If you went to college in the 20th century, there's a good chance you've already picked up on the title here. I'm echoing Our Bodies, Ourselves, a feminist women's health classic from the 1970s. The book arose out of a 30-cent, 138-page booklet called Women and Their Bodies, published in 1970 by the New England Free Press and written by 12 Boston feminist activists, including Gloria Steinem. I'm certainly no expert in feminism, but the big idea of the book was that knowledge about health amounts to power. Knowledge to make decisions, knowledge to seek help, knowledge to heal — all kinds of knowledge that women deserve to have access to.


If our bodies can bring us this level of empowerment, I would like to think that our money can, too. Okay, so maybe I am just starting to acclimate myself to the Touch Up blog categories. Fashion & Beauty, Health & Wealth. What do these things have to do with one another, anyway? Is it simply that, as Madonna quips in the documentary Truth or Dare: "Earrings don't make people look beautiful. Money makes people look beautiful."

No, despite the Truth or Dare theory, Wealth & Beauty share the Touch Up byline a bit awkwardly. Madonna said the line about the earrings in 1991, anyway — doubtless the post-Kabbalah Madge would cringe at such a statement. Let's look at the Touch Up subtitle again. Fashion & Beauty — comma — Health & Wealth. Fashion & Beauty seem like kind of the same topic, right? So the punctuation implies that Health & Wealth should fit together as easily. But Health and Wealth don't seem to have much to do with each other. (There is that fairly common phrase "financial health," though.) How about if we take the punctuation out and just look at these four terms as equally weighted and unpaired? Fashion, Beauty, Health, Wealth. If you had to pick three out of four of these, which three would it be? Personally, I would throw Fashion out in a heartbeat and just focus on keeping Beauty, Health and Wealth around.

Our Money, Ourselves? Let's not get all "power yoga" here, now. Really though, what I'd like to borrow from Our Bodies, Ourselves for a moment is the idea that knowledge is power in a real way. Also, that our relationship to knowledge can affect not just our relationship with the outside world, but also our relationship with ourselves. It just hit me that I really am speaking the OurChart language now. Our Money, Ourselves, OurChart! No, really, though. There is that other fundamental lesson to take away from the feminist canon. There's the notion of not just myself, but Ourselves — the possibility of a shared experience and shared knowledge.

So, what, again, does any of this have to do with money? Well, to be honest, with the fairly dismal economic data that came out this past week (GE earnings miss dragging down the Dow; mortgage freeze spreading to prime rate equity loans; major retailers going bankrupt by the dozen; the IMF cutting its global growth forecast for 2008), I wanted to take a step back and focus on principles. The economy will probably not be getting better any time soon. This, however, cannot stop us from gaining new insights, making more informed decisions and building wealth in our lives even as the economy tumbles.

What is a "better" economy, anyway? When the U.S. has a level of income inequality tied with Turkmenistan and Ghana — way down the list from, say, the U.K. (which, last time I checked, wasn't exactly known as a bastion of socialism) — is it any wonder that such an economic system might not be sustainable? Oops, I don't want to wander too far into the area of policy and politics.

Let me just say this: It seems obvious now that giving women sexual agency in the context of health and body image would eventually rewrite the rules on sex and gender altogether. I think, as we figure out what economic agency looks like, it's possible we could empower ourselves beyond just dollars. Sure, we could all trade stocks based on sports analogies, evict people from their homes for a quick real estate deal or copy other mainstream fantasies of wealth creation, but I think we have better ideas. So, please, keep informing yourself about the economy and wealth, here and elsewhere. There are a whole lot of rules to rewrite.