How the Shift of Wealth to Women Will Change Everything from Education to the Environment

It was in 1984 that Cindy Lauper sang ‘Money, money changes everything.’ Perhaps she sang with such conviction because she knew it to be true. At 17 she had already left home and was living in a cockroach-infested apartment with drug-dealer neighbours. She hitch-hiked, occasionally stole clothes for herself and her sister and at times had no food, her boyfriend presenting a squirrel for dinner that he had shot. When Lauper sang, a new generation of women listened. Previous generations had already been propelled into the likes of Avon, lured by the chance to have an independent income and their own car, a luxury one at that. Money, it seemed, could change everything.

We’ve long called her Mother Earth, yet the world we’ve lived in has been decidedly male. Far from being in a state of acceptance of such a reality, women have been on a quest, variously articulated as one of equal rights or human rights. Generations of women and their male comrades (sometimes known as the enemy) have met the challenge with vigour, although subject to bouts of despondency, confusion and regrouping. Nonetheless, they’ve persisted, buoyed by the odd breakthrough, a female presidential candidate for example, although her loss risked a charter into the doldrums. But now we find ourselves far from there, somewhere on the high seas.