This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 41, Summer 2000.
Ruth Pearson talks to Debbie Cameron and Joan Scanlon about women and the politics of money. She is an unusual feminist academic in that she not only has an understanding of international economics, but is also an activist in her own community. In this discussion, she talks about creative strategies for how women can financially support one another and our own organisations.
Debbie Cameron: Let’s begin with the issue of feminist attitudes to money: Should feminists be outside of the cash nexus, and rightfully suspicious of money, or should women be less reluctant to seize the power that money embodies?
Ruth Pearson: There’s a number of issues in there that we need to unravel. A lot of feminist discussion about women and money has focused on the fact that women don’t have it — that they are excluded from income generation or inheritance or assets… But I think there are a lot of other issues about women and money that we have only just begun to think about. One issue, which runs parallel to the discussion about feminist ethics, is whether services should be exchanged for love rather than money, and whether that would make our society different, and I think there is a radical, if not essentialist, position on that.
Debbie: Do you mean a position which holds that women are too nice and caring to sully their hands with money?
Ruth: It’s like the debates about globalisation — as if you have got a choice! We live in a monetarised economy and the issue for women is how to make that work for women, and how you relate to money and understand money, rather than stopping the world and getting off. I think we have to engage with money on a number of levels. That’s why I would disagree with the view that it’s not feminist to dirty ourselves by dealing with money. We live, as Madonna puts it, in a ‘material world’.
Taking responsibility for money
Debbie: What about this theory that even women who perhaps aren’t feminist and aren’t motivated by a thought-out (however essentialist) ethic are somehow afraid of money. You mentioned a book called The Money Tree by Colette Dowling…
Ruth: She has this thesis which is quite interesting which is that women are not adult about money and they don’t take full responsibility for their relationship with money. She argues that either they leave it to other people, often male family members or male business partners, to control; or they don’t feel it is fully theirs — whether they inherit it or earn a high salary. They somehow feel they don’t merit it. Even when they earn money, they don’t think it’s for them; it’s always for something or for someone else. There is an interesting discussion here about women and philanthropy, because in order to be able to give money away you need to feel it’s yours in the first place and that you have the right to dispose of it.
Debbie: That’s slightly reminding me of what some Tory politician said — I’ve forgotten which one — that the Good Samaritan could only be a good Samaritan because he had a successful small business and made a little nest egg and so on. Whereas a feminist question would surely be: should there be a need for philanthropy at all?
Ruth: Well, maybe there shouldn’t, but there is. Women’s philanthropy could give women’s organisations and groups the resources for organising. Whether you get those resources from the state, from foundations or from individual donors, money is a claim on resources and you need those resources for political work. Maybe the Tory said it, but he said it from a different position
Joan Scanlon: I have some difficulty with this psychologising of women; with women being perceived as ‘infantile’ in relation to money, especially when they have so little opportunity to make decisions about money, and when a huge percentage are skillfully managing criminally low household budgets.
Ruth: If you look at the context in which we relate to money — it’s a very recent phenomenon in the West that women have had independent access to money incomes; it’s a 19th and 20th century phenomenon, but the whole of the way in which welfare and social policy has been organised is as though women are not primary income earners. For a long time (I think it’s changing and that’s complicated too) there was an assumption that women could have a money dependency either on men or on the state. It’s very ingrained in our thinking, so I don’t think it is just a psychological thesis that women are not ‘adult’ about money; it’s social and historical as well.
Debbie: Colette Dowling is also the author of The Cinderella Complex, so she does have this self-help approach to the subject. Moreover, she is sort of writing about herself, since she made a lot of money, went bankrupt and so on. I think I recognise something of what she is talking about in terms of my own attitude towards money, which I don’t think is very adult. It’s something to do with not being raised to expect to have any, both on class and gender grounds. I’m good on the housekeeping, and my accounts are always in order — but I realise now that I’m in charge of a department and a budget (paltry as it is) I feel as though I was managing it like one of those housewives in those 50s books, thinking ‘How can we have cheaper stationery?’ and idiotic things like that. It can’t be culturally universal, although I’m thinking of that man who set up the Grameen Bank [Mohammed Yunis] for women; he says you get a safer return on your money from women.
