Kalee Boisvert: Welcome to the wealth and wellness podcast with me Kayleigh, Bob air.

I specialize in helping people to achieve their financial goals.

I have a love for all things numbers, and I'm passionate about financial literacy.

My goal is to spark healthy and positive conversations around wealth and investment and create a world where nobody is limited by their financial situation.

But wealth is just one piece of the equation of living our best lives.

So join me as we explore both wealth and wellness topics.

From your net worth to your self worth.

Get ready to take confident action.

Hello, this is Kaylee and thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the wealth and wellness podcast.

Very excited for today's guest and today's topic.

I'm all about empowering women.

You know, women being in control of their their money, their finances.

So I think this is a really neat topic.

So we have special guests, Dr.

Kara Cooney, who is a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA, specializing in craft production, coffin studies and economies in the ancient world.

She received her PhD in Egypt homology from John Johns Hopkins University, and her new book when women ruled the world was published in 2018, by National Geographic press, and explores the reigns of six powerful ancient Egyptian queens and how they change our perceptions of power.

So we're gonna go all into that.

I love it.

I'm excited.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Kara.

Just to get started.

Is there anything to add to that a little bit about your journey?

And what brought you to do this work?

Dr.

Kara Cooney: No, no, I'm sure I'm completely different from any of the other guests on your podcast.

I hope I'm the first Egyptologist if I'm not, I'll be disappointed.

Kalee Boisvert: So definitely the first Egyptologist, absolutely.

Which is exciting and new.

And you're right, very different.

Because oftentimes, we're okay, we're very money focused, or we're wellness focused.

But I think this is a very important piece for women to talk about.

Because when we're when we're talking about finances, and careers, and things like that, there is still this balance of power that, you know, is not completely equivalent.

And I work in a very male dominated industry, still only about 15% women, female advisors, which is unfortunate.

And so there's work to be done.

So it's amazing to know that going into our past, there was actually a difference there.

Unknown: Yeah, a little bit, but but all under cut it too.

So don't you worry.

Okay, I'll get there.

Kalee Boisvert: So can you tell us a bit about okay, so female power in the past?

And how you know what that looked like then in this in this book that were you talking about when women ruled the world?

Unknown: Yeah, Egypt was this strange and unusual place that allowed women to act as nothing less than leader of state as king, and they called them kings.

So but for people get upset that I'm not using the word queen.

That's why the Egyptians called them kings.

And they allowed them to rule from the very beginnings of their kingship to the ends of their, their kingship and women, powerful women really bookend the entire scheme, which gives you an idea that, when when, and here's the dirty little secret of the whole thing, when authoritarian power is held in the hands of one family, women are needed.

I could have written a book that was all about how it was a revisionist history, claiming that women were more powerful than they were.

Instead, I wrote a book that said, women are capable of ruling, and there are their workplaces in the past that allowed them to rule.

But don't misunderstand that these women couldn't change the system.

From the inside out, they ruled in the same patriarchy that we exist in today.

And they had to play by those rules as well.

So it from your perspective, being a woman in finance, where there's only what 8% female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and as you say, 15% financial advisors, finance is the economic power is one of the places where women are, are really barred from playing.

And if you know that, and you learn from these women who couldn't change the patriarchy, you can you can gain some insight on how to find your way forward in a man's world.

Kalee Boisvert: What can you say that about these women?

And like was there differences to how they ruled versus how men ruled like it sounds like they kind of had to follow the rule.

But was there some differences there?

Unknown: There are always differences.

There have to be any woman who rules and I'm chair of my department.

So I understand this women who rule in whatever small or large capacity I know that they are expected to rule differently and that they have to fulfill certain expectations.

And if they don't, then they will be Hillary Clinton or Yoko Ono, however you want to, you want to see it because a woman who, who is openly ambitious and claims power that is not perceived to be her own, who is not playing by patriarchal rules, because usually quashed pretty effectively and pretty quickly.

So if you're going to be strategic about it, then you you have to play by the game of being more peaceful, being more self denigrating, laughing more being, there's all kinds of things a woman just knows in her bones she has to do.

And I will say, for these ancient women, the only reason they were chosen is because they didn't have armies behind them.

They weren't trained in professions, they weren't socially embedded.

And as such, they were the Safer Choice when say, a young king comes to the throne, and he's unready to rule.

And you need a decision maker, because the kids like seven or eight, no one's gonna let a seven or eight year old make decisions.

