Women Who Reshaped Financial Power and Economic Opportunity | Smithsonian Voices

How have women built real financial power? ‘We Do Declare’ shares oral histories of women who opened pathways to wealth, influence, and opportunity.

We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence is our oral history project exploring what independence has meant in women’s lives. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we conducted over 30 oral histories and interview from across the country and listened as American women declared that independence is not only essential but also deeply tied to financial power.

Unwilling to put up with barriers in their way, the women we interviewed played critical roles in advancing women’s financial independence over the last fifty years. These oral histories reveal four interconnected approaches women took to overcome the challenges they faced: passing new laws, creating new networks, finding new data, and building new power. Together, they tell a remarkable story of women’s determination to increase economic power and independence for themselves and others across the United States.

“We Have to be Talking About Money”

By 2030, women will control $34 trillion in assets—more than triple what they controlled just ten years ago(1). As a group, women still are not equitably represented in the halls of financial(2) or political power(3), continue to face a significant wage gap, and are overrepresented in the ranks of the working poor(4); nevertheless, there has been an undeniable shift in women’s access to wealth, power, and influence over the last fifty years. In government and in the private sector, the women in these interviews have worked to change the power imbalance between men and women. They share the belief that making things more equal is not only necessary and fair but also has and will lead to better outcomes for the economy and the country.

These interviews showcase stories of women who have not only made significant fortunes themselves but have fought to open up avenues for more women to access wealth and the influence it brings with it. Moreover, they seek to reimagine what women of wealth—and all women—might do with new levels of financial independence.

Barbara Hackman Franklin was one of the first women ever to attend Harvard Business School, graduating in 1964 as one of fourteen women out of class of 650 students. Frustrated by the sexism she experienced in her early corporate jobs, Franklin accepted an offer extended by a Harvard classmate to come work for the Nixon administration in 1971. Her role was to spearhead Nixon’s commitment to vastly expand the number of women serving in policy positions in the federal government. She travelled the country asking local women’s organizations to help her identify top talent in their region. Her office was flooded with letters from women who sought help accessing jobs in the government. She was highly effective in the role, creating a “talent bank” of more than 1000 resumes and tripling the number of women in policy positions in the first year alone.

The resistance Franklin faced from some in the White House—and her own experiences in the business world—shaped her belief that there was no consensus about the role of women in the United States at that time. She believes Nixon’s intervention was crucial. “I think it expanded opportunities all over the place in our society that I don’t think it would have happened had the President not created the first break, the crack in that wall of non-consensus.” Franklin herself would go on to have a long career in government, including serving as Secretary of Commerce for George H. W. Bush and in business and corporate governance.

Alexandra Armstrong’s parents had been born into wealth but lost a great deal during the Depression. When her father got lung cancer, medical bills swiftly ate through their savings. He died when Armstrong was eight and her mother was 48. A few years later, Armstrong’s mother noticed that the amount she was receiving from a small trust fund was steadily decreasing and discovered a family member had embezzled her money. A teenager by then, Armstrong believed her mother’s lack of financial savvy had made her vulnerable to this crime and swore to herself that she would never let that happen to her. “I was determined,” she recalls, “that I would know about money.”

There were not many options for women when Armstrong graduated from college in 1960. She decided to take a class in short-hand, and then a career counselor helped her find a job as a secretary in the research department of Washington, DC financial firm Ferris & Co. As Armstrong puts it, “I mean, talk about being at the right place at the right time.” It just so happened that two of the earliest women stockbrokers, Julia Walsh and Gail Winslow, worked there and took Armstrong under their wing. Winslow encouraged her to pursue her own license as a stockbroker.

Armstrong became interested in the new field of financial planning, and, after completing a correspondence course and passing the test in 1976, became the first woman in Washington, DC to become a certified financial planner. She went on to open her own business, Alexandra Armstrong Associates, one of the first women-owned financial planning firms in the country. She has long advocated for more women to enter the field of financial planning and also wrote a very popular book of financial advice for widows.

Jacki Zehner graduated from college a generation later than Franklin and Armstrong, and from a young age was not afraid to articulate her ambition to earn a lot of money. Hired by Goldman Sachs after college, she rose quickly through the ranks. She was one of the firm’s only women traders, a job she loved for its intensity and intellectual challenge. Zehner was highly successful and at age 32 became the youngest woman and the first female trader to make partner.

In leadership roles at Goldman, Zehner focused on recruiting and mentoring other women. When she left Goldman in 2002, she began a personal and professional journey focused on finding ways for women of wealth to tap into their financial power to change the world. She was instrumental in transforming Women Moving Millions from a short-term campaign that recruited wealthy women to commit a million dollars to organizations supporting women and girls into a lasting organization which has since collectively donated more than a billion dollars. After coming to the realization that “philanthropic capital would absolutely never be enough to make the change that I wanted to see in the world,” Zehner started a new endeavor, SheMoney, focused on women’s “financial agency and wellness.” Zehner argues that society needs to “invite women into their own financial agency and power…And I think making this connection between financial engagement and agency and women is key to creating the world that we want to live in. We have to be talking about money.”

Nathalie Molina Niño grew up in a family dominated by her two grandmothers who had both fled from Latin America to the United States to escape abuse. In the new country, they made most of the important economic decisions for their extended families. Molina Niño used her language and technical skills to build a powerful career as an entrepreneur and technologist. She travelled around the globe “helping everyone from Disney to Microsoft, to eventually Google and Facebook and everybody else” figure out how to make their products function in different languages. Suffering from burnout after the dot.com boom and then crash, she stepped off the fast track.

At Columbia University, Molina Niño co-founded Entrepreneurship@Athena, part of the Athena Center for Leadership at Barnard College. Hoping to support women entrepreneurs, she helped design a curriculum and wrote a book on the topic. But, she realized, “the largest issue facing these women who wanted to be entrepreneurial was not so much a lack of education and a lack of tools. It was a lack of money.” She decided that she needed to change her approach.

“It became very clear to me that the biggest intervention and the most important way to move the dial for women was going to be to get involved in the finance piece of the equation.” She wanted to support businesses that were going to make a significant difference in women’s lives in a long-term way.

She decided that “if we were going to do something to change finance at a really root structural infrastructure level, then you were going to have to forget about the endowments and the pension funds. You were going to have to deal with families.” At her company Known, she works with high-wealth families as well as endowments. “We are starting to see more and more women taking the reins and controlling these large bodies of capital. And they do do things differently,” she says.

Molina Nino wants women to understand that they can play an important role in rethinking the way finance works. “Finance and the structures and the rules that we’re taught, they’re made up…None of them were written in stone, and none of them were designed for women, for families, for people who care about the collective. … There is nothing about these rules that say that you can’t rewrite them.”

The women in this group of interviews have been rewriting the rules for decades, and their work has supported massive change in the United States. They also recognize the need for ongoing efforts to protect and build upon the progress that has been made so that women’s economic independence, and the power and influence it gives them, can continue and expand to more people.

Notes:

1. Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. “Women in the Economy.” Accessed January 20, 2026.
2. Lisa Z. Lindahl. “Is This The Age Of Women in Leadership?” Forbes, February 5, 2024. Accessed January 20, 2026.
3. Claire Ballentine. “Massive Wealth Transfer Will Give Women $34 Trillion by 2030.” Bloomberg, December 9, 2024. Accessed January 20, 2026.
4. National Women’s Law Center. “Women in Poverty, State by State.” September 24, 2025. Accessed January 20, 2026.

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