Ruth: There are two points there. The first one is where you say you are good at household accounts but not at long term strategic management. That mirrors the fact that women’s expectations have not necessarily been that they should provide for themselves over their life cycle; certainly not that they should have financial assets to provide for dependents. A lot of women’s reluctance to think about pensions is not only that they tend not to think of themselves, or about sustaining themselves in later life, but also that they do not think of themselves being financially responsible for a household even after employment ends. It’s not the way we have been raised and socialised. As a lot of second wave feminists are now approaching pensionable age we are only just beginning to think about the issue.
Joan: There is also a gender issue about the whole idea of retirement. Most women I know assume they are going to carry on working indefinitely, in terms of paid work — and they will probably need to, since if they do have pensions at all they are pretty pathetic.
Ruth: My perception is, that there are different trends. Many women seem to be taking strangely premature retirement from waged work. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they stop working altogether; I think that women can slip into portfolios of work more easily, because that is what they have always done, either as paid workers or as volunteers. But to get back to the Grameen Bank, what’s interesting is that it was set up to provide working capital to very poor households, to increase the productivity of their labour, their income potential. It turned out that women were the most appropriate and effective borrowers in that they were more reliable in making repayments. So it wasn’t set up for women, although it ended up with a majority of women borrowers.
Debbie: But that suggests that women are rather good managers of money.
Management vs control
Ruth: We need to make a distinction here between managing money and controlling money. I agree that women have always managed scarce resources in order to look after their households, including monetary resources. But that doesn’t mean that they have the decision making power or the responsibility; certain individual women may, but culturally women don’t have the responsibility for accessing those resources and distributing them. One of the great debates about this micro-credit phenomenon in South Asia is what happens to the money that women borrow. People have argued that women may manage it and take responsibility for repaying it, but a lot of the money is then used in male enterprises. Personally I think it’s a bit of an odd argument since we are talking about joint budget households where it makes no sense to separate out a woman’s livelihood strategies from the men in that household. You are talking about very low levels of income where the labour is pooled and the income is pooled anyway. Nonetheless a lot of the money that women borrow doesn’t go into women’s autonomous businesses.
Debbie: So women repay the money they borrowed, and they subsist, but they are not actually reaping any larger benefit.
Ruth: What I think is that there is an increasing monetarisation of household subsistence all over the world, and that’s why I say we have to face it, we can’t just ignore it.
Debbie: You mean it’s more and more based on the consumption of goods and services produced by others, for money, rather than being self-sufficient.
Ruth: Firstly that you have to purchase in the marketplace goods and services which you may previously have self-provisioned or to some extent bartered; secondly, that many public services are only accessible through money. There are user charges on primary health in many cases; or public services are so bad you would rather go to a quack doctor in the private sector rather than go to the government health alternative. You are having to pay, if not for school fees, then at least for books and uniforms… So a lot of the things that we thought of as public services are only accessed with money and that is one of the main legacies of the 1980s structural adjustment neoliberal policies. It has had this effect of monetarising household survival. And so women have had to manage.
Debbie: You say that it doesn’t make sense to separate out household income along gender lines in most cases, but surely it does make sense to look at who has the decision making power and who gets to benefit.
Ruth: Well yes, but I think that is rather a simplistic way of looking at it. There are other ways of approaching those kinds of issues from a gender perspective which I find more helpful. There is for instance a model of cooperative conflict which looks at the way in which women and men have joint interests in the household, and also are in conflict, and recognises that women’s sense of well-being is very much tied in with the sense of well-being of the whole household. The notion of individual welfare is actually quite problematic in lots of contexts, including ours. And I would see gender as a social relation rather than an individual attribute. So if you are looking at a poor household in which there are forms of subordination and power within the household, one of the things that matters is: up to what point will women accept the negative aspects in order to trade their own survival, the survival of their children and so on? and at what point will they exit that situation? Having financial resources independently of that situation is likely to make a difference, whatever culture we are talking about. I think that bringing money into the household, and particularly into the hands of women, can create the possibility for women to participate directly in the market rather than having to go through men and non-marketised forms of exchange. So potentially it can be very empowering.
