Price You Pay

Money determines the way we live our lives. In a patriarchal society women experience money as one more element of control: often abusive, sometimes paralyzing. It has only been in relatively recent times that women have legally owned and managed money or were able to pass it to their children. As a group, women remain a reserve labor force, underpaid in relation to men, the most rapidly expanding of the poor. In "The Price Women Pay," Margaret Randall interviews women from a wide range of economic, racial, and cultural backgrounds to reveal the role money plays in their lives. These women speak of their changing expectations and attitudes regarding money. Daughters of immigrants remember what money meant in the transition between worlds. They disclose the feelings that they have of stigma or shame at not having enough, guilt at having too much, and the lies, secrets and silences caused by these feelings. These personal stories are woven into a history of women's economics and chapters on family, work, the media, power and control, and lesbian economics. "The Price Women Pay" is for the wives who hide money from their husbands, single women or lesbians who struggle against discriminating financial practices and all who are interested in a feminist analysis of women and money.