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.