But do you have the uncle of the kid make the decisions?

Or do you have his mother make the decisions, and the mother the Egyptians realize was the better choice, because the uncle might be able to raise an army he's embedded in society is going to be able to create competition against his nephew, the mother probably won't want to do that because she loves her boy.

But say you choose a mother who's not directly related to this boy, even in that case, she's a safer bet, because she doesn't have access to all of the social tools that men who are embedded in society do.

And and so she's expected to rule and then when when her time is done, just be quiet, sweetheart, go away.

We're done with you now.

And and you're, you're good to go.

So, these women did roll rather as placeholders.

But they were chosen by a male driven and male lead system, because they could be so effectively used as placeholders.

Men were more difficult to use in that way, they got more powerful within the system, as they went up that ladder, and women often don't.

And that's something that we need to think about.

Why is that?

How is that?

Why is it so hard for a woman in a king ship or in a corporate space to gain a legacy to train people underneath her to be a leader?

of many how, why does a woman have to compete with other woman women, why she set up to do that?

It's a very common thing in the corporate world.

In my university world, women are often trying to take out other women, but we shouldn't expect any less.

That's the patriarchal system.

We're all looking towards the guy at the top and trying to take each other out to get to that guy.

So my opinion is just like racism, if you understand that racism is inherent to the human species, but with education and, and communication, and openness, we can we can transcend it.

The same with sexism, if that's something that's inbred, that's arguable, but we certainly live in a patriarchal system.

So given that it's nicer to give it a cold, hard stare, and say, Okay, how am I going to get over that hill?

And that's the way I tend to do it.

Kalee Boisvert: Yeah, absolutely.

That's very, like very interesting and ways of looking at that and questions to ask of why, why is this happening?

And why does it look like that?

When you were saying like in those positions, and they were good placeholders, then were they taken serious like was that still that they were taken serious in their role?

Unknown: They're taken seriously, but they're also not given the full range of options that a man will have.

And let me just give you a biological example.

So a man in the position of King, what's the king most known to have?

How is he going to create his legacy, he's got a harem of women, whom he will impregnate with many different children, and one of those male children will be chosen as king after him.

But he will then have a variety of princes and princesses to use, as his legacy.

Now, biologically, was just the way mammals work, the female creates the baby inside of her body, very taxing, if you have done it, I have done it, it's a hard thing.

It's not easy.

And then all the things that come after and the breastfeeding, the caretaking, and the hormone changes, it's not an easy thing, to have a an alien take over your body.

And to deal with that, plus, you can only have one a year.

And the man can have 365 a year if he is if he is so endowed.

And so in those terms, just in terms of biology, a man is less burdened with caretaking hormonally physically than a woman is whether it's having children or not in our world, right.

So think of it in our world.

So imagine that you're a professor like me, and and let's imagine that we humans have pheromones that we can't even sense or that we have social cues that we don't really understand.

I with my door open and more liable to get undergraduates in my office weeping about their problems than my male colleagues who give off a strong male vibe and so they don't have to deal with all of that caretaking.

Whereas I'm caretaking all the time.

And I have to put up like a certain front to be able to not caretaker, I have to often not be in my office so that I don't have to take on that role.

And it means that even in a corporate space, women are leading less creating less progeny, if you like, less legacy, and taking care and cleaning up messes more, which means that, and we're expected to do this, this is part of what we do.

So you've got to bust it and work twice as hard to be able to have both to be able to have your legacy and, and be able to caretake and clean up all the crap that's happening in that corporate workspace.

And if you want to have kids, in addition, you know, just to take on that private life aspect, if you do want to have a child, how are you going to literally farm that out as you as you work through the corporate world to be able to have all of these things it's it's very difficult to negotiate what's expected and, and that are an unspoken, unspoken and biases that people don't even know they have.

And and try to find some power in your workplace.

It's what makes women get that stereotypical reputation of the bitch.

Because if she doesn't care, take and smile and stroke ego, then she is considered on feminine, highly problematic.

Something that that is upsetting to the social core, and we don't talk enough about why and how that works.

Absolutely, we

Kalee Boisvert: don't know.

And then when it came to so when it was women ruling the world, how is the finances looked at then because I'm writing a book and I'm on this chapter right now about not giving up your control.

And so often women, it's just like, okay, you know, my husband takes care of this, my boyfriend takes care of this.

And I'm like, we can't do that anymore.

Gotta stay engaged, stay involved.

