You're listening to That's Not Very Ladylike, the show where every week, we start with one rule, ladies don't, and then we do it anyway. Welcome back to That's Not Very Ladylike. My name is Tracy Willingham and many of you know me as That Hormone Girl. And I want to talk about something that we dance around in this culture like it's impolite to say directly. Women are not poor because they made bad choices.
Tracey:Women are not poor because they didn't work hard enough. Because they didn't budget right, because they picked the wrong man, because they had kids too young, because they weren't ambitious enough, because they didn't pull hard enough on the bootstraps they were really never actually given. Women are poor because a system that needed their labor, their caregiving, their compliance, and their silence spent centuries making absolutely sure they could not accumulate access or control enough resources to ever not need it. And then that same system turned around and then said, Hey, this is a personal failing. We have been sold a story that the right relationship is the exit ramp out of poverty, that love is the plan, and that if you find the right person and make the right choices and say the right prayers, financial security will follow.
Tracey:And every woman who ended up alone or left or passed over or a dollar too much for help and a dollar too short for rent, well, she just didn't do it right. And she did it exactly as right as a system designed to keep her there would allow. So today, we are looking at ladies don't get pushed into poverty. They get kept there by design. So let's go.
Tracey:It's story time, my friends. And I'm going to tell you about two women. And I need you to understand that both of them are the hero. So the first woman is my mom. So my mom raised me as a single mother, and she did everything right.
Tracey:I want to be crystal clear about that. This isn't going to be a mom bashing story. She did everything that a woman in her position was supposed to do. She worked. She showed up.
Tracey:She sacrificed. She held the whole thing together with nothing but her own grit and whatever was left in the tank after the bills were paid, which was often not very much. And still, the system found ways to keep her exactly where it needed her. She made a dollar too much for assistance. 1 damn dollar.
Tracey:So that help evaporated. So then several times she had to go to the church with her hand out and not because she wanted to and not because she hadn't worked for something better, but because the church was what was left when everything else had a cutoff that she couldn't quite make. And if you've ever had to swallow your pride to feed your kid, you know the cost is not just financial. The cost lives in your body. She applied for jobs and got passed over, and it's not because she wasn't qualified.
Tracey:It was because some of them even said she had a child. Because employers looked at a single mother and saw a liability, someone who might need to leave early, might miss a day, might have needs that inconvenience the company. So doors closed that had nothing to do with what she was capable of. Family didn't show up. Sorry.
Tracey:I'm blasting it. The people who should have been the safety net decided it wasn't their problem. But she kept going anyway because that's what women in this situation do. They keep going because there is no other option. Frequently, that's because there's a child watching.
Tracey:And here's what my mom did with all of that. She looked at her own life at every door that had been closed, every resource that had been just out of reach, every time the system moved the line, and she made a decision about her daughter's life. No ring before the diploma was one of the things I heard all the time and she meant college diploma not high school. That was a requirement and it was not a suggestion and not a preference. It was a requirement.
Tracey:Here's the lovely thing. My husband wanted to propose and my mom said yes, but she finishes college first. Not because she didn't believe in love. She wasn't a love hater, but because she had lived inside what happens when love is the whole plan. Because she knew from the inside of her own experience that love does not pay the rent when he leaves.
Tracey:And she was not going to let me find out the hard way like she did. So I finished college, I got the degree, I built the skills, I got my own job, my own money, my own account, my own financial identity. And I found a spouse to share my life with, not to be rescued by, but to share it with. But then this is where the story turns into two heroes. And I see this so often, especially with daughters and mothers that go through this single parent thing.
Tracey:I went back for her. So I helped my mom finish her bachelor's degree, then her master's. I helped her leave the toxic jobs that were keeping her small. I helped her build her own business. Two women, one system that tried to keep us both down, and we passed a rope back and forth until we both got out.
Tracey:So I tell you that not to pat myself on the back or be like, look at us. Everybody else can do this. I want to tell you right now, I know that because I know I'm privileged. I had access that my mother didn't. I had a partnership that did allow me to build things that she was never given the chance to build.