Joan: Can we go back to what you were saying about women being very good at managing money but not at controlling it. What exactly do you mean by ‘controlling’ it?
Ruth: What I mean is deciding what happens to household income and household investment — whether your money is going towards a holiday or a DIY tool or to take the kids out for a day, or to pay off your debts. Research indicates that, certainly in heterosexual households, regardless of women’s financial contributions, it is predominantly men who make the decisions about how it will be used. But you can break the management of money down into enormous numbers of subtasks: checking the bank statements, paying the household bills, organising repayments… There’s a whole series of financial activities that women clearly manage perfectly well. but it doesn’t mean that they have ultimate control of the household budget, and they usually don’t expect to.
Feminists and money
Debbie: The question I wanted to bring up is: What should feminists do with their money in a society like ours? I think there is a tremendous embarrassment and confusion amongst middle class professional feminists about how to handle having any amount of money.
Ruth: It’s interesting that when I was in the Netherlands I met a group called Women of Inherited Wealth…
[uproarious laughter]
Debbie: You’d never find a group called that here!
Ruth: There’s also an organisation called MamaCash, which was founded in the 70s by a woman who had inherited a lot of money. She founded this organisation, and invested the income to support women’s projects in the Netherlands, and, interestingly, credit projects in third world countries — and in the 1980s stock market crash that kind of income just disappeared, so they then had to refinance it and she brought in a lot of other relatively wealthy women as donors at that point. There are some women who are seriously rich through inheritance; if you look at the property market in Britain for instance, quite a lot of our generation, or younger women, are potentially going to acquire considerable financial assets.
In order to think about what feminists could do with their money, we have to begin by accepting that we have money. The second thing is that we have to have a life-cycle approach to money, and be much more intelligent about how we use the financial industry and the diversification of financial products. There’s a proposal I have been touting around to various community finance or social bankers — which is that we should have a women’s unit trust or bond — I’ve called it a GONAD as a working title — in which women could invest, and like a social investment, or an ethical investment, you would receive a fixed rate of interest which would be sub market rate. You would put your money in a safe investment which would accumulate for the future, but the differential could be used to reinvest in women’s projects and women’s organisations. Because I think money is tremendously powerful, and that’s how I think we should look at it, rather than thinking that as feminists we should have nothing to do with it. We are in a monetarised world; there are women who do have access to money; let’s think what we can do with it collectively.
Joan: There seem to be fewer and fewer independent social investment schemes that are not part of some larger, grossly unethical banking conglomerate. And of those that do exist, I haven’t come across any that invest directly in women’s projects.
Ruth: Independence doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a company or product is ethical. Social banking is growing, and it’s interesting how it differs from ethical investment. NatWest have just launched a community bond which operates on much the same principle as my GONAD bond; they found it difficult to market — they tried to sell it to the ethical investor, who wants to know that they are not exploiting child labour, and they weren’t interested, so they had to relaunch it. I thought it was interesting what they had to say about it which was that ethical investment is for people who don’t want to do any harm, and social investment is for people who want to do some good.
Debbie: If you get GONAD off the ground, let me know. I think there would be a number of women interested in investing in such a scheme. It’s a great idea, though not a particularly pleasant name.
