• First, Let’s Talk About What Capitalism Actually Did for Women
• So What Actually Went Wrong?
• If Feminism Understood Money…
• Feminists Should Embrace Sound Money
• Bitcoin Is a Pro-Woman Freedom Technology
• Capitalism Is Not the Problem!

Note: I originally wrote this for Substack… If you’re reading this on Nostr, you likely already know much of this. :)

Capitalism is the problem! I keep seeing this default explanation for collective discontent everywhere. The rest of us are suffering because of the 1%, and greedy corporations with their relentless, heartless motive of profit above everything. We need to eat the rich! Almost everything that is wrong with the world must be because of capitalism… but are we actually even talking about capitalism, or are we conflating it with outcomes from another system altogether?

While in this essay I am specifically focused on anti-capitalist sentiments in modern day feminism, the idea that capitalism is the problem extends to almost everyone in the 99% who feels hopeless in 2026. Populism is rampant. And in feminism too, we are encouraged to embrace the idea of being victimized by the huge, evil system of capitalism, which keeps us oppressed and underpaid.

It’s a compelling story, but its wrong. If you are open minded enough challenge the perspective, please keep reading. The real villain isn’t capitalism… it’s fiat money.

In fact, market economies (importantly: when constrained by law and sound money*) are actually a major part of what gave women something the “patriarchy” had denied us for hundreds of years: economic agency. Paid labour introduced a choice that allowed women to walk into the marketplace and exchange value for our labour. Mind you, we don’t live in that kind of economy, not really. We live in a fiat society. When fiat money arrived in 1971, it quietly stole back the prosperity and equality it initially promised us.

*Sound money is money that reliably preserves its purchasing power over time and is resistant to arbitrary expansion of supply.

I’m sorry to report that in order to truly understand this, it requires a detour through monetary history. I won’t try to pretend like that sounds exciting… I found this subject incredibly boring at first. But as it turns out, it’s more like a heist than a finance lecture: once you see who has been robbed and how, you’ll wonder why nobody told you sooner! The history of money is ultimately the history of who controls value: and that is a very feminist question from which myriad fascinating conversations can take place. So please, bear with me, because the truth is worth the effort it takes to wrap your head around it.

I want to make an argument here. It’s an argument that I think is more historically accurate, more useful, and way more urgent: market economies gave women economic agency. Fiat money took it away. And the feminist movement, specifically the second wave which was born and raised inside a fiat monetary system, never had the tools to see the difference.

§First, Let’s Talk About What Capitalism Actually Did for Women

Marxist feminism has always had a complicated relationship with this question, and I understand why: the early industrial era was brutal. Women, like men, often worked extremely long hours in dangerous conditions for very low wages. But women also remained legally subordinate to their husbands under coverture laws in many places, and faced the double burden of factory and domestic work.

But step back further. Before market economies, women had even less independent economic existence. In pre-industrial agrarian and craft economies, the household was the central economic unit. Married women typically could not keep separate earnings or own property under legal doctrines like coverture, so the idea of a woman having her own money was largely structurally impossible: the norm for the vast majority was a structural economic dependence on the family unit.

It was capitalism that commodified and industrialized wage labor, and turned it into the primary way people earned income. It is a major contributing factor (along with legal reform) to the first time on a large scale that women could go to a mill, factory, office, or shop and receive a wage with her name on it.

Wages gave women the possibility of exit. That is, the ability to support oneself, delay marriage, leave difficult family situations or save money. The suffrage movement, the labour movement and the early feminist movement all grew in the soil that industrial capitalism tilled, because capitalism was the biggest driving force that gave individual women with the ability to accumulate individual wealth.

Property rights followed: the ability to own, inherit, and sign contracts. These arrived through legal reform, yes, but they were reasonable as demands because the market economy had created a world where individual economics mattered. Money is always the motive.

I do not mean to suggest that markets are perfect or exploitation didn’t happen. I just want to point out that when feminists look for the root of women’s economic dependance, they should be careful about blaming the mechanism that made female economic independence imaginable in the first place.

§So What Actually Went Wrong?

Here is my claim:

Modern feminism is broken. It is broken, in a very large part, because it emerged inside a fiat monetary system.

The second wave of feminism surged through the 1960s and 1970s. Then, in August 1971, Richard Nixon ended the last link between the US dollar and gold in what became known as the “Nixon Shock,” effectively turning the US dollar (the currency on which all others were measured) into a pure fiat currency.

Until that moment, the dollar had been anchored to gold: a real, physical commodity with limited supply. After 1971, America (and by extension, most of the world) fully transitioned to a fiat money system. That is, a system where the currency is not backed by any physical commodity. Fiat currency gets its value from public trust and government endorsement.

Without gold to back it, the central bank can (and does) print as many dollars money as they want. When more money is created, the dollars you hold become worth less. This is inflation. And the fiat standard that allowed governments to print money led to the gradual debasement of the dollar that became a defining feature of the decades that followed. And since the suspension of convertibility of U.S. dollars to gold (which Nixon described as a “temporary” measure) has still not been lifted, we still feel it to this day.

