An Empress Economy? đ
In which a tiny midlife womenâs book club Zoom becomes a movement... đ
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Fellow Empresses, How the hell are you?
So we had a thing and it was SO COOL. Allow me to paint the pictureâŚ
It is late Saturday morning, and we are all on Zoom with our requisite coffee, tea, and avocado toast facsimiles looming somewhere off-screen. It is a tiny group today, but special. We are there with Kirsten Miller, bestselling author of THE CHANGE, which is being made into a limited series, and if you don't know the book... Let me just say, that you should run right out and buy it right this instant because it is a riveting thriller in the spirit of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK meets BIG LITTLE LIES. There are elements of magical realism to the novelâa heroine who can now hear the siren call of the unjustly deceased, a woman with a hormonal heat so profound, itâs practically a weapon, and a sage character so self-possessed, with a green thumb and gift for ironic punishmentâbut by and large, it remains a grounded, but still highly twisty. Think vines... lots of complex vines.
And so, we're talking about what motivated Kirsten to write the book, how angry she was about the Jeffrey Epstein situation and the inequities women face, and I donât know exactly when our conversation shiftedâor how it happened. Maybe itâs that two of the three women in her novel have lost their jobs and the other is a widow and each is facing her own brand of isolation and cultural invisibility. But suddenly there we are, discussing the very real mid and end-of-life issues women currently deal with. I was like, âYou know, it's crazy how you look at the country and we're at 3.9% record unemployment overall, but then you look at the 50-plus demo and the unemployment rate jumps to 13%.
Even worse than that, 80% of women in the US die in poverty, which stems from everything from the pregnancy penalty to long-term pay inequity to the inability to advance as fast as our male counterparts to ageism to other chronic health issues to a lack of a real social safety net, and also the fact that we simply live 8 to 10 years longer than male partners.
We looked around at each other and Kirsten said, âWe all have to hire each other.â
Right then, something in me sparked and I said, you know there's this thing... it's the Lyft Women Drivers Program where you can request to have only women drivers if they're availableâto give women more jobs and create a sense of safety, and what if we magnified that? At that point, Kirsten started laughing because she had been part of getting the Lyft womenâs program off the ground.Â
While we dug into some of the significant failures of the different factions of the womenâs movement, we also discussed several cooperative living arrangements for women in Europe that weren't convents or religious but rather intentional co-operative communities, known as Beguinages where women went to live as they got on in life, or during wars to access an extra social safety net, care, and community.Â
It's compelling and synchronistic because it's something that my colleagues
, Dr. Heather Bartos and I have been giving a great deal of thought to at The Institute For Women's Futuresâin terms of how to create something like that here, i.e., best locations, different resources, amenities, funding models, and so it was like, "Wowâthis was the best book club meeting... ever!"As we said our goodbyes, Kirstenâs words anchored me.
We need to hire each other.
As I headed to the park, it occurred to me: what if we all (by âallâ I mean a billion of us) took a pledge of sorts, to buy more from each other?
What if we took over the economy on a grassroots level? A âMenopausal Money Heist for US, by USâ. What if we could change poverty rates directly without the help of the patriarchyâbut in defiance of it?
If you think about it, they don't really get anything done. Mostly, all they do is impede, ban, and block and say: oh, ppffft⌠that will never work.
Instead, what if we changed things and asked: What if this were easy?
There are a billion women as of 2025 going into menopause. Two of them own a hardware store in my neighborhood. To hell with Home Depot. Iâm going with the Empresses.
What if we all just employed or bought more from each other? What if we all pledged to support each other? From midlife womenâs art to writing to services to products to hiring on gigs?Â
Of course, not everyone is skilled for every job but what if we all took a moment to look deeper? To listen longer? To see that the midlife woman is so much more than her last gig, the woman in front of us actually has a full array of skills knowledge experience, and wisdom that may not be readily apparent but is still there and incredibly valuable to an organizationâbeyond AI, beyond an intern.Â
Because if we made that pledge to each other to try, we could (in theory) create our own microeconomyâmuch like Taylor Swift just recently did.Â
Right now, we have Women's History Month and International Women's Day where we support women-owned businesses but that should be every day. That should be all the time and it should also include midlife women's political campaigns because if the midlife money and visibility pledge is the way to solve end-stage poverty for women, then maybe that's how we truly Empress the economy. Maybe thatâs how we thrive.
Take the Empress Pledge and commit to buying the bulk of your goods and services from midlife women-owned businesses. If hiring, commit to bringing more midlife women onto your team. There are a billion of us and we are ready for you to CHANGE. Huzzah! đ
OK, stay safe out there.
Yours in Grandeur & Deep Sh*t,
PS - We need to pick our next book!
p.s. If you are so inclined, follow us on IG for flash content & upcoming giveaways. Weâre at @the.empress.age and weâd love to see you there!
YES to supporting each other!! Somewhere in 7th grade, I wrongly learned that it was always a competition with my "friends." Looking back, I'd call those "frenemies" instead of friendships, and they led to a lot of tears back in the day. Today I'm grateful for the few, dear friends that I have, even though we are all bombarded with work and kids and responsibilities that make finding time for friendships challenging. Regardless, we are all better as a collective menopausal group when we lift each other up! Starting our own micro economy is enticing. What about a resource list of women owned business/companies? I know that would be a lot of extra work, but just thinking out loud... And sorry I missed the last meeting! <3
Time for this mid-life (Okay - old) trans feminine person (woman? - aghh - I don't know) to put their (her?) money where their (her?) mouth is. For those whom I haven't yet met, this is my awkward form of an intro.
I promise to honor this space.
Alisa, thank you for always making me feel welcome.