Tracey:So I want to say that out loud. I call it privilege because it is. It is more than grit. Things aligned in my life and things happened and it wasn't just I woke up one morning and in the mirror said, You will get this. There was a lot of privilege and a lot of things that happened.
Tracey:Because then if we pretend it was just grit, then what we're saying is that, you know, hard work erases every woman who worked just as hard, but she didn't get the same outcome. So we got to stop and pause. So my mother is not less than me because she ended up in a harder place. My mother is the reason I am not in the same harder place. And that is how you get two heroes in a story.
Tracey:And we see this so often, right? Even if it's not a mother daughter. Women going back to help others. One woman gets somewhere successfully. She brings her tribe along.
Tracey:This is something that I love about the sisterhood is not all of us, but a lot of us when we get places, we don't forget where we came from. We don't forget who was there and we bring them with us in any way that we can. And that's not always financially. So let's look at the cost of this rule and what it looks like in real life. It looks like a woman working two jobs and still not qualifying for the help she needs because the formula was designed by people who have never had to choose between the electric bill and the grocery run.
Tracey:It looks like a child watching her mother swallow her pride at the church door and filing that image away in a place that will shape every financial decision she makes the rest of her life. It looks like a job application that never gets called back because there's a child listed somewhere in the paperwork and an employer who decided, well, that's relevant information. It looks like a woman who did everything right, who worked, who showed up, who held it together, still ending up in the same place she started because the exits were designed for someone else. And it looks like a daughter who absorbs all of it, who watches what happens when a woman doesn't have her own financial foundation and makes a silent decision. Sometimes really without even fully knowing she's making it.
Tracey:And that's that her life will be different and not from a place of aggression or pity, but it is seeing the struggle and saying, I'm going be different. And the cost isn't just the poverty itself. The cost is what poverty does to a woman's sense of what she is allowed to want and what she's allowed to reach for, whether she believes she deserves access to the things that would actually change the trajectory of her life. And the cost is what it does to the next generation, either the daughter who saw it and built her way out or the daughter who saw it and learned that this is just what women's lives look like. Both outcomes are the cost of this rule.
Tracey:So let's look at history. Let's see how deep does this go? And I'm going to give you some numbers because I need you to understand that what I'm describing is not a series of individual bad luck stories, right? This is structural. This is documented.
Tracey:And it's documented by design. So the official poverty rate for single mother families in 2024 was 31.3%. For married coupled families, it was 5.5%. Single mother families are nearly six times more likely to live in poverty than married couple families. Six times.
Tracey:Not slightly more likely, six times. And before anyone starts talking about the solution being marriage, the Center for American Progress put out a report specifically to address that argument. Their conclusion, marriage is not a logical economic solution to poverty. The problem is not that women aren't paired up correctly. The problem is that the system doesn't support women who are on their own and not on their own because they were high maintenance, lazy, blah, blah, blah.
Tracey:It is because the people who came into their lives and agreed to a partnership, they left. And that's fine. Things don't always work, but they did not hold to their responsibility. The woman is left holding the responsibility. So let's be clear on that.
Tracey:Single mothers earn about 56¢ for every dollar paid to all fathers. That is tens of thousands of dollars a year in lost income. Money that could be school supplies, rent, groceries, retirement, all gone because of who she is, not what she does. And it's worse. It's worse for women who are not white.
Tracey:Let's just go there. I acknowledge my privilege. We've got a lot of work to do, my friends. Black single mother households have a poverty rate of approximately 35%. Hispanic single mothers earn just 57¢ for every dollar a white man earns.
Tracey:And Native American female headed families with children have the highest poverty rate of any ethnic group. The system is not equally cruel and it definitely has priorities and it does not hide those priorities at all. More than a third of single mother families, 36.8% experience food insecurity. Nearly one in four receives food stamps. And in some states, a single mother with an infant would have to pay more than half of her income for center based child care.
Tracey:Half of her entire income just for childcare. And then we wonder why some of these women can't get jobs, can't get the job that would get them advanced. They don't have the money upfront to pay for the childcare. So here's the historical part that should really just make your pressure just shoot off the record. Women in The United States could not open a bank account without a man's permission until 1974.