For a clear and deep understanding of money and monetary history, and why 1971 mattered so much, I strongly recommend Lyn Alden’s book Broken Money. It’s one of the most insightful and comprehensive books written for understanding these hidden economic forces and their consequences. Every person and every feminist should read this book.

Rising prices slowly and steadily eroded the purchasing power of a single paycheck, which made the previously viable single-income family very hard to sustain. Dual-earning households went from the middle class norm in 1950s America to an exception, a luxury, today. Of course this effects marriage, childbearing, childcare, and family stability. More women entered the workforce, which we consider progress. But the reality is that this shift wasn’t purely choice, it was largely driven by economic necessity. That is not real progress.

In 1971, $100 could buy what roughly $750–$800 buys today.

Feminism delivered advances in legal equality and opportunity, absolutely. But it also handed us narratives about “female empowerment” that disguised a monetary shift that was, at the same time, amplifying deep economic pressures that make not working totally unfeasible for all but a wealthy few.

When supply of money can expand without constraint at the discretion of institutions (a.k.a. money printing), those institutions will (and have, for the last 50 years) continue to expand it steadily.

The result is a systemic inflation that punishes savers and rewards debtors. In other words: when more money is printed it loses value over time, so the money you save buys less (a.k.a. loss of purchasing power) and debt becomes easier to pay back (why we live in a debt based society). And worst of all, it does this slowly and almost invisibly.

Capitalism is the system of private property, voluntary exchange, and market prices that channels resources through profit and loss. What we have today is a kind of capitalism operating inside a fiat monetary system, which constantly distorts price signals. It is fiat money, not capitalism, that structurally transfers wealth from those who save money to those who own/control assets.

Feminism noticed that many women were economically disadvantaged by the 1960s and 1970s, and that it persists today. But it misdiagnoses the root cause. We saw feminism pushing for more representation for women in the workplace, gender quotas on corporate boards, increasing government subsidies, and normalizing dual-income households. Today, more women are in the paid workforce than at any almost point in history. (Not to mention the glossy “girl-boss” corporate feminism: the fact that it has become a dominant cultural archetype makes me squirm.)

We blame capitalism: but the more accurate culprit is monetary system beneath it, which is quietly destroying the value of every pay check and savings account, and every hour of unwaged domestic labor for women and men alike.

Capitalism is not the problem. Redistributing the wealth within a fiat system will certainly not help anyone.

§If Feminism Understood Money…

Feminist economics developed inside the academic and policy frameworks that the fiat system created and sustains. It accepts the money we use today as an unchangeable given and relentlessly argues just about everything downstream of it. But we won’t find good solutions in wages, representation, or workplace power dynamics: we will find solutions somewhere deeper: in the design of money itself.

A feminism that truly understood money would have been asking about the Federal Reserve by the mid-1970s. It would have looked at monetary policy (who controls money, and how it’s created) instead of focusing so heavily on workplace equality/representation, and social dynamics. It would have asked who suffers the most from inflation (its really everyone, and women slightly more*). Modern day feminism focuses on symptoms, not the system shaping the economy underneath.

Maybe I’m being a bit bitter, but I’d go as far as to say that today’s dominant flavour of feminism would likely not call for the adoption of sound money alternatives like gold, or better: Bitcoin. If anything, today’s feminism it would probably focus it’s efforts on demanding gender quotas on the Bitcoin Core development team and more more female representation in the Bitcoin space before it seriously advocated for Bitcoin and sound money education.

*Because women generally earn lower wages for a variety of reasons, hold more wealth in cash and savings (rather than assets) than men, and live longer in retirement. Therefore, some believe the erosion of purchasing power may generally hit women harder and for more years than it does men.

§Feminists Should Embrace Sound Money

I am critical of Feminism at times. Not because I don’t believe in women’s flourishing, but because I don’t believe modern feminism is delivering it. I really dislike the resentful, adversarial and anti-men tone it often takes, and I believe the dominant form (fuelled by divisive, attention-grabbing algorithms that reward anger over balanced, solution-based discourse) is actively contributing to outcomes that make women less happy, healthy, and secure in the long run.

I am fully in favour of women’s genuine flourishing: but I think it involves some of the very things modern feminism often fights against: strong families, realistic trade-offs between careers and motherhood, the value of domestic life, recognizing true biological differences between men and women, and economic conditions that make single-income households viable again.

Bitcoin (and the broader philosophy of sound money) starts from a simple premise: money should not be controlled by any institution with the power to debase it. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, demands transparency, is completely permissionless to join, and no single authority that can print more.

For everyone, (including, and maybe in this context, especially) women, this is important. Bitcoin directly protects women’s economic agency in ways our fiat system never can.