Ruth: I would be happy to consider alternatives! The point was to begin to think about what we can do with money. A lot of charities operate through wills; they get a lot of their income from legacies. And clearly for women’s trusts that’s a possible source of funding. In the US there are hundreds of women’s trusts, and in Britain I think there is one, in the North of England; it’s not something we have thought about really. As funding and resources for women’s organisations have dried up we ought to be thinking about what we can do with money politically, individually and collectively. Why not a Women’s Lottery Fund? Professional women have professional salaries, and may well have professional pensions — but how are most women going to support themselves through an active older age? Women of our mother’s generation no doubt sat with their disagreeable husbands and waited for life to end — but there wasn’t a sense of positively planning one’s post-retirement life. Secondly, I know lots of women who don’t expect to rely on their children or relatives for financial support, and so need actively to plan for their financial security in older life.
Joan: As for middle class women of our mother’s generation — most of them long outlived their disagreeable husbands, and found themselves managing, and controlling, money in a way they had never done in their lives before. And where women of our generation are concerned, I don’t think it’s women on professional salaries who are generally embarrassed by it, least of all women from working class backgrounds; it tends to be women of inherited wealth. In fact, the state of your salary seems to be a measure of how well you have resisted being exploited by whatever institution or organisation you are employed by, and a measure of how far you value your own skills and persuade others to recognise them. According to which I don’t appear to have fared too well!
Microcredit
Ruth: I worked in Norwich for this microcredit group for low income women, which was an adaptation of the Grameen Bank…
Debbie: Why is it called microcredit, apart from the fact that micro just means very small?
Ruth: That’s precisely why, because they started with loans of £500, which for a business is absolutely tiny. It’s micro also in the sense that it functions at a level of credit that the mainstream financial institutions just won’t touch, because they think the transaction costs are too great. A lot of the women we were dealing with had such limited access to income, being dependent on benefits or social security, that the risk of losing that, even if you can get working capital to set up your own business, jeopardising not only your own but your children’s livelihood, it’s an enormous big step. We worked hard then, and are still negotiating with the Treasury, to try to get a welfare bridge so that you don’t have to risk everything at once. Working through the business training programme, so many women said it was the first time they had understood how their household accounts worked, so that they could make active choices, and they found it empowering. In the classic Grameen style, they were organised into borrowing groups. One of the reasons they lent to women, in these Asian microcredit groups, was because they were such good repayers, and they were good at managing the funds etc., but partly it was the group collateral, you organised the group so that it put social pressure on the group members to repay, and it was felt that women were much more susceptible to that kind of peer pressure.
Debbie: Can you tell us something about WEETU [Women’s Employment, Enterprise and Training Training Unit]?
Ruth: This was an organisation that we set up in the mid-80s, around issues of women’s employment and so on. We’ve had an advocacy role, and also run a guidance service for women about training, and we had quite an interesting project on the accreditation of prior learning through unpaid work so that you could get a management qualification from home management or community work. And we wanted to do something about money, and initially I wanted to have a crisis bank but then the new director, who had experience of development studies, was keen to see if we could replicate the microcredit experience, and there had been some interesting work done in North America (in Chicago) on community finance. It took about 18 months to put together a package of funding from the National Lottery and the European Union; it predated the current interest of this government in community finance and regeneration. And we are now at the end of a 3 year cycle of funding and we have to refinance the project, and the Government just announced a Phoenix Fund in which it promised 30 million pounds for such initiatives. So far it is more words than action, but there has been some interest by the present Government in supporting community based microfinance projects.
Debbie: Do they generate the means of their own regeneration?
Ruth: The idea is that the loan fund itself will service itself; it will be a revolving fund. We have been lent the capital for the loan fund by the social bankers, the Community Aid Foundation, the NatWest… But there is an issue in discussion about microcredit: people talk about financial sustainability — that it will pay for itself; it may well pay for the administration of the loan fund but it doesn’t pay for all the complementary training and support that women need in order to move into a position where they can make a living by developing front-room businesses. And our experience is that, partly because of women’s problematic relationship to money and business, the kind of support that is needed is quite extensive. You need to build up the lending circles, and the kind of support that women give each other is crucial in giving women the confidence to take out a loan and start a business.
