A few months ago, The Feminist Financial Handbook had a big month.

One of my children, to whom the book is dedicated, read it for the first time. They’re a fast reader, and finished it during one sitting. The entire time I was holding my breath.

Would they like it?

Honestly, it was the only review that ever mattered.

As they read, they kept popping over to me with questions.

“Mom, did you really put this reference to [inside family joke] in here?”

“Yes, I was serious when I said it was dedicated to you guys.”

“Mom, Jackie — you know her, don’t you?”

“I mean, on some level I know all the women in the book. I interviewed them all. But yes, remember when I went to Ohio to do that service project and brought back your $2 bills with OSU stickers? That was Jackie’s gift to you.”

“Don’t you have her book?”

I pulled F.I.R.E. for Dummies off the shelf. They tore through that one that night, too. They wanted to know more about how Jackie had done it. Maybe they will follow in her footsteps one day — they have the advantage of youth on their side, which is exciting.

Much like other readers, in addition to being intrigued by Jackie’s insights, Nicky and Heather’s story stuck out to them the most. In the end, I got that good review I was anxious for.

Later that month, I got some more news about The Feminist Financial Handbook. A friend sent me an academic paper. My name was in it.

The Feminist Financial Handbook is in (another) academic publication

The authors of the paper set out to analyze ‘financial feminist’ trade books, specifically those written after the onset of the pandemic. One of the texts I had never read. The other I recognized as a derivative of my own work.

The Feminist Financial Handbook is mentioned in the outset as the only explicit example of a book which these two have ‘clear links to’ as an ‘earlier work.’ The authors of the paper comment on the cover of the book, noting the dollar sign on the reimagined Rosie the Riveter’s arm, but not going into a nuanced analysis of the implications of that image created by Elina Diaz as Emily Guy Birken did in the book’s introduction.

At first glance, the book is quite literally judged by its cover. Its lack of further analysis can be attributed to the fact that it’s not a post-pandemic publication. It came out before that mess.

But as I read the paper, I wondered if the authors had read the book and found it didn’t completely align with the analysis of the post-pandemic tomes. Because the conceits lined out in the analysis of the other two texts? The Feminist Financial Handbook, for the most part and in my own admittedly biased view, doesn’t fit into them.

So I thought we’d talk a little bit today about some of the ways the book doesn’t completely meld into that third-wave feminism vibe, and why some of those decisions were purposeful.

Neoliberalism & the public versus private spheres

Third-wave feminism in the past has been described as a neoliberalisation of feminism. The two texts the paper analyzed were described as slightly different — a feminization of neoliberalism.

If you’re like, “What the heck is neoliberalism?” don’t worry. It’s not a term you’d often hear outside academia. It’s pretty much the political system we’ve been living under our whole lives. It’s highly individualistic, puts a lot of responsibility on the individual rather than society (this is called responsibilization) and favors free markets above almost anything else.

It’s not as new as the 1980s, but it really fired up to new levels in the Reagan era. Lest you think it’s a ‘Republican’ thing, many if not most Democrats also operate on neoliberal ideals, including America’s last president.

While during his presidency, some argued Joe Biden had a post-neoliberal agenda, my personal opinion is that was a lot of branding and not enough actual change seen for the American people’s lived economic experiences. This is a whole other article, though, and a ton of people wouldn’t agree with me. For most of his career, there is no argument he was neoliberal.

Whether a neoliberalization of feminism or a feminization of neoliberalism, ‘financial feminists’, the authors state, are focused almost entirely on the public sphere. (Here’s where you can gain an introductory amount of insight about the public versus private spheres.) There’s arguments for ‘work-life balance’ under these models and in these texts, but more often than not, they either cursorily acknowledge family life or erase children from the narrative altogether.

It’s a part of third-wave feminism I personally think is counterproductive. When we ignore the private sphere, we obfuscate policies that could have a real impact on women’s lives — economically and otherwise.

‘Balance’ is not an achievable goal — it’s responsibilization

Purposefully, The Feminist Financial Handbook is not that. It starts out with a dedication to my children. Decries the idea of ‘balance’ within the first chapter, as balance is an unrealistic demand for individual responsibility put upon women which does not acknowledge societal deficiencies.

