From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Just in Case
The last dependable man: your broker.
Who of us can forget "Independent Women," the anthem for the hit movie "Charlie's Angels" (2001)? The pop group Destiny's Child sings of all the things that a woman should buy for herself: a car, a house, a ring and a lot else. The song's advice: "If you're gonna brag, make sure it's your money you flaunt. Depend on no one else to give you what you want."
Women's-lib songs have been around for decades, but no other ballad captures the core idea so explicitly: The key to a woman's independence is money. Or as Destiny's Child puts it: "I pay my own bills." It's a sentiment right out of a 1905 Edith Wharton novel. No matter how much progress women have made in the past 100 years, they are still all Lily Bart in "The House of Mirth": The only chance for independence--and thus happiness--comes from money.
A recent ad from Charles Schwab makes a similar point, this time aimed at middle-aged suburbanites instead of multiplex teens. In one of the company's "Talk to Chuck" TV commercials, we see a woman on a ski lift confiding to a friend that "the papers came through." She is now, she announces, "in charge of [her] own investments." To help with future financial decisions, she is looking for someone who will listen to her own ideas. She puts on some chapstick, pauses and then jokes: "That will be a change after Larry."
Larry, we don't need to be told, is the Neanderthal ex-husband who no doubt always kept her in the dark about money matters, probably making her beg for the $50 to buy her lift ticket. When I describe the ad to David Blankenhorn, the president of the Institute for American Values, he laughs at the implicit message, which he summarizes as: "Are you looking for reliability in an uncertain world? Depend on your broker." (Not your husband.) He notes that John Hancock ran a series of ads a few years ago featuring mothers in unsteady relationships who needed "insurance for the unexpected."
Of course, it never hurts to plan for the unexpected. But are women really so unprepared? Are they as clueless about money as Madison Avenue and Hollywood cliché would have it? Mr. Blankenhorn cites a long history of women being in charge of their households' day-to-day budgeting. But more disconcerting is the premise of such pitches: Is dependency best understood as a threat to well-being? "One thing that causes a marriage to be strong is interdependence, each person depending on the other to do certain things," Mr. Blankenhorn says. "If each person is hedging his or her bets, they can't become dependent in that way."
Now a whole industry has grown up to teach women how to hedge their bets. Books like "Women Don't Ask," "Girl, Get Your Credit Straight" and "Nice Girls Don't Get Rich" share a theme: In a world where divorce is common, where children are increasingly born out of wedlock, where women live longer than men, it would be downright irresponsible for a sensible woman not to know about Treasury bills and p/e ratios.
Jacquette Timmons, the president of New York-based Sterling Investment Management, says that there is no distinction between the advice she gives to men and women. But she does think that the "negative consequences" of not knowing how to handle finances "fall more on women" than men, because women are more likely to have children on their own or to take time off from their careers to care for children, diminishing their future earning power. In a new book called "The Feminine Mistake," Leslie Bennetts goes further: She argues that a woman who drops out of the work force to raise a child, even for a short amount of time, is often adding an unacceptable level of financial risk to her life.
And the problem isn't just on the earning side, or so we are told. TV personality and financial advice-giver Suze Orman claims that women start at a disadvantage because they have a "dysfunctional relationship" with money. They are, she tells me in an interview, emotionally hardwired to use money differently from men. (Such is the theme of her recent book, "Women and Money.")
Is she right? In a recent column, Time magazine writer Anita Hamilton accuses Ms. Orman of "patronizing finger wagging" and "exaggerat[ing] women's financial foibles at a time when we are making more money than ever before." Ms. Orman responds by noting that she is not suggesting, as the old stereotype goes, that women are frivolous, putting all their money toward clothes and manicures. Rather, she says, women have to combat the desire to nurture others before taking care of themselves. The problem is not their own dependency but their willingness to let others depend on them. She cites the ladies in her audience who ask her how to repair their credit rating because they co-signed a car loan for a deadbeat boyfriend; or how to save money for their children's education when they have nothing put away for their own retirement; or how to care for their aging parents so that the burden doesn't fall on their brothers.
What to do? She suggests that a woman keep a "save yourself" bank account separate from her family's--at least enough money to survive for three months. "I've heard too many times," she tells me, "that one partner wipes a joint account clean."
However cynical it sounds, Ms. Orman's save-yourself view of modern marriage is probably a prudent one. But it may help to perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve. "It's kind of antithetical," says Mr. Blankenhorn, "to the concept of two becoming one."
Goodbye, Larry. Hello, Chuck.
Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.