Joan: You’ve talked about the fact that women have only just had money, but women have only recently had access to other things — professional jobs for instance — and property, as well as opportunities for independent decision making about a range of issues. So why is money such a sticking point? And if it is, how do we address it?
Debbie: I don’t think money is the only problematic thing. It may be the most important one, but success, for instance is another problem for women, and of course they go together. Also I don’t know how much of this is about women. What I’m talking about is more to do with a feminist, or a socialist, ethic of equality; what bothers me is the inegalitarianism of money.
Ruth: There are two separate issues here: the issue of embarrassment about having enough, or a surplus, of money; and what I am talking about now, low income households where women’s access to money has been very dependent on men or on very low income jobs or on the State. Now I’m talking about a project which says to women: Borrow some money, start your business, and make a living. And they don’t think they have those resources; they are very unconfident about making a go of it. Many of the business pundits will tell us that all they need is the money, and what I am saying is that it is not just the money, it’s the feeling that you have the skills, that you know how to manage the money, that you can sell your product, that you can change your view of yourself — and your kids’ and neighbours’ view of you — instead of being somebody who just scrapes by, you are someone who is going to get out there and make it work for you. So it’s not just about the money; and yet that’s one of the difficulties of discussing this as a policy issue, because what people grasp is the need for money. And another problem is the way that income support has developed in our kind of society; we used to have the deserving and the undeserving poor, and now it’s the honest claimant versus the dishonest claimant. So if there’s any hint of entrepreneurial activity, the reaction is that you don’t deserve your income, rather than seeing that as the first stage towards independence from the State.
Debbie: Is there a problem with women thinking that they will be alienated from their peer group if they go for such initiatives, and prove successful?
Ruth: Well, probably, except that you are creating peer groups with these lending circles… in a way you are creating alternative or ‘virtual’ communities
Debbie: Which is of course precisely why that would be so effective.. as with the analogy of professional success. Because, for example, when you have staff and you encourage someone to go for promotion, they don’t want to have to deal with the resentment and hostility of their colleagues; they may resist because solidarity is also a pull, sometimes stronger than money.
Ruth: That’s true, but also sometimes the monetary increments are so small that the extra money isn’t worth having a miserable life. Also there is something — I don’t know if it’s cultural or circumstantial — but there is this fear of putting yourself forward, a fear of failure…
Debbie: I think it’s fear of people being horrible to you. If I put myself forward and it doesn’t work that’s one thing, but if I find myself with no friends as a result that’s something else.
Joan: This may be a sweeping generalisation but I still find it astonishing the number of hugely competent women who feel fraudulent in some way, that they don’t merit the success they have had, and are afraid that they will be ‘found out’ and found wanting. Whereas men who are spectacularly incompetent in positions of responsibility have no difficulty in perceiving themselves as eminently well suited to jobs they are transparently not doing very well.
Ruth: There was an article in the THES [Times Higher Educational Supplement] some years ago which proposed that women would have equality in the academy when they are 50% of professors, 50% chairs of key committees, and when 50% of them are incompetent.
But to get back to your point, I think we need to distinguish between issues around money in excess, and when it’s too scarce. And what I am interested in is how as feminists we can address that cross-class issue of women and money; that’s why it’s important to look at how we can mobilise the financial resources of those who have money in order to forward political organisation.
Joan: Philanthropy suggests that money is not someone’s right, it’s within someone else’s gift. Whereas if resources are treated as a matter of solidarity, and as a principled way of using money to benefit the larger group, then it removes it from the sphere of guilt, embarrassment, and all those useless emotions which go with political apathy.
Alternative currencies
Ruth: I was talking to Debbie earlier about alternative currencies. And I do think that there are ways of using alternative currencies as a form of cross-class solidarity that is probably worth thinking about. There is a group in New York called WomanPower which operates through a time currency and exchanges hours of work like a time bank — anything from ringing someone up to remind them to take their medicine, to therapy, to going shopping. You could combine the feminist ethics of care and solidarity with organising an alternative market, and thinking about money helps you think about alternative means of exchange.
