Women need their own damn money

What if--hear me out--most of humanity's tragedy could be solved by simply caring for women?

Aug 24, 2025

A quick reminder that we are about to wrap up a summer discount on annual subscriptions for $39.50 (that’s only $3.29 a month!)

Paid subscribers get access to all our essays and interviews and perks like book club, and also pay us for our work—which is very appreciated!

Upgrade to paid for $39/year

MR is on summer vacation and will return shortly. Please enjoy this essay previous from behind the paywall—that is still one of my most popular.

“Medea Escaping” by quilt artist Marilyn Belford

This week I have been thinking about Medea again.

My dad came into town a while back, and he treated me to two wonderful shows. The first was Tina, a biographical musical about the life of the legendary Tina Turner. The second was Madama Butterfly, the Puccini opera, at the Metropolitan Opera House.

I didn’t choose the shows thematically, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that the plot and pathos of both hinge on narratives of women who are trapped in terrible circumstances by their reliance on men, and patriarchal systems that fail them spectacularly.

In Madama Butterfly, Puccini’s 1904 opera, a beautiful Japanese young woman is courted by an American Naval Officer, who becomes infatuated with her while he is on shore leave. He realizes that he can marry her and enjoy himself with cultural approval, then later sail happily on back to America at his leisure, since abandonment equates divorce in Japan. That’s exactly what he does, leaving Butterfly and their young child bereft and destitute. Tragedy ensues.

Two nights earlier I saw Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which was co-produced by Turner herself, and tells the story of her unlikely rise to stardom at the age of 17 when she’s discovered by Ike Turner, who then marries her. The relationship famously sours when he reveals himself as an abusive control freak, who makes her the vehicle for his own success, establishing sole ownership of all their music and even her stage name. Then he subjects her to mental, physical, and sexual abuse to ensure she doesn’t resist the arrangement.

When she gets up the courage to leave him, Tina and her two children are penniless, and there’s a moving scene where she begs a hotel manager to take them in even though she has 36 cents in her bank account. (He recognizes the recording star, and he does).

Different cultures, different time periods, same old story.

Is there a name for this genre? There should be. A gazillion tragedies rely on this narrative—one could argue that a line could be drawn from Euripides’ Greek tragedy Medea right up to the Tina Turner story, though Tina certainly has a happier ending.

This type of story is a favorite of sorts and has been for millennia. It’s one that we keep returning to again and again: Woman meets man, woman has children by man, woman finds herself in twisted and desperate situation when that man abuses or abandons her. Or, in the case of Medea, finds herself banished after she, among other things, slays a dragon to save her husband, only for him to leave her to marry a princess. Tale as old as time.

Sure, one way to read these narratives is that men are the worst—but that gives men both too much and not enough credit, and misses the point I think. Rather, I think what is damning about these tales is the structures and systems that make women’s and children’s survival and wellbeing reliant on the whims of one person who has access to status and economic resources that they lack (usually a man), or the fickle whims and pity of others.

Maybe the reason that this narrative is so enduringly popular is because it is so relatable. Who among us doesn’t know a woman or child who has been in this situation, if we have not indeed been a woman or child in one of these situations ourselves? Generations of women in my family have lived versions of these stories. Heck, I couch-surfed and cheap-hoteled my way through New York City myself when I left a marriage years ago, and shudder to think what it would have been like if I’d had a child in tow.

But also, these narratives are enduring because they speak to what may be the core predicament of the human condition. Humans have young that need intensive and involved care that requires large amounts of resources over a very long time in order for them to survive, much less thrive. This makes human children extremely vulnerable, and it makes their caretakers very vulnerable as well. A single caretaker of a child, or multiple children, often lacks the massive resources to support themselves and a child on their own.

This predicament is uniquely human and could be considered the birthplace of human suffering. No wonder dramatists and artists have been drawn to it for thousands of years.

So when I watched these two shows last weekend, I couldn’t help but think: You know what both these women need for these tragedies to be avoided? They need their own damn money.

The pathos in these stories wouldn’t exist if these women had the resources to just go their own way. An entire genre of tragedy could perhaps be eliminated with this one deus ex machina.

And this got me thinking again about the real life examples of societies and communities that actually have tried this tactic to head off suffering: giving women money when they have children to make sure those children have enough.

About six years ago, I was assigned to cover poverty-related issues full-time, to the tune of five stories a week. There are a lot of poverty innovations out there—from nonprofits, philanthropists, researchers—who try different things to see what works.

One solution that popped up several times was the seemingly over-simple idea of giving people cash to support their kids, like this test program in Kenya.

A charity called GiveDirectly.com gave Kenyans money — no strings attached — in a randomized trial. What happened? People that received cash had more assets, less hunger, and more happiness than those that didn't get cash.

But wouldn't it be better to give goods — like food — than cash handouts? What if that money just goes to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes?

The answer is no, according to a paper by the World Bank that looked at 19 studies to analyze the effects of "cash transfers" and the amount that goes toward "temptation goods," according to Vox.com. They concluded that 82 percent of those receiving cash actually reduced purchases of alcohol and tobacco.

