Podcast Episode - Suze Story: Are You Using Your Voice?

Suze talks about why she started focusing on the subject of “Women and Money” and why it is so important, especially right now, to use your voice and vote.

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Podcast Transcript:

November 3rd, 2024. Welcome everybody. This is the Women and Money podcast and everybody smart enough to listen. And Suze O here and today is a Suze Story and today's story is actually about me, about me and why I've done some of the things that I have done in my life as well as therefore how it affects all of you.

It all started back around 1999 somewhere in there where I met a woman by the name of Eve Ensler. And Eve Ensler had produced a play called The Vagina Monologues, which was one of the most brilliant plays out there.

And if you hadn't seen it, it was really something, it was really a teaching vehicle of how women feel about who they are and owning the power of their body in every type of situation.

And over the time that passed Eve and I started to become friends and we ended up going to Washington DC where we addressed, I think it was Congressman, maybe a few senators. I'm not exactly sure, but we addressed and talked about domestic abuse and I wanted everybody to understand that, in my opinion, I really believed that women stayed in an abusive relationship because they didn't have the money to leave. They just didn't have the ability to get out.

Now, that was my understanding at the time, obviously, since then, over 20 some odd years, it's become more expansive than that.

But that's kind of where I started. And so I was thinking about that and working with it in my own way. And then in the year 2006, a woman by the name of Tarana Burke started what was called The Me Too Movement and she started it to raise really awareness about sexual abuse.

And given my opinion that sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse all starts with financial abuse, which I've talked to all of you about before.

It really attracted my attention.

And I was like, Suze, you gotta do something about this. And that's when I decided in the year 2007 to write a book called Women and Money - Owning the Power to Control your Destiny. Now, what was so interesting about me writing the book called Women and Money was that prior to that

I always said to everybody, I'm not just going to write a book just for women.

Money has no race, no sexual preference. It's for everybody, it's just as important to teach men about money as it is to teach women about money. So I'm not just going to focus on women.

And as I thought more about what Tarana was doing and the Me Too movement,

I said, you know, Suze, you're not thinking about this correctly.

Women are very, very different than men. Women have the ability to give birth, in most cases. Women have the ability to feed that which they have given birth to, in most cases. So it is a woman's nature to nurture and that's not exactly true for men. So women will do anything to protect their children.

And as time was going on, and I was working with these ideas in my head, I was thinking about all the people that I had given financial advice to. And what was so fascinating to me is that women always took care of the household money and they let the man in the house. If there was a man in the house, take care of everything else. And I couldn't quite figure out why was that? What was going on here? Women were working everything but yet they still really took care of the household expenses. And that's when I realized that women took care of the household expenses because the house held everything that they loved, namely their children.

And so I started to think about this and the more I thought about it I realized, oh yeah, I need to write a book just for women, for women to pick up because I needed to make sure that women didn't put themselves on sale. They knew how to own the power to control their destiny. They knew how to say their name.

And what I mean by that is I had been doing a lot of speaking in those days. And what was fascinating is that as I would go to all of these events and the moderator would stand up and thank all the women who volunteered, who maybe worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week to put on this event. And they would call out their names so that they could stand up.

The women just nodded, they didn't want to stand up. They didn't want to take pride, they didn't even want to say their names out loud. So, a good chapter in that book was all about, say your name, be proud of who you are.

And I decided that I should write a book called Women and Money.

But what was fascinating as I toured with that book everywhere I went and it was the number one New York Times best seller. So I went everywhere with that book. I would stand up and men would come.

And as the men were there, I would say, I know you think that this book may be just for women. But if you take this book and hold your hand. And I would do this over the wo of the word woman on the front of the book. I would say, do you see men? This book is for you as well.

Because if you are in a relationship with a woman, it is very, very, very important that you understand how a woman thinks, feels and acts, which is very, very different about how you think, feel and act. So the two of you have to come together as one, you have to understand everything that she's up against, that you're not, you have to understand what she has to go through to make as much money as you.

You have to understand men, the difference in being a woman and a man. And when you can understand things from a woman's perspective and feel what she has to go through, then you could have a successful personal relationship because unless you understand that you're never going to be one with your money.

And as all of, you know, if you're not one with your money, you're not one with who you are. And if you're not one with who you are, there's no way your relationship with yourself could ever work out, let alone your relationship with somebody else. So it was very important at that time and still is to this day that a man understood what women go through and women were open to letting men know what they go through.

So there, I was 2007 empowering both men, women, whoever to understand their own power, especially when it came to who they are and what they had then as time went on and maybe you can remember this things started to gain in popularity. The me too movement actually became very popular in 2017 when all these people, strong people, business women had been abused by their boss or somebody wanting to give them a job or whatever it was.

And again, I was saying to myself, I've got to go on and I've got to start speaking about this. Again, women need a voice. They need to be heard because if you don't have a voice, everybody, if you can't say what you're thinking, if you can't do what you're feeling, if you can't take the action that you know, you want to take so that you can save yourself on every single level, then there's no way that you can own the power to control your destiny.

So that's when I started to go around and talk about it really, which is women, you need a voice. You have got to stand in your truth.

And I was out there talking about it and really wanting women in particular to understand this point. And here we are now in 2024 on November 3rd, two days away from the last time you can cast a vote in this year's election.

And here we find ourselves everybody. And this includes the man listening. This isn't just a woman thing, it's an everybody thing.

And that's because what happens to the women in your life affects everybody's life, not just the woman's life.

And here we are once again where women need to have a voice, they need to speak up and get back control over their destinies, their bodies, their ability to be free and make decisions for themselves, whatever it may be.

And so this story, this story still goes on the story that started so many years ago when women got the vote, when women got all kinds of things, the right to have an abortion and now that right is taken away and health benefits are taken away. And so many things have been taken from us. And the only way to get that back, everybody is to use your voice.

And I don't know a more powerful way for all of you, every single one of you to use your voice more than making sure than on November 5th or before that, if you can to go in to that voting booth and vote and I did, I used my voice and I voted for Kamala Harris. And I really believe that if she wins and is the next president of the United States of America, we all will be unstoppable.