Tracey:1974. So this is not an ancient history, my friends. Your grandmother was alive in 1974 Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, leaders could legally deny women credit or require a male cosigner. Even financially secure, employed single women. A woman who had worked her whole life and saved her own money could be turned away from a bank because she didn't have a man to sign for her.
Tracey:Fun fact: Mississippi was the first state to allow married women to own property in their own name, and that started in 1839. And even then, only with their husband's permission. So they could own that property in their name, but yet it's still linked back to a man's permission. In The UK, women could not open a bank account or apply for a mortgage without a husband or father's signature until 1975. Germany, 1977.
Tracey:So we are not looking at medieval dates, my friends. These are dates that people in this room remember. So when we talk about why women end up in poverty, why the exits are harder to find, why the resources are just out of reach, why a woman can work her whole life and still end up with nothing. We are talking about a system that spent centuries making it structurally impossible for women to build, to accumulate, or to even control their own financial lives. And then spent those same centuries calling the outcome a personal failing.
Tracey:This design was intentional. The results, they're not an accident. And understanding that is not making excuses. That's what they say it is. You know what it really is?
Tracey:It's telling the truth of a system designed to keep it that way. So if this could be said, this is what it would sound like. I watched my mother work herself to the bone and still not be able to get ahead, and I have never fully processed what that did to me. I am terrified of ending up in the same place she did, and I have never said that out loud to anyone. I don't have my own money, and if this relationship ended tomorrow, I genuinely don't know what I would do.
Tracey:I was taught that wanting financial independence meant I didn't trust my spouse, and I believed that for longer than I should have. I've been told my whole life that the right relationship is the plan. And I'm starting to realize that nobody ever actually taught me how to be my own plan. And I watched my mother not have options. And I have been quietly, desperately, without ever naming it, making sure I have options.
Tracey:So here we are. This should piss you off because here is what really should genuinely piss you off about this. The things that actually keep women out of poverty, education, independent income, their own bank account, their own credit, their own professional skills, their own financial identity are the exact same things that have been called unladylike for centuries. Those women are too ambitious, too focused on themselves, too independent, too career driven, not romantic enough, not trusting enough. A good woman doesn't need to worry about money.
Tracey:A good wife lets her partner handle that, especially if it's a husband. A good mother puts her family first. Every single message is designed to keep women from building their own financial foundation, and it's been wrapped in a language of virtue, of femininity, of what a good woman does. And those women end up with nothing when the husband leaves, when the marriage or partnership dissolves, when the job disappears, when the church is the only option left. The system that told them not to build their own foundation then turns around and says, you should have built a foundation.
Tracey:And that's a personal failing. It calls it bad choices. It calls it a consequence of not working hard enough in a system that was actively working against them. And this should piss us off, ladies, because it was not a series of individual bad luck stories. It was a coordinated centuries long, fully documented removal of every resource that would have made women dangerous, every tool that would have given women the ability to leave, and every asset that would have made women not need to stay.
Tracey:And the women who went after those things anyway, those who got the education, who opened the account, who built the skills, who insisted on their own financial identity inside a partnership, they were called selfish, untrusting, a lot to handle. And meanwhile, the women who didn't or couldn't or were never even given the access ended up exactly where the system designed them to end up. And then we called it a cautionary tale. Because the poverty, that was not the accident. The poverty is the point.
Tracey:So how do you know if this is you? There are probably three women listening to this episode right now. And they're probably saying, Hey, I'm wondering, am I in even maybe a poverty mindset? So if you are the daughter who's still watching, you have a front row seat to what financial dependence does to a woman and you're absorbing it whether you know it or not. You've been taught explicitly or implicitly that love is the plan, that the right relationship is the exit ramp, that your financial future is something someone else will handle.
Tracey:You do have access to things your mother didn't like education, information, opportunity, and you're not fully using them because nobody has really told you clearly enough that they are your protection. And you want to help your mother, but you don't know how to do that and also build your own foundation at the same time. If you are the mother who is in it right now, you are working as hard as anyone you know and it's still not enough, and you're exhausted from pretending that it's a math problem that you just haven't figured out. You made a dollar too much for help or too little for opportunity, and you fell into a gap the system designed specifically to catch women like you. You are doing the most important financial work of your life right now, teaching your daughter what to reach for, and nobody is calling it work or paying you for it.
