Historically Broke, Book Club Chapter 1

In Chapter 1 of Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, Suze Orman brings up a very relevant point about the evolution of women’s work. We work now, but come from a social paradigm where working and having money is new. If you think in a historical context women have never had money of our own because we weren’t allowed to work. We kept house. Husbands and fathers kept us. Obviously things have changed and now we have access to an empowering amount of our own money.

But, she says that we haven’t yet learned what to do with it.

One of the most striking things about Chapter 1 is that Orman validated the fact that I have felt like I’m bluffing as professional. I suspect I’m not the only woman who has felt that way. It’s almost liberating to be able to acknowledge it and cut myself some slack for it. I can deliver the goods, make the deadlines, write the articles and conduct the interviews. But, the reality is I wasn’t raised to be a good reporter. I was raised to be a stay-at-home mother and it’s something of a miracle that I ever wrote up a resume and sent it anywhere. While working I feel like I’m making it up as I go, running on instinct and doing a lot of guessing. I doubt I’m alone in this. A “working bread-winning paradigm” wasn’t bred into me as it was for my brothers.

Women have only had 25 years practice at “working” which isn’t a very long time to have such high and unrealistic expectations of perfection.

I think that’s what frustrates me about the whole working vs. stay-at-home argument. I’m frustrated by the whole conversation because it’s obvious to me – having experienced both sides – that there are very real sacrifices to doing either one.

Stay-at-home moms DO, in a very real sense, suffer from being economically dependent. A balance of power does exist in a marriage and it very much has something to do with who is working outside the home and who is making the money. It is empowering to be generating money for the family.

But, there are very real consequences to working outside the home as well. They are perhaps less tangible on a day to day basis, but there isa power that is lost when you are not physically with them during the majority of their waking hours. There is little evidence that fulltime daycare for 40-50 hours a week, has NOnegative consequences to a child’s development. In fact, I think every woman who actually does work realizes that if you are busy being an ambitious professional fulltime there are some community/social/familial sacrifices that must be made. Housework becomes a drain. Every second with the kids takes on a new significance because since there is less of it, what there is becomes more important.

Both sides get defensive – and I think rightly so, the other side IS judgmental about it.

Neither side is right, both sides are right, neither side is wrong and both sides are wrong.

The fact it is, and thank you Suze for articulating it in the book, we’ve only been working outside the home for 25 years. These problems are all new to us. Historically we weren’t even dealing with anything related to these kinds of issues. We had no access to money or professions. To claim that either side has it figured out is a total bluff. The dirty little secret is that we’re all figuring it out for the first time. We’re, collectively as women, figuring out something new to our collective conscience. We need to cut each other and ourselves some slack.

Everyone learns through trial and error. It’s unrealistic to expect women, whether entering professions or choosing to forgo professional paths while living in an increasingly expensive society, not to make errors.

The solution, I believe, is in forcing the workplace to cater to our maternal nature rather than adapt to the masculine paradigm of the current workplace. But, is was impossible to force men to accommodate us in the beginning. Thank God there were women who were willing to forgo home and demand to be let in. I’m grateful for every one of those trailblazers. Thank God for the women who stayed home and made sure the children got raised too.

The truth about women is that we do have unlimited potential, but that we have to get on the same team before we can become truly empowered. If we keep trying to play a man’s game by the same masculine rules then we will sacrifice our maternal selves and our children’s emotional well-being. I believe that.

But, I don’t think working women and stay-at-home women are on different teams, or at least they don’t have to be. I think we should be cutting each other some slack and cheering each other on and learning from each other’s mistakes and being proud of each other’s choices – because historically we didn’t have choices. The worst thing we can do, as Orman points out is have unrealistic expectations about our progress and being judgmental about each other’s decisions. When we do that we rob ourselves of the ability to learn from our mistakes and do better for the next 25 years.

We’ve only been doing this for 25 years, which historically, is like 5 minutes.

For more on Chapter 1 and how we can empower our daughters financially check out So Sioux Me. By the way, this is the first time I’ve ever led a virtual book club (or any book club for that matter) so I am still working out the kinks of how to have an online conversation between two websites. Cut me some slack.