The Women in My Family Had to Be Good With Money

How my mother, grandmother and I saved, schemed and sacrificed to gain independence from our controlling husbands.

Of all the stories we’ve published over the past decade at Narratively, this deeply personal piece may be the one that has resonated with readers the most. We’ve heard from so many different people who empathize with what Dena and the women in her family have been through — and who of course have similar stories of their own. If you haven’t had a chance to read this one yet, take a few minutes out of your #MemoirMonday to spend with this very special story.

Illustrations by Cornelia Li | Story Edited by Lilly Dancyger

“If you write the check for five dollars over, they’ll give you cash back,” my grandmother told me, scrawling her name and ripping the paper out of the checkbook. “Then you can get some money for yourself.” She took the five-dollar bill the clerk handed her and tucked it into the inside pocket of her purse, between the coupons and crumpled tissues. “Just make sure you do it every time, so your husband thinks that’s really what the groceries cost.”

I was twelve, in that liminal state between childhood and womanhood, still playing with dolls but also shopping for training bras. Eager to soak up lessons about what it meant to be a woman, I watched, and learned, never once questioning why a woman who had a job had to hide money from her husband.

My paternal grandmother Pat graduated from Wheaton College with a degree in chemistry in the 1940’s. When we’d talk about her college experiences she’d laughingly tell stories of how, right up until her senior year, her advisor urged her to switch majors to home economics. After all, women with degrees in the sciences didn’t find husbands.

Despite that handicap, she married on August 12, 1950 at the age of 19. For a few years she actually got to work in her field as a chemist for Anheuser-Busch, in Wisconsin. “One year,” she’d tell me, “there was a problem with the hops coming in flat. I needed to take some cases of beer home with me to study. But I was a married woman with a young child! It would have been a scandal if I’d been seen with beer in the car. I wrapped the cases in blankets and hid them in the trunk. The whole drive home I was terrified I’d be pulled over and have to explain myself.” But the children kept coming – four in total – and working full time became difficult. My grandfather made the case for her to get her teacher’s license and switch to teaching elementary science. After all, she’d still be using the science background she loved. And it would be much more practical for her to have the summers off when the kids weren’t in school, too.