Discover What a Woman’s Voice Can Do That a Textbook Can’t. Meet the Team Turning Oral History into Financial Education.

What’s missing from financial literacy education? The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum is using first-person stories from We Do Declare to reshape the way students learn about money and financial independence.

Summer Hamilton remembers when her grandmother told her she couldn’t buy a house without a male cosigner. It was the early 1970s, and she had to get her brother to sign for it. "I didn't understand," recalls Hamilton. "Now that I have the context of history around it, I went back to her and was like, tell me that story again. I've experienced myself how these stories inspire curiosity and to have those kinds of conversations, and that's what I'm hoping to create for other people."

We Do Declare: Women's Voices on Independence gathers first-person accounts from women across generations about their relationship to financial independence—the lessons they learned, the barriers they navigated, and the choices they made. In her role as digital community partnerships specialist at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, Hamilton is using these stories to develop educational materials for middle and high school-aged students, hoping to spark conversations like the one she had with her grandmother. This project is one example of how the museum is working to bring women's history into the classroom in a way that centers women's voices and experiences. For Hamilton and education contractor Liz Eder, the question was how to translate that material into something a student could actually use.

What’s Missing from Financial Literacy Education

"Financial literacy education, when it's taught at all, tends to focus on information," said Eder, who has worked with museums across the Smithsonian to develop educational content for more than twenty years. "Here's a budget. Here's how interest works. What it often misses is the behavioral and emotional side—the impulse spending, the fear, the pride, the messages about money we absorb before we're old enough to name them."

That gap is exactly what first-person narratives fill. Eder describes watching the We Do Declare interviews and listening for specific moments—not just what a woman says, but how she says it. The pauses. The shift in her voice when she describes something her mother taught her or a financial decision she made alone for the first time. "These aren't talking heads," she said. "They're feeling faces."

The distinction matters because it’s much easier for people to connect emotionally, rather than analytically, with a conversation about money. Hamilton describes it as a "windows and mirrors" effect: a student either sees her own experience reflected or gains a window into one she's never encountered. A student who struggles to answer, "what do you think about this?" can almost always answer "how did that make you feel?" That, for Hamilton, is the point of entry.

Stories Worth Teaching

Hamilton and Eder are working to develop four short videos, each five minutes or under, built around themes that emerged from both the interviews collected for We Do Declare and from conversations with the project's partner organizations, Girls Inc. NYC and Girl Scouts of the USA. They told Hamilton how they struggle to find examples of women investors and entrepreneurs to put in front of their members. There isn't a collection like this to point to until now.

Each video will center on a theme—messages about money, advocating for yourself and others, women creating change, and women as investors and entrepreneurs—drawing on excerpts from interviews with multiple women to show range across background, generation, and experience. The interviews from We Do Declare surface stories with specific personal details that make the subject of financial literacy memorable. Ai-jen Poo remembers being taken to the bank as a child to deposit money into a family account, making savings a communal act passed down without ceremony. Bo Thao-Urabe's mother kept a private stash of cash, a quiet form of financial autonomy her daughter watched and absorbed. These aren't abstract lessons. They're the kind of stories that make a student think about her own household, her own grandmother, her own questions she may have never thought to ask.

From Classrooms to the Community

Alongside the videos, Eder is developing wraparound materials to support educators and after-school program leaders in bringing the content into their work with students. The materials are intended to work across subjects beyond financial literacy to English, history, and social studies. The videos can also be used at multiple scales. A student can engage alone, a class can use the material as a jumping-off point, or a community organization can build programming around it. Hamilton frames the scope plainly: you can do this for yourself, and you can do it for your community.

Educators will get their first look at the materials at the Smithsonian's National Education Summit this July. The interviews from We Do Declare are available now at womenshistory.si.edu/we-do-declare.

Related Reading:

• Using Oral Histories as Tools for Financial Education
• What Oral Histories Reveal About Women’s Pursuit of Economic Independence
• How Four Women Built Careers on the Financial Lessons They Learned at Home

Meredith Herndon | Read More

Meredith Herndon is the writer and editor for the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.