It features the stories of diverse women — including a myriad of mothers with stories directly tied to their private sphere experiences. It does not operate under the assumption that women will bear children, but it also doesn’t pretend that motherhood or family life are not a huge part of some women’s lives. Not something to be ‘balanced’ away — but a daily reality integrated with the rest of their lived experience.

Joyce’s story was a prime example of this. The blending of the public and private spheres — though work-from-home opportunities — were what made her financial life stronger, even though there was initial sadness out of having to abandon a purely-public-sphere work environment where she was excelling. I’ve spoken to so many other mothers with the same story throughout my career — their careers are strengthened by opportunities that don’t ignore the private sphere. It’s one of the reasons why demands to return to the office in 2022 were extremely disheartening.

Rising tide & trickle down logics

The authors of the paper state that these two books rely on a combination of ‘rising tide’ and ‘trickle down’ logics. Essentially, the books are saying that the only way to amass power is through money, and the more money one woman has the more that empowers women as a whole.

So if you want to change the world, you’ve gotta get rich first. It’s the pre-requisite to meaningful political action, which is exercised not by collectives but by individuals with individual economic power.

Again, The Feminist Financial Handbook is not this. While there is an entire chapter dedicated to investing — the one that inspired my child to seek out more of Cummings Koski’s work — I was kind of tired of seeing financial books directed at people who have enough money to function within traditional financial education guidelines. Because a pre-requisite to investing is having enough disposable income to invest. Telling someone to invest when they can’t afford groceries is a little bit absurd.

Instead, I focused more of the book on the poverty line (where about one-third of American women lived at the time,) and lower-middle- to middle-income women, who still face some level of precarity. The book takes social programming as a financial resource head-on, whether that was Pell grants, SNAP benefits, healthcare systems, short-term disability programs for maternity leave or court-enforced child support.

It also begged women to redefine their definition of ‘wealth’ to a point where money wasn’t the only metric. To consider what led to a ‘contented’ life, and to participate in democracy — even if they weren’t rich. Not just for the benefit of themselves, but for the benefit of all the women in their communities.

I still believe that in isolation, the amount of amount of money in your bank account or IRA is not an accurate indication of your power to act within the world.

Feminist anger & economic anxiety

The texts are noted as not only expressing ‘feminist anger’ but also ‘profound anxiety’ around economic and social systems. The paper authors note that the authors resolve this anxiety by telling women they can join the ranks of the privileged and then use their money to make the lives of those ‘below’ them marginally better.

In the book I did read, there was one point where the author said something along the lines of, ‘Men have been doing it this way forever — so why can’t we?’

So essentially the resolution to this anxiety is reproducing the current system as a way to get ahead, and supposedly that somehow makes things better for people of the same gender as you who are not ahead.

It shows up problematically in both texts to differing degrees — one is not as severe as the other from my reading of the paper.

At one point in The Feminist Financial Handbook, one woman does talk about using her knowledge as someone who dug her way out to give back to her own community through financial literacy education. I don’t think this is the same thing, and I do still think it was a beautiful action on her part. I hope it’s the closest the book gets to this phenomenon in ‘financial feminist’ texts.

As for feminist anger, it was something I actively tried to avoid in the book. While anger is not a negative emotion on its own, and can sometimes inspire action that leads to great social change, the book tried to focus on intersectionality. In the introduction, we covered vocabulary terms like kyriarchy and the ways in which people are both oppressed and privileged across any number of domains — only one of which is gender. The point was, you can be experiencing the negative impacts of these systemic inequities if you’re a man, too. Similarly, if you’re a woman, there can be a lot of blind spots to acknowledge depending on where you hold privileges.

While the book did purposefully center women in both the people it interviewed and the sources it cited, it didn’t fall into tropes of ‘man-hating.’ As Bitches Get Riches put it, it “belies the feminist equals victim simplification” that people sometimes espouse based solely on their gender alone.

Acknowledging similarities

In some ways, The Feminist Financial Handbook does speak to neoliberalism. While encouraging people to get civically engaged — to organize and vote for better — it primarily focuses on the ways individual women can navigate the systems that exist. Its unique offering was targeting these strategies towards those who have less — who do not seek to replicate the systems that exist, but seek to survive within them until something better comes along. There was a gap in the trade literature for this audience, and I sought to fill it.