What did it look like back then?

Was there power for women in finances?

Like, did they have that that ability that

Unknown: Egyptian women did have this ability.

It's funny you say this about finances.

I had a really horrible car accident in 1999.

And I gave financial control to my partner then that turned out horribly, I know divorced from him.

But oh my god and credit cards in my name I didn't know about and when I divorced, it was a credit card debt of hundreds of 1000s of dollars, that of course I was then liable for as well.

So at least I'm in California that the half payment kind of worked for me, because he had to at least pay half of it.

But anyway, in Egypt, women, this is normal women, not just queens or princesses.

Women could bring money into a marriage, they could initiate a divorce, and they could take money out of a marriage.

So they had their own independence in a way that other parts of the ancient world did not like Greece or Rome or Mesopotamia or the Levant.

Women did have this economic power.

It didn't equal that of men.

However, because they couldn't enter professions, and patriarchal societies, until recently, did not allow women to enter professions unless they gave up their sexuality entirely.

Which is why you see an abbess in charge of all kinds of finance.

Why did they let a nun do this?

Well, she doesn't have children.

She doesn't have a legacy.

She's not going to complicate things.

Okay, well let her take over all of the money.

You could say Elizabeth, the first Queen Elizabeth.

The first is this similar example and these Egyptian women.

Women like Hatshepsut, you know, she doesn't have a son as a legacy.

She wouldn't be there.

If she'd had a son, she's ruling with her nephew.

But she would have been as much a part of ruling Egypt's economy as he would have.

And until he came of age, she would have ruled at all and made all the decisions about what went where, having said that, and this is a really interesting point for hardship suit, female King of the 18th dynasty before her reign, the nobles of Egypt had nice things, you know, tunes, chapels, statues, reasonably nice things during her reign.

They have the nicest things you could possibly imagine.

They have beautiful tomb chapels and statues and all kinds of things.

They were spending money.

There were more of these nobles than ever before.

It means that Hatshepsut in many ways had to give to get she had to pay people off.

How do we pay people off?

It's never like, I'm gonna give you this, you're gonna give me that.

It's like, oh, I will make you the great overseer of the robes, you know, and you will receive this salary and then you will be beholden to me.

She makes all of these different positions within her kingship.

And they're, they're useful to her but that means that she's letting tons of cash however you want to understand that for the ancient world out of Her treasuries, and the Egyptian court, or the king ship is diminished for generations thereafter.

So I think it's expected that for women to gain power, they also have to maybe distribute a little bit more of that than would be expected.

It's something to look at, right?

It's something to think about when you're in your corporate workspace or you're, you're trying to bust in, in some profession here or there.

What do people expect you to give them?

How much do they expect you to share?

How much do they think they have helped you achieve?

And that they get a cut of in some way?

These these are interesting things to see in the ancient record and then to connect to the modern day.

Kalee Boisvert: Yeah, well, even in like direct, like financial life, like I have a chapter about loving your money too.

And I said, as women it's like, we think it's greedy or selfish to say I love money.

I want abundance.

And we think we have to give it all away.

So often women are just, it comes in and it's like, okay, I'll give it to my children.

I'll give it to other people.

And there's nothing left.

So it's so funny to think that that that was like something very ongoing and it's so ingrained then maybe that's connected

Unknown: to caretaking.

Yes, connected with caretaking.

Right.

So we have all of these stereotypes of the woman who spends too much on clothing, shoes, handbags, plastic surgery.

It's interesting how much of that those handbags and shoes are considered gifts from the man everyone wants a handbag from their man or a diamond ring from their man, then it's okay.

Because he's marking her as his property in a patriarchal world.

She buys it for herself, then it's like, Oh, my God, think of the good that you could have done with that money.

I mean, I actually happen to agree with that.

And I think these handbags are stupid, but that's just me.

Right?

If you want the handbag, then you should be able to buy it for yourself.

But it's it's part of that caretaking?

It really is.

It's and it also reminds me of Do you know anything about micro loans?

I think so yes, this is a really interesting anthropological rabbit hole for you to go down.

Because there are micro loans given to women and traditional cultures.

And they generally by and large, do not give them to men.

These are like small loans of 50 bucks, where you can buy a cow, take the milk, make it into cheese, create a small business, take care of your family, right?

If they give men those micro loans, they have found on in general that the men take it to the bar and create social capital, which works very well for them buying drinks for all the guys creating gift debt.

