| A Penny For Your Thoughts | ||
| First published in The Hartford Courant | Select another essay | |
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Calling a hot line so that you can speak to a disembodied voice in order to figure out your romantic or financial status is sad. We shouldn't have to wait for somebody else to reassure us that we have not exceeded our limits. Yet I am reduced to grabbing the telephone for comfort. I call to be soothed, to be told that I'm not a lost cause or a bad bet. Truth be told, I'm almost afraid to admit this for fear that the bank will change its 800 number to a 900 number and that somebody with a throaty voice will pick up the phone the next time I dial. How I deal with money is one of the least-smartest things about me and, trust me, that's saying something. I am, however, in excellent company. "A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man," thinks Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind," realizing, in a moment of epiphany, that she had managed her business "without men to help her...Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men's help." Scarlett feels "a sudden rush of pride and a violent longing to prove it, to make money for herself as men made money." Driven by a preoccupation with her status in the world and help less to disguise her deepest wish for power over her financial future, Margaret Mitchell's heroine sees for the first time that she can control her life in an entirely new way. Scarlett is concerned with independence, and independence for women depends on intellectual, sexual, and -- yes -- economic autonomy. The right and ability to control one's own money has always been an issue for women. Virginia Woolf, for example, writes about the necessity of having "a room of one's own" in order to be creative and she insists that a woman must also have her own income. Woolf gives her reader the figure of "five hundred ... a year," but the number is less significant than the idea. Even if a woman earns a small amount, she has nevertheless earned the right to control the aspect of her own life without asking permission from someone else. So since I know all this (Mitchell and Woolf here tsk-tsking over my shoulder as I try to decipher my checkbook), you might well ask how come I'm still plagued by the narrow and fearful belief that -- all autonomy aside -- I'm going to wreck my account, make a mess of my savings, lose whatever I have in my purse and be forced to live on whatever small change I can uncover from beneath the sofa cushions. Is it really gender-specific? I wonder: How did women handle money in my family? The bigger question is: Did women -- ever -- handle money in my family? I don't want to blame my own ridiculousness on my mother's lack of experience with finances; she never had a dime, before or after she married, and it would be disingenuous and wrong to compare my situation to hers. My grandmother and my aunts hid their "pin" money in makeup jars and old stockings stuffed under mattresses. (I thought the term originated from the idea that one of these old ladies would "pin you down and whack the stuffing out of you" if you touched it). But I've come to realize that my neurotic relationship with dough is my own baggage -- nobody else gets the blame -- and that it must change; I need to do better. I need to use the phrase "checks and balances" in a full sentence without referring to a governmental situation. I need to remind myself that Woolf and Mitchell were living in tougher times for women -- not for individual women, who might have always had access to funds, but for women generally, who were barred from accepting responsibility for this crucial aspect of life even when they wanted to embrace the independence one's own bank account promised. For the ladies who never knew how to write a check, who spent their lives hiding whatever they could save in a secret place so nobody could take it from them or who handed over their wages to someone who gave them only a few coins in return, I have to do better. They knew it mattered. I shouldn't forget it. | ||