How Four Women Built Careers on the Financial Lessons They Learned at Home

In oral histories, advocates and executives reflect on how their mothers shaped their understanding of financial independence through quiet examples and everyday conversations.

“She always made money and kept some of it to herself because she wanted independence,” Bo Thao-Urabe says of her mother, Mai. This quiet act of financial independence was a lesson passed down to Thao-Urabe that influenced her own decision-making as an adult. This is the kind of financial education that often happens at home through observing the decisions caregivers make about what to spend and how to save.

We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence is a collection of oral histories from women across generations documenting how their relationship to financial power and independence has changed over the last fifty years. In the stories of Bo Thao-Urabe, Jacki Zehner, Ai-jen Poo, and Dwana Franklin-Davis, it’s clear that behind their independence, there is a mother figure who modeled what it looked like—often quietly and in ways that defied expectations.

Mothers Who Modeled Financial Independence

Bo Thao-Urabe’s family were refugees when they arrived in the United States in 1979. Despite the uncertainty of living in a new country, Thao-Urabe’s mother, Mai, opened her own bank account separate from her husband’s. Reflecting on Mai’s actions, Thao-Urabe remembers, “she always made money and kept some of it to herself because she wanted independence.”

That desire for independence allowed Mai to make her own financial decisions, including helping her daughters buy their first car. Once Thao-Urabe experienced independence for herself, she realized she had the desire to empower others. As an advocate and leader for the Hmong community, Thao-Urabe’s work has increased independence for her community members by helping demystify how support systems work so they can gain more control over their lives. But Thao-Urabe's realization would not have happened without her mother. “She was my first teacher about self-determination and about what it means to really live into your own leadership,” Thao-Urabe recalls.

Jacki Zehner grew up in a small town and dreamed of financial power to the point where her yearbook quote declared her goal to make one million dollars. After starting her career in finance, Zehner has worked to increase the amount of investment capital going to women and to educate women on how they can claim their own financial agency. She identifies the root of this passion in the example her mother, Rose, modeled. “My mom worked,” Zehner remembers. “She also had money of her own.”

For Zehner, Rose’s work outside of the home provided crucial financial support for the family. Her father was an entrepreneur who owned his own grocery store, but it was only Rose’s then-uncommon choice to be a working mom that allowed Zehner’s father the capital he needed to keep his business. Within her family, “it was so normalized that a woman could be a mom, and take care, and she did do all the work at home,” Zehner recalls. “But [she] had a job. And that is always what I wanted for myself.”

Money Was Always Part of the Conversation

Bo Thao-Urabe and Jacki Zehner witnessed financial independence before anyone named it for them. Other women interviewed for We Do Declare describe mothers who didn’t just model financial independence, they named it, explained it, and made sure their daughters understood it.

“Early on my mother instilled in us the need to take control and to be aware of money, how you're saving it, what you're using it for,” Ai-jen Poo recalls. Her mother Wen-Jen, who immigrated to the United States in pursuit of education, always took a long view of finances. Poo, now a domestic work and caregiving advocate, remembers Wen-Jen’s lesson to her children to “think not just about what you want in the moment, but what you want long-term.”

Poo grew up “never seeing [her] mother sit down.” In her childhood memories, her mother was “always moving, cooking, and studying, and working, and cleaning, and taking us to this place or that place.” Realizing that Wen-Jen’s work was taken for granted helped inspire Poo's later work to bring rights and justice to caregivers by helping pass the first state Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in New York.

Dwana Franklin-Davis, now CEO of Reboot Representation, a nonprofit working to increase the number of Black, Latina, and Native American women graduating with computing degrees, also comes from a family with a focus on long-term financial decisions. Franklin-Davis's mother, Donna, raised her to always question “how are we spending our money? Does it make sense?” One of Donna’s biggest lessons was about name brands and thrift. Donna taught Franklin-Davis that it was better to make things at home than buy them. This ethos extended beyond material objects, with Franklin-Davis remembering her mother didn’t like to eat at restaurants. As she recalls, Donna always said she made better food than restaurants. Donna wanted her family to know “we’re not gonna spend money on the restaurant when we have food at home.” 

The lesson to carefully decide how and when to spend money later became a resource for Franklin-Davis. During her first job after college, she rented a less expensive apartment so that she could save up to buy a condo in her second year on the job.

The women interviewed for We Do Declare grew up in a period of transition. During the 1970s and 80s, women were entering the workforce in greater numbers, building careers rather than just taking jobs, and increasingly staying in or returning to work after having children. Today, maintaining a separate bank account or having a career are common choices for women, but at the time, they were hard-won acts of independence. The mothers in these stories made those choices deliberately and, in doing so, gave their daughters something that couldn't be taken away: the knowledge, habits, and expectations that made their own independence possible. Learn more about women’s determination to increase economic power and independence for themselves and others across the United States by exploring We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence.

Related Reading:

• How Women Built Networks of Support for Economic Independence
• Women Who Changed the Laws Shaping Economic Independence
• How Women Researchers Changed Our Understanding of Women’s Economic Lives
• Women Who Reshaped Financial Power and Economic Opportunity