"We have investigated evidence from around the developing world, including Latin America, Africa, and Asia," said David Evans and Anna Popova, who wrote the World Bank report. "There is clear evidence that transfers are not consistently used for alcohol or tobacco in any of these environments."

Instead, people bought cows, started small businesses, and bought more and better food for their kids. People took their kids to the doctor, and paid for educational supplies.

This solution has been successful in Brazil for decades now. Brazil has conditional cash-transfer program that gives families money for sending kids to school and to regular doctor visits. Bolsa Familia, or "Family Grant," shells out the equivalent of about $70 every month to a quarter of the country's population.

But the cash doesn't go to just anyone — it's given to women.

The state tends to think that women are more likely to use the cash for children and family needs than men are — especially in Brazil, where alcoholism is a persistent problem of poverty.

Researchers have found that Bolsa Familia not only helps to alleviate poverty, it also empowers women and is changing gender roles.

Maria da Paz, a mother of two girls from Rocinha, Brazil, told The Guardian that the extra cash allowed her to leave her abusive partner. "I substituted my husband for Bolsa Familia," she said. "Bolsa Familia has helped women. Before it started, women could only be frantic about feeding their kids but now, with Bolsa Familia, we are less dependent on men."

Social development minister Tereza Campello told the Guardian: "Our research shows that the money empowers women. It means they are less dependent on their husbands, more likely to share in decision-making, and have higher self-esteem. Some women who were forced to put up with husbands who beat them now feel liberated enough to think of divorce. The money also gives women more say in whether to buy and use contraceptives."

The program has been so successful over the years that’s it’s not an experiment anymore, it’s just a regular feature of Brazilian governance.

While I was writing this, I was looking back over the comments sections in these stories that I wrote several years ago, and was struck by how many commenters expressed doubt that such a program could work in the U.S., even though they have proven successful in cultures around the world.

“Unfortunately, I would bet results would be different here in the States. We are too entitled. I'd like to see the study done here,” wrote one reader. About a third of the commenters expressed similar doubts about the U.S.

Due to extraordinary circumstances, the seemingly impossible has happened and these readers got their wish. We did the study in the U.S. in 2021. Under the cash transfers to families program during the pandemic, 3.5 million American children were lifted above the poverty line with expanded monthly child tax credits that gave $250-300 per child to eligible families.

Those payments led to a 24 percent drop in hunger for families receiving the credits; families used the cash to pay for food and other basic necessities according to White House data.

There was no evidence that the monthly payments reduced employment (anyone with kids knows that $250 a month comes nowhere near covering the cost of supporting a child).

The results in the U.S. were in line with other countries. Child poverty plummeted, child hunger plummeted, and stress for adults dissipated when they had money to sustain a baseline of stability.

It turns out that women, and families, in the U.S. aren’t that different. We’ve just believed a different story about them.

If Madama Butterfly had access to such a program, she might have been able to keep her child, instead of being forced to surrender him to strangers. Tina Turner might have left an abusive relationship earlier, and made and owned her own music decades sooner.

Maybe we enjoy these stories too much as entertainment, and we need to let them inspire outrage instead. Maybe we need to expand our imagination to believe that there are alternatives to these stories, that they don’t have to be normal.

These stories are so normalized that we tend to react to them as though they are inevitable. A woman shouldn’t have to be subject to desperate circumstances because she has a child. Yet our reaction to these narratives—fictional as well as real life—is to sort of throw up our hands: So sad! But what can be done? You drew the bad card, the bad husband, had bad luck. It happens!

But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way, we have just let it be that way.

One thing I always liked about the Medea story is that she refuses to accept her society’s commonly accepted narrative that she and her children have to suffer because of the choices of her husband and the king. She points out that her husband’s decision to leave them would likely lead to a slow death for her children, since they are not Greek citizens and have no kin, and have been banished to the wilderness. And instead of bemoaning that fate, she rages against everyone, and threatens to burn down everything in her wake in protest rather than watch her children suffer like everyone around her expects her to do.

In the end of the play she exacts revenge on everyone she can—poisoning her husband’s fiancée and the king. She threatens to kill her own children rather than watch them die a slow death (in many versions of the play, this happens). But one way to read the story is a parable about a woman who won’t stand for the systems and individuals that seek to quietly normalize the suffering of herself and her children, and that maybe we shouldn’t stand for it, either.

At the end of the play, Medea rises on a chariot into the sky—a device usually reserved for gods and goddesses, not raging spurned women. I can imagine Medea looking down at stories like Tina’s, and the millions of others like it both onstage and off, and crying out to us through the centuries—"Are you fools kidding me? You’re still letting this happen? I’ve been raging about this since 431 BC! Do better!”

We have ample evidence that there’s a solution that’s worth trying. What could it hurt, and how much worse could it be, than what we’ve been living with for all this time?

We might have fewer grand tragic stories, and more Maria da Paz, mother of two from Rocinha, Brazil, who left her abusive husband and no longer has to panic about her children.

The evidence is there. We could try to change the narrative.

Matriarchy Report

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?