Money. Career. These are among the most loaded words in American society. The first determines everything that we can and cannot have in life. The second firmly delineates class status: One has to be middle- or upper-class to have a career; everyone else has “jobs.”

The very word “career” implies a well-thought-out life plan, replete with the requisite education: doctor, lawyer, et cetera. People don’t have “careers” in factories, fast-food restaurants or housecleaning agencies. There are working-class trades — construction, plumbing, and so forth — but they are never described as careers. Careers, like the money they provide, are a luxury that a huge percentage, more than half, of all Americans cannot afford. And within that percentage of wage-earning job-holders, most are women.

My parents, who grew up in poverty, dreamed that their children, both girls, would grow up to achieve middle-class status. My parents were the first members of their respective families to go to college, both on scholarships: my father to an Ivy League university and my mother to a New England Seven Sisters equivalent. My parents were smart. They believed, because their parents instilled the belief in them, that education would alter their class status, that poverty could be offset by education.

But for a host of reasons, middle-class status never quite happened for my parents. My mother died last year in poverty, while my father continues to live on the edge of its grim embrace. I, too, live in poverty, although not the grinding kind my parents grew up in. I live in seemingly benign 21st-century poverty: a legacy of the conservative power elite’s downsizing, outsourcing, benefit-cutting, wage-freezing and health-insurance-denying antics.

I am a member of a class that grows each year in America: the working poor. We in that class may have a home and food on the table and clothes to wear, but we do not have the wages to pay for it all. According to the most recent U.S. Census, I share that class status and its concomitant level of poverty with 20 million American women. Another 40 million American women are working-class, toiling at jobs — usually more than one — that pay just over the minimum wage (which is never, as Barbara Ehrenreich explains so adeptly in her superb book Nickel and Dimed, a living wage).

I also represent many working poor in America in that I actually have a “career,” not just a job (actually, two simultaneous careers). I have published over 20 books and I write for a range of publications, mainstream and queer. I was an award-winning investigative reporter before illness disabled me. Like many Americans, not merely the 45 million (most of them women) without health insurance, illness catapulted me not just out of a career with a decent salary and benefits, but into dire financial circumstances.

I have also taught college for over 20 years. But like the majority of people teaching today, I lack tenure and benefits. And being without benefits, I am among the working poor. My lover has taught (at the same college at which I teach) for 30 years; she too lacks tenure and benefits. We are typical of women workers — and lesbians — throughout America.

Unlike the nuns who taught me throughout my years in Catholic school, I did not take a vow of poverty. Few days go by in which I don’t wish I could go for just a day or a week or the unimaginable luxury of a whole year without worrying about how I will pay my bills, how I will juggle payments for health insurance and utilities and food. Like millions of other women in America, I live paycheck to paycheck, never making enough money to pay for everything, and consequently creating an ever-larger pool of debt. Like millions of other American women, I have no savings, even though I am in my late 40s. According to the most recent statistics, a majority of women in the United States will have to continue to work into their 80s because they will not have enough savings to retire. (The life expectancy of American women is 78 years.)

In high school, when I was first sneaking into queer bars with my fake ID and my deep desire to find other lesbians, all the women I knew were working-class and poor dykes. The bars were populated by butches who worked factory assembly lines, like I did for a few summers, and femmes who waited tables or clerked in office buildings, like I did as well. Prospects for women have changed in the 25 years since I was in college — there are more female doctors, lawyers, businesswomen — but the wages they earn compared to men have not. If I went back to the bars today, I have little doubt that the women I’d meet would still be mostly working-class; although their job descriptions may have changed with the times, the money they make is comparable to that of the dykes I knew in the 1970s. In 2004, women still earn only 70 cents for every dollar men earn. Class-action suits against huge companies like Wal-Mart indicate that the pattern of abusing women by denying them equal pay and benefits has not changed much in a quarter of a century of feminism. How are we expected to work our way out of poverty and into the middle class?

It no longer holds true in America that a good education will ensure a good job. The market’s glut of qualified candidates for even entry-level, white-collar positions is huge, and qualified women continue to lose ground to qualified men in that competition. In fields like teaching, nursing and social work — ostensibly white-collar careers — women are disproportionately represented. And, not coincidentally, the wages offered by those careers continually decrease.

Other work-related factors contribute to female poverty. President Bush has determined that outsourcing is good for the American economy, but a majority of the jobs outsourced have been held by American women. Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who is also a physician, assert that “not everyone” needs health care, which is why millions of American women don’t have it. Lack of benefits adds to women’s poverty quotient.

Yet popular culture, queer and straight, would lead us to believe that American women, queer and straight, are actually doing quite well. We are pitched a picture of comfort and financial stability in which our major concern appears to be signs of aging, for which we are offered hair dyes, face creams, makeup and fitness programs. Our only other concerns seem to be decisions over what packaged foods can best feed our families (not how to feed our families) and what products can best clean our houses (not how to afford a place to live). Our queer and straight magazines have healthy, wealthy, good-looking women on their covers, from Oprah to Ellen. Which leaves the 60 million American women barely managing to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads wondering how they missed out on the American dream that seems so tantalizingly close.

We often hear the axiom that money isn’t everything — usually, I have noticed, from those who do not have to worry about it. And it’s true that we need spiritual and emotional, not just financial, sustenance to make life livable. But the power elite talks endlessly about the problems of the middle class while utterly ignoring the poor, working poor and working class. As human beings, we should be able to do more than just struggle to survive — and without living wages, health care and sick leave, we can do little more than scrounge for survival.

In one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world, there should not be 20 million women in poverty. Women should not be forced to work until they die because they have no pensions, retirement funds or savings with which to retire. I have a career, but I am also poor. And I am far from alone. Isn’t it time women were given the real choices — including not living in poverty, including work with meaning — that feminism promised us? Isn’t it time women were given real access to the American dream?

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