Katie's Book, Rich Girl Nation, Published Today

For those who want to girlboss too close to the sun, but feel righteously indignant while they do.

Katie here, interrupting our normal Sunday email cadence to tell you: My debut book, Rich Girl Nation: Taking Charge of Our Financial Futures, came out today. For those of you who don’t know, my full-time job is being an only occasionally insufferable personal finance media personality.

Rich Girl Nation is a guide to thriving under capitalism¹ that covers:

1. The beauty and personal care industry’s relentless assault on women’s economic security

2. The truth about earning more money and gender bias in negotiation

3. How to figure out what a quantitatively sound “enough” financial target is and how to invest to get there

4. How marriage changes your legal and financial rights, particularly for women in mixed-sex relationships

5. The statistical impact of caregiving on women’s finances and how to plan for the most common pitfalls

…and more. I’m biased, but I think it turned out great for a book that’s in the same genre as whatever the fuck Dave Ramsey has been doing for 20 years.

I published an op-ed in Salon Magazine today² that should give you a sense for why I think this book is necessary. Here’s a little excerpt:

The “traditional family” financial structure is back in vogue. We shouldn’t forget why we left it behind.

Two seemingly disparate topics dominated media during the 2024 presidential election: gender roles (the male loneliness epidemic; tradwives) and the economy (the cost of living or, its shorthand, eggs). But these threads might have been weaving a single narrative all along: The renewed fixation on traditional gender roles was a canary in the late capitalist coal mine, warning that the neoliberal era’s social contract was leaking noxious gas.

As of 2024, almost half of Republican men and one-third of Republican women believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” a cultural prescription that’s doubled in popularity since just 2022, in part due to the grim outlooks of disillusioned young people. This vision was particularly seductive for young men, who voted for Trump in record numbers: Gen Z men report regressive gender views (like “A man who stays home with his children is less of a man”) at more than twice the rate of their Baby Boomer counterparts. This context makes otherwise unobjectionable family-friendly proposals—like that of a $5,000 baby bonus—seem more sinister, meager attempts at restoring the single-earner, single-caregiver family structure associated with a bygone era of American prosperity and dominance.

In the world that Reaganomics built and over which 14 billionaires now run roughshod, it’s certainly an alluring theory. Wouldn’t it be convenient for those struggling in the tightening fingertrap of modern life if embracing the supposedly natural traits downstream of one’s reproductive system was enough to raise wages and make housing affordable? But we shouldn’t forget why we left the so-called “traditional” family structure behind in the first place.

The last time gender’s cold war erupted into a battle fought on such explicit terms was around 50 years ago. Two years after Silvia Federici published her seminal work Wages Against Housework, a woman named Terry Martin Hekker took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to bemoan the state of homemaking—not because she wasn’t being compensated for her time and labor, as second-wave feminists like Federici suggested she ought to be, but because she felt too few women were choosing to do it anyway. Examining household income trends, she muses, “I calculate I am less than eight years away from being the last housewife in the country.” Betty Friedan, avert your eyes.

Hekker, the author of the 1980 book Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in ‘an Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing,’ was the ur-tradwife. Her writing adopted the defensive, defiant tone that will be familiar to anyone who’s had the displeasure of viewing the infamous Ballerina Farm response to the Times of London article about the modern “queen of the tradwives.” (The more things change…) Of course, Hekker may not have realized at the time that many of her housewife contemporaries were entering the workforce not because they had read a time-machine-faxed advance copy of Lean In, but because inflation was creeping higher and their families needed another paycheck. In short, for reasons people have always worked: for money.

In the piece, Hekker alternates between playful and indignant. Her argument—that the “do your own thing” mantra of the women’s movement should extend to homemakers, a group she saw as at risk of becoming “extinct”—seems fair enough, though at times it’s plain that Hekker believes being a stay-at-home mother is not only her thing, but the right thing. Putting the ambitions of her peers in scare-quotes in one particularly biting parenthetical, she writes, “[There’s no getting even for] years of fetching other women’s children after they’d thrown up in the lunchroom, because I have nothing better to do, or probably there is nothing I do better, while their mothers have ‘careers.’ (Is clerking in a drug store a bona fide career?).”

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Keep reading on Salon’s site.

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We’ll see you on Sunday to talk about Liv Schmidt and the sterility of SkinnyTok.

XOXO,

Gossip Rich Girl

1. I consider the purpose of my work to alternate between destabilizing (3-hour episode about the CIA interfering in communist revolutions!) and restabilizing (a how-to guide for investing) your worldview, lmao

2. I’m acting like publishing my thoughts in progressive magazines is all chill and stuff but I am decidedly not chill