Monica Drake wrote a wonderful The Joke About Women And Money I
Monica Drake wrote a wonderful article about old gender roles, called “The Ongoing Joke About Women And Money Isn’t Funny Anymore.”
Her husband has a habit of saying in public that she is “bad with money.” He’ll toss this out in conversation as though it’s common knowledge, expecting to be met with general agreement. She almost feels sorry for him because he’s married to such a bumbling, financially inept woman. The beauty of that inept woman is that she makes him feel extremely competent.
It’s a script, an old one at that. There’s a role at the heart of it: the wife, pretty and accomplished, but bad with money! She needs her husband to keep her head on straight.
“When he talks about money, I’d guess he’s thinking about characters from his magazines conflated with his own childhood. This includes his mother, who, according to him, is the star of her own financial flop. It includes his sister, too. He’s written at least one essay about the financial turmoil of his mother’s existence and how his sister couldn’t see clearly enough to be of help. In this essay called “La-la Land,” published in an anthology called Citadel of the Spirit, he quotes his mother about her own finances, exploiting her private email to him in which she wrote, “I seem to be in a very tenuous situation and am having trouble getting myself to do what I need to do to get out of it.” His mother plays the role of a damsel in distress threatened by the serious math of income.”
“It’s unnervingly easy for a false narrative to sink into ordinary life without a hitch or question when it aligns with standard assumptions—in this case assumptions about women and finances, women and math, women and shopping, and women as irrational. Hello, nexus of sexism!”
“Have you heard the joke about the woman economist? Of course not! Who talks about women economists?” (except Janet Yellen)
“Money is power. When people tell you you’re not good with money, what they mean is they don’t want you to be comfortable with the ordinary exchange of power in capitalism, in large bills or small. They don’t want you to trust your instincts in accessing one of the few routes to an approximate personal freedom: finances.”
“In 1978, Joyce Carol Oates published a collection of poetry with the remarkable title, Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money. Oates’ collection was published four years after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The title illuminates a persistent cultural flaw. I’m glad I saw the spine of that book back when I was a child. It’s made my life better. Those words have kept me from buying into a shoddy paradigm.”
“Over the years, when I’ve asked my husband what he’d like to do about dinner, he invariably answers, “I haven’t thought about it.”” He’s been eating dinner for almost 50 years. Who will think about his dinner, if not him? His mother, his sister, his wife?
“I could sink into this model, becoming a woman whose life is food, married to a man whose life is money, but I hold Oates’ title in mind. I love food. I’m good with finances. Life is bigger and richer than either of those two driving concerns.”
“When my husband is financially anxious, I let him manage our accounts. Money is always in the guise of practicality but really it’s laden with emotion. It’s all about feelings.”
He wants to feel in control. I let him. Money is control. When I grant him jurisdiction over our spending, I’m doing the emotional work of recognizing his needs. There are ways to be generous with money, and ways to emit a steady wave of anxiety. He was raised in a financially insecure household, I get it, and he’s assuaging his childhood insecurities and helplessness by crunching the numbers. I understand. But then again, who among us, the former middle class, wasn’t raised in such a household? This isn’t unique. It’s common as dirt.
“To be good with money doesn’t mean another person is necessarily bad with it, as though to underscore and define the parameters by creating a dichotomy. Real power isn’t about putting another demographic down. It’s about freedom and being able to see the world without false constructs. It’s about letting go of sexism, racism, bias.”
“But marriage is a negotiation of narrative, and like employment, it tells at best half of the long, complex story of who you are, who you’ve been.
“There’s nothing remarkably bad or distinguishing about my credit history, my use of money, or my financial decisions. But the larger picture is important: Women are capable of being in charge of their own investments, by the minute and by the dollar.
I’m not the only woman trapped under the weight of this ongoing cultural joke.
Read more…http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/08/17/the-ongoing-joke-about-women-and-money-isnt-funny-anymore/