Last night I watched the HBO special about Gloria Steinem, Gloria: In Her Own Words. At the very beginning of the documentary, Gloria remembers back to her first days in New York when she had to sleep on friends’ sofas because she was having a hard time getting her own apartment. She had the money, but she was a single woman looking for her own place in the late 1960s. Even in progressive New York City it was hard to find landlords who would rent to single women at the time.
I try not to let my politics seep into this blog, but Gloria Steinem is one of my personal heros. Regardless of your ideas about feminism and the women’s movement, I think it’s very important to appreciate the revolution that has taken place in the past forty years. The fact that I am writing about saving, spending, and investing my own money on this blog is a product of the very hard work that women like Gloria undertook a generation ago.
I could go on about this, but I just wanted to take a moment to remember that it didn’t used to be a given that women would go to college, start a career, and make financial lives for themselves. In historical terms, this is a new phenomena, a paradigm shift that swept in and revolutionized women’s lives very, very quickly.
And I am grateful.