A full explanation of Bitcoin goes beyond the scope of this essay. For a deeper understanding of how Bitcoin works, I strongly recommend reading The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. It’s probably the single most comprehensive, most widely read and influential book for understanding the principles behind sound money and Bitcoin.

§Bitcoin Is a Pro-Woman Freedom Technology

Consider the impact this kind of system has, beyond the global north. Roya Mahboob, one of Afghanistan’s first female tech CEOs, began paying her female employees in Bitcoin as early as 2013. Under Taliban rule, women were denied bank accounts and needed permission from a male guardian (her husband or father) to work. Bitcoin gave these women direct, permissionless control over their earnings.

Similar stories exist across Africa, Latin America, and conflict zones, where Bitcoin is used to bypass corrupt banks or unstable local currencies.

Inequality between the sexes is seen all across the globe when it comes to financial access. For example, in South Asia, 55% of men have a bank account, but only 37% of women. This disparity holds true in Saharan Africa as well. In Pakistan, 34% of men have a bank account, and that number drops to only 13% of women; largely attributed to the process which is more complex for them as it requires more ID and sometimes permission from a male relative. In India, (despite having one of the most tech-savvy populations) women receive credit equivalent to only 27% of the deposits they contribute, whereas men receive credit equal to 52% of their deposits. There are countless examples worldwide that illustrate that the banking system is not neutral. It has gatekeepers. And in varying degrees across the world, those gatekeepers have structurally kept women out.

Bitcoin removes the gatekeeper.

The benefits may seem less drastic for average women in the global north, but they are still extremely profound. A woman who saves in sound money doesn’t find herself stuck on the endless fiat treadmill trying to save for tomorrow. She doesn’t need learn how to invest in the right stocks and manage her money like a financial advisor just protect the value of her labour. She certainly doesn’t need “lean in,” and become a CEO, and try to have it all. She can realistically choose to have more children, invest time in caregiving, or build a single-income family, and have these things not be a luxury, if she so chooses.

Sound Money also prices everything more honestly. The true value of unpaid domestic labour, caregiving, and motherhood all become more visible for more people in a low-inflation world, instead of being hidden by nominal wage increases under the fiat standard, that don’t even begin to keep up with real costs.

Bitcoin won’t magically fix every problem women face, but it removes one of the strongest, most powerfully insidious, and under-discussed ways in which women’s (and, honestly, everyone’s) time, energy, and savings are quietly stolen through inflation. And it gives women who typically don’t have access to traditional banking system instant, permissionless access to a global financial system. That alone makes it one of the most pro-woman innovations of our time, and one that every feminist should seriously concern herself with learning about.

§Capitalism Is Not the Problem!

Capitalism (when anchored by sound money) is not the enemy of women. Like I mentioned earlier, it was actually one of our biggest liberators and helped create the very possibility of female economic independence in the first place.

What we have today is not even pure capitalism, but a form of capitalism distorted and undermined by a fiat monetary system that, as discussed, quietly extracts wealth. It’s more like debtism.

Yet I keep seeing modern feminists attack the wrong target (blaming everything from greedy corporations to consumerism to men in general) and missing the monetary policy underlying the economic reality around them.

The result is a version of “empowerment” that celebrates women working more and leaning in harder.

Another result is an incredibly convoluted and fractured discourse: we get intersectional feminism, anti-capitalist feminism, choice feminism, critiques like “white feminism,” “lean-in” or corporate feminism, each offering a different explanation for why, despite decades of apparent progress, something still feels off. But all of these arguments are downstream. When you misdiagnose the root cause, you cannot agree on a solution.

Women can only genuinely have a choice to enter the workforce with an economic foundation that protects their purchasing power: otherwise it’s a necessity. Necessity does not equal choice.

Feminism fights on economic terrain without understanding the monetary system that shaped it. It diagnoses the symptoms of fiat (inflation, wealth concentration, institutional gatekeeping, the erosion of savings, rising cost of living, etc.) and too often we see them all attributed to capitalism. Critics will argue that fiat money isn’t the only thing causing these effects, but it is the single most structurally powerful, yet the least understood and least discussed.

And this misdiagnosis has a cost: it creates SO MUCH NOISE. Worse, it has led feminist economics to call for policy solutions that rely on the exact same fiat-based structures that are part of the problem.

The real path to women’s flourishing doesn’t require more quotas, more subsidies, or more resentment toward capitalism. Redistributing (or printing more) fiat money certainly won’t help anyone in the long run.

Blaming capitalism keeps the conversation away from money itself, and from the most radical act of all: choosing to peacefully opt out of the fiat system and hold wealth in a form that the central bank can’t inflate away.

We have to be willing to ask the harder questions, and that involves thinking critically about the feminist narratives we grew up with. We have to put in the real effort to first understand what money is on a fundamental level. We have to be willing to follow the money all the way to the actual source. Then I think we will discover how women can actually flourish.

This is the first piece in the Fiat Feminism Series.

Originally published at Proof of Wild on Substack