And they'll be able to you know, but it's not going to help the family.

It's not money put into caretaking.

Whereas when they give it to the women, the women make very different decisions embedded within the patriarchal society as they are unable to have professions.

They make different decisions.

It's why women are also drawn to all of these pyramid schemes that we see in the world today.

Because they're stuck at home, they can't get out.

And so they ended up selling bad leggings or whatever some of these other schemes are.

Kalee Boisvert: Yeah, okay.

Interesting.

I love it.

These are all very interesting points and to see how it played out in the history versus now.

What What would you think could be different now like with what's going on in the world?

I mean, we're we have a war happening right now with leaders.

And I say, in my mind, I believe if more women were in the position of power, this wouldn't be happening at all.

I agree.

What can we say to that then?

And how like, was there differences in in violence and actual, you know, war and things like that, historically, when women ruled?

Unknown: Yeah, women of the ancient world had to do what men did.

So the first woman I talk about in the book, when women will the world is a is the only woman who didn't become a female king in the lineup, but she's very good as a king, and her name is Mary Kay.

And she is a queen of the first dynasty.

And she rolled on behalf of her young son, who then when he grew up, took over and buried her as a king in the in the royal cemetery.

This woman when her son was thrown in throne crowned, she ended up engaging in the same human sacrifice that had occurred in her father's reign.

And that would occur when her son died after so the first dynasty is known for human sacrifice.

When the king dies, not a couple of people and not enemies of state, that people have the court, wives of the king, sons of the King brothers of the king, these people would be sacrificed.

And we don't even know exactly how poisoned maybe some sort of blunt force trauma, it's not clear, but hundreds of bodies around the body of the king and they were purposefully buried all at one time.

So you could look at some women and say, women ruled differently and make that blanket statement.

In some ways.

I'll agree with you within the context of a patriarchy.

However, women do what they need to do if they're occupying the position of a man is the decision holder that a man would have the place that him And what happens, if it is expected that blood be spilled, she will do it and marinate when she puts her son on the throne or she watches her son be put on the throne by all of these priests.

And it is expected that this human sacrifice take place, we can assume that she made the decision about who lived and who died.

And it's a very interesting thing that she decided that more males would be sacrificed.

And it's a defensive strategic strategy, right?

To make sure that not too many males were around of her son's age of her son stature to take his power away.

So she's the best offense for her was a good defense.

And she she made the decision not to kill as many wives for her for the burial of her former husband, but her dead husband, but instead to kill more of the males that could potentially compete with her son.

So her being a woman didn't make her any more Pacific.

It didn't make her any calmer.

She had to do what she had to do.

I will say, though, that the expectations of a woman and the way a woman is embedded in society generally do make a woman less violent than a man, I agree with you.

I think that if there was a woman, President of Russia, well, first of all, I don't think it would be as as drastically authoritarian as it is.

And secondly, I don't think that you would do something so boneheaded ly stupid is just decide to invade another place and take it like this is mine.

It's just such bullying, playground behavior, right.

And I also like to think as a historian looking at things over a very long duration of time, my history goes back 5000 years, I like to think that we are now existing in a late stage patriarchy, patriarchy is failing, and it's failing before our eyes.

I'd also like to remind your listeners that patriarchy is very young, in the long term scheme of things.

10,000 years old, at best, were where we are in the United States, maybe four or 500 years old, you know, in most very young, this idea of farming and hoarding resources and social inequality and, and violent invasions and things like that.

Not that you didn't have islands before.

But this this kind of patriarchal hoarding, and seeing a forest of value only when it's cut down and made into lumber.

This is, this is rather new, and it's not something that's sustainable anymore.

I think we all feel it.

It's interesting that it's something that unites both right and left, both right and left, look at the world around us and go, Oh, my God, we are all of us perched on the edge of a cliff, ready to jump into, we don't know what Now, some people on the hard right will say, Well, we have to go back, we have to go back to what we had before.

And they'll be like, no, no, we're not, we're just not going to go there.

We're just gonna go back as if that's possible, right?

And most of society is like, no, no, no, we have almost 8 billion people on the planet, something's happening, people are deciding not to get married not to have babies.

In Los Angeles, where I live, the amount of people opting out of society entirely, as homeless junkies is extraordinary.

Or they're just like, you know, I'm just not going to do anything.

It's amazing to see and disturbing.

But you can see society changing very quickly around you.

And to see all of those things is it's, it just makes one realize that we are on the edge of something very big.

