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“ When I set out to write this book, I thought I’d be writing about economic policy—what I didn’t expect was how much of the story would be about reproductive freedom.”
Josie Cox is a journalist, author, broadcaster and public speaker. She’s worked on staff for Reuters, The Independent, The Wall Street Journal, and is founding editor of The Persistent. Her first book, WOMEN MONEY POWER, is a narrative history of female economic empowerment in America since World War II.
TAKEAWAYS
From Covering Inequality to Confronting It
After college I landed a junior markets correspondent role at Reuters in Frankfurt largely because I spoke German. I taught myself finance on the job and realized that a lot of barriers to understanding money is the lingo.
Fast forward ten years, I’m starting a family, and living the realities of the gender pay gap I’ve reported on. At this time (pandemic), I had the opportunity to interview the CEO of a very large corporation, and I asked him what he thinks of pay inequality, why it still exists and has barely moved in the past twenty years. He said to me,
“it still exists because sometimes when a woman takes a brief leave of absence from the paid labor market to start a family, when she comes back she’s just not that ambitious.”
And that was the starting point for me.
The Women Who Pushed Financial Freedom Forward
I wanted to look across decades at the women who were deeply involved in pushing forward women’s financial freedom and understand how we got to where we are today. I started with World War II, when women entered the paid workforce in huge numbers and proved they were just as capable as men.
What became clear was this recurring pattern: every time women make meaningful progress, there’s a backlash. By telling the stories of women who lived through those moments, I wanted to understand not only how far we’ve come, but why we keep finding ourselves confronting many of the same challenges.
Below are a few of the women whose stories are showcased in the book:
Katherine Dexter McCormick — The main funder of birth control research and development and one of the first women to graduate from MIT
Muriel Siebert — The first women to purchase a seat on the NY Stock Exchange
Lilly Ledbetter — After discovering that she had been paid significantly less than male colleagues during her career at Goodyear, Ledbetter sued her employer.
Pauli Murray — Coined the term Jane Crow to describe the intersection of racial and gender discrimination. Became the first African American to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School.
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