Demystifying the Power of Moolah

By Sheerly Avni, AlterNet. Posted January 24, 2006.

"Women, emotions and cash." This is the subtitle Liz Perle chose for her new book, Money: A Memoir, a brutally honest look at how women's conflicted relationship to money holds them back in love and life. We know more about our friends' sex lives, she says, than we do about their pocketbooks, and women are still caught in a push-pull of desire for cash and shame over that desire. Perle doesn't offer any easy answers, but she forces us to ask hard questions about one of our deepest taboos. And asking the questions is the first step.

AlterNet met with Perle in her San Francisco office and asked her all about sex, love, divorce court, double-ovens, and how to decide who should pick up the check.

In this book, you argue that money is always a fraught symbol.

Yes, it always carries the weight of something else. Money for men is power, it translates into sexual power. And for women, it's an aphrodisiac, because for centuries, women could only survive by attaching themselves to people who had money.

So I'm reducing here, but it seems that in the first half of the book you say that for men, money means power, and for women, money means love and security. But then at the end, you reinterpret that formula and say actually that for women too, money means power, which is why our relationship to it is so problematic. But when you say "power," what exactly do you mean?

Power: independence, freedom, the ability to make your own decisions.

Why wouldn't we want that? Why would women have a hard time embracing it? Isn't that exactly what women have been fighting for?

OK, you've got to look at how fast this has all happened. This is where the women's movement to me, is alive and well.

Move back a few generations: My grandmother's relationship to money was indirect. She didn't work. My mother, she went to college and she worked, but then she met my father and stopped working. Now, she died, so I don't know what would have happened, she might have gone back to work. That was a shift, but the money was still expected to come from the husband. The image of nirvana that was being broadcast was still the idea that the husband brought home the money.

Remember that the media creates norms. The Cleavers never existed, but how many people do we describe as Eddie Haskell? The media images are archetypes for us, so my mother felt perfectly secure depending on my father.

Now, today society will judge me on two different scales when they weigh my worth: 1) the amount of money I make and the prestige of my position, and 2) my ability to attain the womanly arts: to marry, to reproduce, to keep a nice home.

What about attractiveness?

Oh, that's part of the womanly arts. Implicit in that is that you've got to look good enough to get there in the first place -- and then keep yourself there.

So here I am: I have both those values systems inside me, I'd have to be the girl in the bubble not to. Each of those value systems contains a specific relationship to money. ... One is direct, the other is indirect. And I've spent my life ping-ponging back and forth between the two.

So you are in this constant state of turmoil between two ideals, two archetypes, and when you have two ideals that are discordant, it makes for a lot of conflict and ambivalence. It's these two different value systems that operate in our society, whether or not we accept them, and they pull us apart.

In your book, you say that the younger generation is different from your generation. What's the difference? Are the conflicts resolved? You found the younger women to be less conflicted.

Yes, I think younger women are more comfortable with their material sides And I'm not sure that's all to the good. The person who reflected the healthiest relationship to money was this one woman, Anna. She knows that cash is just cash. I admire her, because she's got a very clear sense of what cash can and can't do. What they don't have is a sense of fiscal responsibility, they've been raised in a society of credit card debt. That will be their challenge.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based writer.

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