Women, Money and Power : The author of “Fire With Fire” charges that the Left’s aversion to money matters is holding feminism back

In my book, “Fire With Fire,” I show that we women, collectively, have our hands on enough political tools to begin to pry open the gates of power. We are 51% of the population, 53% of the electorate; we have 7 million to 12 million more votes than men, and we’ve been outvoting men since 1980. We spend 85% of the consumer dollar, 51% of the charity dollar and most of the tuition dollar. If we wake up to our own power and learn to use it far more combatively, we will secure social equality by the dawn of the coming century.

Paradoxically, what stands in our way at this moment of opportunity are precisely the reflexes left over from a feminism articulated by the Marxist left of the 1960s. That revolution taught that women’s true liberation would to be secured by shunning the tools of an evil capitalist patriarchy. It urged withdrawing from any engagement with the market economy, even in the interest of creating social justice. The revolutionaries’ favorite slogan was the poet Audre Lorde’s dictum: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Not surprisingly, my call for women to acquire money and thereby power has brought me into conflict with the left. Robert Scheer’s attack on my book in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (Dec. 19) exemplifies just these attitudes that are holding feminism back. Scheer’s spleen stems from the misguided premise, a commonplace in the elite left, that when someone is talking about using money and power to advance social equality, he or she must only be addressing those with money and power.

“How does urging women to vote their interests have relevance for a welfare mother in Harlem?” I am often asked sneeringly by white, middle-class “radicals” on college campuses. “How can you talk about economic literacy if most women are struggling just to get by?” Scheer worries that my call for women to achieve their potential status as a “new ruling class” speaks to and for only those women affluent enough to finance candidates.

All these objections accuse me of elitism. But my theories about money, power and the franchise, and how women should use them, descend directly from earlier progressive movements. Realizing that the dominant class never gives up power simply because it is the right thing to do, the leaders of the civil rights movement called upon their followers--made up, of course, mostly of the poorest and most dispossessed--to seize the tools of power that alone could force open the gates. Scheer’s suggestion that only women rich enough to finance candidates are interested in politics reveals, to my mind, paternalistic attitudes toward the disenfranchised that betray the progressivism set forth by civil rights leaders from Gandhi to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

King would be appalled by the idea the poor were somehow beneath an appeal to voter mobilization in their interest. The Rev. Jesse Jackson does not imagine that his poor and working-class audiences are incapable of understanding allusive language or engaging in complex political debate. Many progressive leaders have urged a marriage of government help and community self-help: “You are not responsible for being down,” Jackson says. “You are responsible for standing up.”

Other progressives have urged using the marketplace: Malcolm X spearheaded “Buy Black” campaigns, and today some of the most committed civil rights leaders are promoting urban-area public-private partnerships. The 1930s radical Saul Alinsky advocated what he called “proxies for people,” a scheme in which poor communities bought stock and thus forced corporations to address their needs. None of these radicals needed to be convinced of the urgency of mobilizing around economic empowerment.

Clearly, the relationship between money and social justice has always been recognized in progressive politics. So what’s the problem with women and money? Would Scheer balk so at a manifesto urging economic empowerment for, say, Hmong immigrants? The hostility provoked by my discussion of female economic empowerment betrays a deep, unconscious and immensely pervasive fear--shared by women as well as men, by the right as well as the left--of what would actually happen if women had as much money as men. The specter of the economically independent woman strikes a primal anxiety in the collective unconscious.

Most of us were raised by economically dependent mothers. On a subliminal level, we may fear that if women were economically independent, they might not perform the care-taking and nurturing functions of the world. If Mother had money, she might not be there for us; she might be dancing all night at the Ritz.

Why do I believe that it is so important for feminism to get over its Angel in the House, middle-class-lady queasiness around the issue of women and money? The answer comes out of my own training as a Marxist: To understand power relations, follow the money. It is not misogyny, or law, or child rearing, that make women most vulnerable to sexism; it is their poverty relative to men.

I too grew up as a baby of the counterculture; I too found my longing for a better world sloganized alluringly in the language of the anti-capitalist left; I too am a recovering Marxist. But three developments changed my assumptions, and led me to the belief that it is only the master’s tools that will dismantle the master’s house, and that the next stage of women’s empowerment depends upon their learning to use the potent weapon of money:

1--The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. It does not make sense for the last living unself-critical Marxists to be middle-class American academic feminists (and Cubans!). We on the left need a new eschatological punch line, and it seems obvious to me that those of us who care about social justice need to wake up to this reality and commit ourselves to engaging with the economy that exists if we are to empower the dispossessed.

2--I traveled around the country, meeting audiences that consisted both of academic feminist “radicals” and the women who make up the demographic majority: those who are supporting kids on an average salary of $16,000 a year. These elite audiences were, like Robert Scheer, appalled at my indelicate, unfashionable insistence that feminism must teach economic literacy to all women, and embrace mastery of the marketplace in the interest of attaining equality.

But with audiences of women outside college campuses who make up the majority--women in the pink-collar ghetto, in blue-collar jobs, in the service industry--the same message was met with cheers. When polled by Redbook and the Ms. Foundation, working- and lower-middle-to-middle-class women say categorically that what they need most as women is--surprise!--more money.

The elite, leftist, feminist community’s distaste for the issue of money shows they’ve wandered into an ideological cul de sac, in which the protection of their own purity has supplanted the true goal of progressive politics: alleviating suffering. As Bill Clinton said to the left wing of his party at the Democratic Leadership Council, “Beware letting the perfect stand in the way of the good.”

3--I listened to women all around the country talk about money, and discovered that financial illiteracy debilitates women of all classes: the working-class women who think it unfeminine to negotiate for a raise; the middle-class women who feel safer in the lower-paying humanities than the higher-paying sciences, and who think of money as “polluting” and “immoral”; the upper-class women who never learn about their resources until a divorce sends their standard of living ricocheting downward, and they find that male relatives have taken over the management of family wealth. I met women of all classes who stay in abusive relationships because they can’t afford to get out.

For all of these women, I wrote the sections on money and power in “Fire With Fire” that so offend some members of the traditional feminist and male left.

We may not be able to bring about a world free of misogyny, but with economic parity, women will inhabit a world in which sexists may have the same old impulses--but can’t afford to act on them.