Because of this focus, it does not suggest the exact collective actions to engage in that would make the larger system better. While inspiring hope that this could one day be the case, it is very much focused on navigating the here-and-now in which it was written.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been educating myself on ways to make those larger systems better. I hope that’s shown in what you’ve read from me the past few years, and that it will become more apparent as time goes on. As always, we’re going to stay hopeful rather than plunging into despair.

 

 

 

It was a dark summer night. The stars shone overhead. Humidity held in the sun’s heat long after it had retired beyond the horizon. Yet the air was not so sticky as to make the bonfire’s singe an unwelcome guest.

He sat there in his shorts and cloth sandals. I in my sundress.

We loved each other, I think. Not in the typical romantic way. All of our deepest darkest pain had seen the light of each other’s witness, and all that truth couldn’t chase the other away – no matter how wrenching.

It wasn’t chemistry.

It was honesty.

In all its confrontation, our bond was tender.

“I just think it’s more likely that we’re in a simulation,” he proposed.

His words were earnest. Full of conviction. Preceded by a very scientific-sounding argument from a brilliant mind which had run meticulous calculations on the physics of the universe.

“And the only thing I can definitively witness is my own consciousness. If that’s true then everything around me is here to teach me a lesson.”

The flames flickered.

Out of the corner of his eye he observed my thighs shift beneath me in discomfort.

“I’m really trying to learn. To do better.”

“Just so I’m clear, you think that everything and everyone around you – this entire planet with all its rivers and mountains and animated life – was created solely to serve your own moral betterment?”

“Yes. And there’s no way to disprove it.”

“Man, that is the most selfish sh*t I have ever heard,” I sighed, eyebrows raised. “It’s unoriginal. A way to moralize self-centeredness. A lack of imagination to conceive that other beings have their own experiences and interactions in the world that don’t revolve around you. And a way to absolve yourself of jumping that chasm of responsibility I know you feel towards them.”

Guitar strings popped in the fire.

“I have been through way too much just to be a side plot in your storyline.”

It sounds like a fight, but it wasn’t. It was an intellectual probe, and as we moved on to the next, I wasn’t always the voice of reason. The exercises we engaged in were revealing.

Challenging.

Enjoyable.

I was right on that one, though.

To his credit, over the coming weeks he took my words seriously. It wasn’t just our interactions with each other which were honest — his intellect was honest, too.

He abandoned that particular philosophy. Recognized his own attempts to evade what he knew to be true: Our guilt and shame can’t be absolved by theories that position us as a cubic rendering of a Keanu Reeves role.

Besides that, he admitted, all the computational theory in the world couldn’t transform me into anyone’s peripheral character.

I sometimes think that maybe if it could have, we would have worked.

I say these words without regret.

Without malice.

And without any desire to contort myself into something I’m not.

Economic extraction

There is a lot happening in the world right now. In this moment, we’re all learning to be mindful of how we express our empathy. Our compassion. Our allyship.

We do this from a framework we call ‘capitalism.’ It’s all many of us have ever lived in. It’s the air we breathe. Like fish to water.

It’s been comforting to watch a larger portion of the population stopping their own thought processes when it comes to economically justifying their neighbors’ well-being. It’s all too easy to say someone deserves human dignity and respect because they contribute to the economy.

They pay taxes.

They’re valuable because of their economic output and how that output benefits us as individuals directly.

Because in capitalism, contrary to near all other social organizations that existed prior, the economy is put above society.

As I look around me, I witness more and more representations in media – mainstream included, but particularly social – stating very clearly that the people who surround us don’t need to justify their existence by their economic output.

Rather, they deserve respect and human decency because above all else, they are fellow human beings.

Moral extraction

While I’m so glad the recognition of humanity over economic output is becoming more prolific in our conversations, I’d like to propose taking things a step further.

Sometimes, when we remove the mandate that other people perform for us economically, we go on to place other extractive requirements on them.

We demand from them lessons. We ask them to serve as crucibles of our own personal development.

“It’s okay, because they give back in other ways…

“They teach us lessons in compassion.”

“In love.”

“In patience.”

And this is where I think we could collectively do better.

Just like I didn’t exist to serve the moral betterment of that brilliant man who thought he was living in a live-action version of The Matrix, no one owes you lessons.

This transactional extraction of value through the guise of self-improvement has roots in the very same arguments in which the economic justifications lie.