Tracey:And you are not the cautionary tale. You are the foundation. And the fact that you have not gotten the credit for that does not make it less true. And if you are the woman in a partnership who has not built her own financial identity, you have been told that wanting your own money means you don't trust your partner, your spouse, and that is a manipulation. Trust and financial independence are not in conflict.
Tracey:They are not even in the same category. You do not know what you would do if this relationship ended tomorrow, and that is information worth taking very seriously. You have access right now to education, to income, to your own account, to your own credit, that women before you fought and bled and were legally denied for centuries. So use it. That's what they want us to do.
Tracey:They don't want shame and guilt around us taking advantage of what they fought for. So use it. And a good partnership is one where both people could stand on their own if they had to. And that is not a threat to your relationship. That is actually the definition of a healthy one.
Tracey:So here we are at the closing and here's what I want you to Here's what I know to be true about daughters. We don't need a lot. We really don't. We don't need perfect circumstances. We don't need wealthy parents.
Tracey:And we don't need a clear path with no obstacles. Is it easier? Sure. But do we need it? No.
Tracey:What we need is a mother who holds the line on the things that matter, a mother who looks at her own life, at what it cost her not to have access, not to have the education, not to have her own financial foundation. And she decides that her daughter's life will look different. Not better in a dismissive way, but it's different in the structural way. It's pushing back to the system that is trying to keep mothers and daughters in this space. My mother held that line when it would have been easier not to.
Tracey:She was living in scarcity at times, and she still had the rule for me of no ring before that college diploma. And again, it wasn't because she was like, I don't want you happy. I don't want you in a relationship. But she understood in a way that only a woman who's been kept from financial independence can fully understand that happiness without a foundation, it's just hope. And at the end of the day, we all know it.
Tracey:Hope does not pay the rent or the mortgage. So I got the diploma and the job and the account and the skills, and I found a spouse to share a life with, but he did not save me. And I'm honest enough to call that privilege because it is. Because I had access that my mother didn't, I have access that other mothers do not, and I had access that other daughters do not always have. And I'm also lucky and I have to recognize that because my partnership allowed me to build things that she was never given the room to build.
Tracey:So I went back and I helped her build them too because that's what daughters who got out do when they understand what their mothers actually gave them. And many of my friends, so many of my friends come from single mothers and we have all excelled. And it's not because we're exceptional. I mean, okay, we kind of are. But to the point of this podcast, it's not because we're exceptional, it's because our mothers were.
Tracey:Because they looked at what the system handed them and refused to let it be handed down for another generation. And that is the generational transfer this episode is really about. Not just surviving poverty, defeating it. And that may mean this generation right now, the way they defeat it is they make the next generation, they pass it forward. The one thing the system can never actually take away, they pass forward the knowledge of what you need in order to not need anyone to rescue you.
Tracey:That, that breaks the generational poverty. So relationships, they're a bonus. A beautiful, wonderful, and deeply human bonus. But they cannot be our plan, ladies. They are not the foundation.
Tracey:They are not the thing that keeps us out of poverty when everyone else falls apart. Access is the plan. Education is the plan. Skill is the plan. Your own name on your own account is the plan.
Tracey:And the most important part of this plan is believing that you are worth building a financial life for and that we don't need anyone else to validate that belief. And raising a daughter who knows the difference between a bonus and a foundation, holding the line on a diploma before a ring when everything in your own life is telling you to just let her have the happiness, and going back for the woman who built you after you built yourself, that's the most unladylike thing of all. Thanks for joining me today for That's Not Very Ladylike. If today's episode lit a fire, pushed your buttons, or called a little BS on the stories we've been sold, share it with another woman who's tired of being told to tone it down, smile more, or play nice. And help a girl out by making sure you subscribe, leave a quick review, and catch me on Instagram at that hormone girl.
Tracey:Until next time, keep getting loud, messy, and raising hell because being ladylike is overrated.