles, new beliefs, and new definitions of the most important elements in our lives: work and family, creativity and spirituality. We are testing new models of combining these components in a way that satisfies us and benefits women, men, families, and communities.

Overall, women today have more options. But the reality is that difficult barriers still exist for women, particularly women of color, low-income women, and women with disabilities. The laws and policies created in the past forty years signal a shift in society’s beliefs. Behavior change will follow, but it may be slow.

WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR LIFE INFORMS YOUR CHOICES

A young woman today has a full range of career and family choices. She is growing up seeing mothers who work, mothers who stay home, women on their own. If she is a careful and critical observer, as most young women tend to be, she can see and evaluate the pitfalls and advantages of these options.

I don’t want to end up struggling like my mom, who is raising four of us all by herself. Maybe I’ll decide to get married, but right now I’m studying hard. I want to get good grades, so I can go to college and become a veterinarian.

A young woman has one advantage over her mother: the evolved societal expectation that she be capable of taking care of herself! She may prefer a single life. Or she may choose a partner with whom she divides the breadwinning/homemaking duties according to the couple’s own liking, rather than societal standards. In either case, today’s young woman is expected to be self-reliant.

Every one of my friends expects to be able to take care of herself. We want to have the freedom to be independent, and to have a career. But most of us also dream of having the perfect family. Growing up, it never crossed my mind to expect a husband to take care of me. It simply wasn’t an option. Not until I got older did I realize that this wasn’t always the case for women.

These young women’s mothers and grandmothers, born in the first half of the twentieth century, now have more options than ever before. Some are exuberant about this freedom. Some are scared. Some feel unprepared. Many are bewildered: someone changed the rules in the middle of the game.

I grew up thinking, “You finish high school, you marry, you have kids, a man takes care of you, you’re set for life.” I was not a stupid kid. That was just what I heard. My sister, who’s only four years younger, heard a different message: “You get an education, you get a job, you learn to take care of yourself, and then maybe you get married later on.” Same background, same parents. What was different? The times.

Somewhere in the back of our heads, even though we know it’s not true, we want to believe that someone else—a husband, a father, the government—should be taking care of us. I think maybe it’s biological—you know, women are programmed to take care of our young, while someone provides for us. Even if that’s true, it isn’t too realistic today.

While it’s true that younger women have a wider range of options, older women have the self-knowledge and experience to choose their path more wisely. Women at every age and life stage can begin to turn dreams into reality, to create a full and meaningful life. It’s not too soon, or too late! As you will read in chapter 2, an important first step is to understand what it is you value.

Which brings us back to the question, “What is it that women value?”

In her important book Beyond Power, Marilyn French attempts an answer:

Our morality manifests itself in our choices, how we live, to what we devote our time and money, the kinds of friends we make, the way we spend our leisure.8

In Women’s Reality, Anne Wilson Schaef echoes this thought:

When I am lying on my deathbed, I think I will look back on the relationships I have had and the connections I have made. These will be the things I consider most important. It will not matter whether I have built a bridge, or written a book, or had a university named after me. I will cherish the lives I have touched and those persons whose lives have touched mine.9

How powerfully these quotations typify the values of most women!

From talking with our students, and living our lives, we believe that what is most important to most women are our personal relationships with friends and family.

Placing such value on building and maintaining relationships—the “nonproductive” world—is what keeps most women willing to drop in and out of our jobs and careers—the “productive” world—when we perceive that our families need us. Our students speak:

I left my job—only two years from retirement age, when I would have received full pension—because my dear mother needed full-time care, and I was the only one of her children who could give it. I read recently that the value of a long-term caregiver is about $650,000 a year if you add up the cost of all the roles she plays: nurse, cook, housekeeper, personal caregiver. It was hard work, but no amount of money could equal the satisfaction and peace I felt. I am so grateful that I could be the one to comfort Mom and help her through her final months.

Recently, I got divorced and reentered the workforce for the first time in ten years. My main goal was to find a job that would allow me to be home after school for my kids. Working part time means lower salary, no benefits, and giving up my chances for career advancement—at least for now. But I am raising my kids myself, and I want to do it well.

Managing our money is an activity that competes for our “free” or nonpaid time and it competes with the very things that we value—spending time with our families and friends. So we choose to put off learning about the stock market or how much we should be putting away for retirement, and instead spend our time taking the kids to their soccer matches, or going out with friends.

I spend a considerable part of my time producing unpaid work—nurturing my family and relationships. Because this is where I choose to spend my time, it also is a reflection of what I value.

So, the important question is: How can we develop a women’s system—a system that fits into our lifework—for becoming and remaining financially responsible? While supporting our primary value of relationship, can we develop a way to stay clear and conscious of our need to be fiscally responsible?

We know what can happen if we do not.

Reluctance to think about or take responsibility for our own financial well-being may lead to bad financial decisions, lost opportunities, be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Financing an Education
• Home Buying and Refinancing
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Notes
• Resources and Readings
• Contributing Authors
• Index