Joan: But how do you regulate alternative means of exchange, like time banks?
Ruth: I think it has to be self-regulating, in that you have to trust people to partipate in it under the rules that have been agreed … In WomanPower in New York they have restricted the size of the group in order to be able to control it. But how do you control other forms of exchange anyway? Even when there’s a whole regulatory framework, you still have fraud. I guess things work by having ‘cells’ where people have actually committed to the rules.
I think there are real issues here; the present government and social services are quite keen on time banks for various kinds of community support and there are real issues about regulation.
Debbie: I suppose that’s about getting the unamployed to do all the social work the government doesn’t want to pay for.
Ruth: Yes, there’s that, but I think one also has to see the positive side of giving people a stake in their neighbourhoods and giving people a sense that their skills are valued even if they don’t have a market value. On the other hand, particularly when you are talking about domiciliary care, who vets the people who comes into your house? There are real isues of regulation that need to be looked at here.
Debbie: Many of these schemes in Britain at the present time are run by ex-hippies in small communal settings…
Ruth: The example I saw in Argentina was in one of the old textile mills which had shut down, in a working class neighbourhood, and it was like a big Sunday market with an alternative currency — with a picture of a tree on it — and people were buying with this currency — clothes and meat and vegetables, and there was a tarot reader and a doctor and a lawyer and so on — and there were about 800 people there on a Sunday morning. And they reckon, according to their own figures, that households have increased their consumption by $600-800 a month, which is considerable in that economy. It’s the only example I know on that scale, and which is also across class. There are examples in New York State — Ithaca Hours is I think the nearest model — where it’s not so much a physical market, but one where people exchange the currencies for goods and services, and mainstream businesses also accept them as payment for services.
Joan: Isn’t it largely women who have done work which traditionally has no market value, and which is either not seen as work, or at best as work done for love, or out of some kind of biological imperative, and does that matter?
Ruth: I think it depends very much on the economic context in which it happens; certainly in New York State, and in the province of Buenos Aires, this is a reaction to economic recession there are a lot of people who are unemployed and can’t access money income and in that kind of situaiton all kinds of goods and services are exchanged. In the context of contemporary Britain, where it is very much aimed at the so called ‘socially excluded’. I think it is very likely to be quite gendered in terms of what is exchanged. But on the other hand that very system of exchange could also challenge traditional divisions.
Debbie: How did people decide on the cost of things paid for by the currency with a tree on it?
Ruth: They set their own prices…
Debbie: So it does work like a real market…
Ruth: And there are rules about setting fair prices, and to guarantee the quality of your products — and I did ask what would happen if people ignored these rules, and they simply said that no-one would buy their products. So it is a real market in that sense too.
Joan: But in that case, won’t this market also be gendered in the value that is set on particular goods and services, with a lower value being attached to particular skills?
Debbie: If you’re right, Joan, presumably it would be things that were scarce that would be valued most highly. Then if demand outstripped supply — say for caring, it would force the price up, whereas the man with the blowtorch wouldn’t be in such great demand. I do think, however, that tarot readers and people like that should only be allowed to charge in alternative currencies!
Joan: Is an hour always an hour, whatever the work? You couldn’t for instance exchange two hours of cleaning for one hour of decorating because the latter is assumed to have a higher value?
Ruth: No. The principle of time banks is that an hour is a fixed time unit, regardless of the market value of the activity. So that does alter the terms of trade and exchange. But from what I know about time banks in Britain , very often people donate time but they don’t buy with it; whereas in Argentina you have to be a producer and a consumer in order to make the thing work. But I think it has worked there because it is such a recessionary situation that people are happy to participate in alternative markets — it’s not an act of good neighbourliness; it’s an act of survival. But I think it shows the potential of alternative currencies.
Joan: There is so much more to be said; and this is just the beginning of the discussion.