I meant it when I said that his philosophy was not original. In many ways, both the demands for economic and moral value extraction are at least as old as capitalism itself. Two threads, woven together in the same tapestry depicting a violent scene.

We are all interconnected – with each other, with our environments – even when we, to our own detriment, organize our societies to pretend that we are not.

The hope I hold for the future is that we begin to actualize our vision of our interdependence as equal, living beings capable of succeeding together – rather than viewing each other as resources to exploit in Malthusian fashion.

Is money the root of all evil?

Commonly, you’ll hear it argued that money itself isn’t the root of evil, but rather the power that money endows upon someone can reveal their individualized propensity towards good or evil.

It’s easier to get a camel through the eye of the needle, and all that.

It’s probably an argument I’ve espoused at least once in my own work.

But as I learn more, my opinions evolve. Since I started writing 14 years ago, I have been exposed to the history of fiat currency as king, particularly in European societies.

And how that introduction led to a slow collapse of feudal systems (which is still ongoing hundreds of years later.)

And how that, in turn, fueled the fires of colonialism.

It’s led to me to believe that money may be the root of all colonialism. And perhaps that, at its core, is what makes it so ethically questionable.

Importance of fiat currency collapses feudalism in Europe

This is going to be a necessarily truncated and simplified history of feudalism’s transformation into capitalism. I’m going to gloss over parts. The story will be incomplete. But hopefully it’s a sufficient introduction.

Fiat currency existed long before feudal Europe, but the impacts of its growing importance in this region of the world had devastating effects on the rest of the planet.

The feudal system of Europe basically worked like this: There were rich land owners. They had access to fiat currency, but initially that fiat currency was not as important as it would later become.

Feudal lands were typically self-sustaining, without dramatic need for external trade. The ability to sustain noble wealth came from the un- or not-well-paid labors of serfs, who were born on the land on which they worked. Some were artisans. Some were farmers. Either way, their dues to the landlord were paid in terms of this labor, with the idea being that labor was a payment for protection from the landlord. If war came to their door, the land owner was expected to provide swordsmen.

Depending on your framing, it could be seen as a mutually-beneficial relationship, and many people regardless of economic positioning felt a strong connection to the land which they inhabited. Even still, some would try to escape. The landlord could send professionals after you to reclaim you if you ran.

The growth of towns and mercantile classes

You get far enough into the Medieval period, and you start to see rules for freedom of movement pop up. In some areas, if you left your feudal lands and settled in a town for more than a year without being reclaimed, you were now free of your former landlord and obligations towards them.

This is when we saw a big uptick in the mercantile class in towns around Europe. Those artisans and farmers were now working for their own benefit, but — working from the bottom up — they didn’t have the same access to fiat currency in the way landlords did. There was initially a lot of truck-and-barter. Transactions along the lines of “I’ll give you these wool clothes I made in exchange for that meat you butchered.”

Trade for fiat currency did start becoming a bigger deal as time went on and economic power of the towns grew, though. That meant the landlord felt they “needed” to charge money rents from their serfs rather than charging them in labor. Not because they actually needed more wealth to get by, mind you, but because they wanted to afford luxury. And fiat currency was increasingly becoming the way of obtaining that luxury.

To get money, serfs were interacting with the townspeople more often, sometimes through truck-and-barter and sometimes for fiat currency to get those landlords paid. Goods were becoming the means of sustaining oneself, rather than feudal contracts.

Europeans start invading other people’s lands

This process eggs itself on until you get a spike in international trade, which is easier to facilitate through precious metals than currencies due to issues of trust in the actual content of precious metals contained within fiat currencies. (Fiat currencies inherently involve issues of trust or belief in the government or other entity backing the currency.)

Money brokers could facilitate currency exchanges within Europe, but when it came to intercontinental exchanges, FX wasn’t advanced enough to cut it. Pure precious metals were the means to achieving the ends. Those precious metals weren’t abundant enough in Europe, so the rich started engaging in “The Age of Discovery,” or sailing to and claiming foreign lands for mining purposes.

Feudal systems don’t immediately disappear. It’s a slow collapse that is still happening in some parts of Europe today. But around the time of the Age of Discovery, you increasingly see a lot of feudal landlords starting to abandon their contracts altogether. One famous example includes a landlord who realized they could make more fiat currency off of turning their land into a massive sheep pasture rather than housing people.

So they kicked all the people off their land and replaced them with money-making sheep.

Where do all those serfs go?

All those people who had generational connection to the land they and their ancestors had worked had to go somewhere. If we were to look at what is today known as Great Britain, you might see the displaced English being given land deals in places like Scotland or Wales to exercise the same type of violence they had experienced over the existing populations. You might see the displaced people from those places going on to areas like Ireland or America to do the same. Or on to Africa, or India, or any other place that was colonized.

There was a racial hierarchy inherent in this method of colonization. People justified their actions by assuming that their way — or the way of pursuing wealth through fiat currency at all costs — was better than the “uncivilized” or “lesser” populations they were overtaking.

The serfs in their displacement become the new oppressors. All of them in pursuit of fiat currency at the sake of whomever’s ancestral lands were being dominated next. Whether that population believed in land ownership or not, the violence of the invading economic system of ownership in the pursuit of currency was virtually inescapable.

Capitalism as the mythology of colonialism

In the late 18th century, Adam Smith wrote a book called “The Wealth of Nations,” which becomes the Bible of capitalism. It’s an erroneous book that justifies putting markets over the well-being of society because, supposedly, that’s the way it was always done.

In reality, scholars like Karl Polanyi in his work “The Great Transformation” (which was on my 2024 reading list) have proven that this type of economic philosophy was actually counter to the economic systems that had sustained humanity for the vast majority of its existence.

But the worship of Smith-esque capitalism — as historically flawed as it is — perpetuates until we have the economic systems we see around us today.

Fiat currency freedom — but freedom for who?

A big argument for the dominance of fiat currency — and with it free markets — is that it grants people freedom. If you’re born as a serf, you might have to stay on the land you were born on, performing the same profession your parents inherited. So not much choice.

But fiat currency within free markets? That allows you to pursue any profession you’d like wherever you’d like — in theory.

The big question we have to ask when proposing that fiat currency in the context of capitalism = freedom is, “Freedom for who?”

Is it freedom to have the lands you live on stolen by people who consider themself superior?

No.

Is it freedom to be sold into slavery for the profits of colonists?

Also no.

Even today, you can look around and easily see that capitalism doesn’t give everyone the same economic freedom. Even the most generous theoretical arguments can’t evade the reality we see around us.

Women are not paid equally for the same work as men. Women also contribute a lot of unpaid labor to economies, especially when we consider this labor on a global scale.

Racialized people of all genders don’t get paid equally when compared to their white peers doing the same labor.

Those born into poverty are asked to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” — a task that’s named for its impossibility — while those born into wealth have the resources necessary to get a “good” start in life, with the ability for their wealth to earn them interest with no actual labor at all.

All this says nothing to the fact that colonization and the system that eventually became known as capitalism overtook societies which had their own social and economic organizations which weren’t rooted in European feudalism. Presenting it as a binary choice between feudalism and capitalism ignores the reality that prior to the Age of Discovery, the rest of the world existed in its own diverse rights.

Is money the root of all evil?

So is money the root of all evil?

Maybe not.

But is fiat currency at the root of colonialism?

Probably. And that’s problematic enough.

Finding joy in the midst of capitalism

This is all super depressing to think about. Even if it’s important context.

The systems which we call capitalist reduce us all to individualistic dollars and cents. Some of us have better access to those dollars and cents. Others don’t.

The systems push us into relationships of independence and co-dependency, ignoring the potential and the realities of our interdependence as living beings on this planet.

They do not care about our joy or if we are cared for, as long as we’ve got the economic output that’s required to feed the continuance of the system.

Joy and care for one another in this context are powerful ways to exist within our capitalistic societies. They’re gentle ways, and yet that does not make them less impactful.

I’ve previously shared some of the ways I’ve allowed myself to find joy over the past year. As this series on capitalism and joy goes on, we’ll look at some of the science behind operating from this place of love.

We’ll catch glimpses of what more recognition of our interdependence could look like.

And we’ll do it all while recognizing the reality that surrounds us — even if we don’t feel like we can change the entire mess in one fell swoop. Because the systems are unlikely to change in the course of a single lifetime, there are likely even instances where we have to find short- and in some cases longer-term solutions through free markets themselves.

In other words, we’ll acknowledge that the current reality is depressing, but that even within it, there’s still room for hope.