And what can Egypt teach us from this, I mean, Egypt teaches us that human beings, if they can just recreate it and do it all again, they will, they'll they'll have the downward slide.

And then they'll build it all back up, again, another downward slide, build it all back up again.

And they'll do that again and again.

But we're reaching a point where the earth isn't going to sustain that kind of smashing and grabbing that kind of male against male violence.

And people are seeing it very clearly for what it is the social inequalities, the race inequalities, that gender inequalities, and people are pissed off, and, and opting out in their ways creating their own black markets, if you will, their own their own side.

hustles.

But there's a lot of anger, I guess, people have to be worth $300 billion, like Jeff Bezos, before we realized that we have kings in our myths, too.

Kalee Boisvert: Yeah.

Yeah, that yeah, where the money is, the power is as well now, that's where it resides, which is interesting.

So what can we say that like, can we take like, it sounds like, okay, there were women rulers, but oftentimes, they were following by the rules and almost like, the strategy was, you know, to stay there and to appease the men, it was, you know, follow the rules and do it this way.

So can we can we learn from the rulers of the past these women or is it you know, can we learn what not to do or what we can do because you're right there is that what did you call it that Hillary Clinton where it was, you know, she was evil and a terrible person.

And so it's just like, you can't win that and it's, you know, you go under the radar and you follow the sort of Male kind of expectation or you stand out from the crowd and you get booed just as much and, and yeah, call up like that your your mean and looked at like as a man or something like that and bossy or whatever they want to call you.

So what is it?

What can we learn?

Or what can we do now,

Unknown: with Egyptian women can teach us how a patriarchal society works.

And we can learn that way.

Egypt is so useful to me as you look at Egypt, and you're like, Oh, my God, look at those weird crowns.

There's some silly oh my god, look at those weird gods, we would never do that.

And then the more you study them more I study them.

The more I write about them, the more I realize we're just like them.

But Egypt allows us to see rule that's over the top, you know, I am a God King.

And we don't see it in our own society because they're dressed like us.

They're they use our own ciphers.

I'm sure it was the same in Egypt, too.

And even when you know, these guys have private islands and jets and yachts that are like, you can't even believe it, right?

We still don't really see the power right in front of our eyes.

And the reason I use Egypt is because as my main comparison for studying the world around me today, is because it's so obvious the social inequalities, the inequities, the the grab, and you know, the power plays.

And I think we need to see more of that in our world today.

Did we did the Egyptians, the women teach us anything?

I mean, they they teach us what it's like to get pushed back down, they teach us what back lashes, they teach us that as soon as we think we've made it, that we have another year of the woman, they're going to push us back down again, they teach us that having a female body is probably the biggest liability, and it's something we will never change.

Because if we want to have children, this is something we have to go along with.

If you cannot transcend your breasts and your ovaries, it's not going to happen.

You can deny them.

But is that what makes you happy is that when you're on your deathbed, and you're dying, you're gonna be like, Oh, I built a corporation, you're gonna be like, I'm my children, which is and I think the man would feel the same way.

Right?

What makes you happy?

And on your deathbed.

That's what I always think about it.

Like, what do I want on my deathbed?

What am I going to be working towards?

I wrote a lot about this.

You mentioned when women ruled the world, but I wrote a book recently called the good kings, which deals with all of these feminists tropes.

Money Power, how this works, but through a hard patriarchal lens, looking at kingship, and my last chapter is like, well, what the hell do we do now?

We're stuck in this patriarchal system.

It's the water in which we swim, we can hardly see anything else.

How are we supposed to overcome this?

How are we supposed to find our way forward, and it is happening all around us, we just we need to look at those things.

We need to look at women out earning college degrees, women acting as breadwinners of their family, women acting as caretakers.

And as breadwinners, we need to see how people are opting out of binary gender entirely.

And we have a whole transgender movement that is we also see at the same time the the vociferous and very brutal pushback in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, we could go on Georgia, right.

And we see the racism very clearly, around us as well.

So I suppose what what I would say is that, we need to realize that just because we're modern, and we have televisions and iPads, and mics, you know, like, I'm talking to you with the headphones, whatever, space spaceships and satellites that were just animals on this planet, and we need to get along with this planet.

And I think the last chapter of my book, I'm like, Okay, how do we smash the patriarchy?

How does that even work?

What is it?

And so these women teach us what patriarchy is teach us how it keeps you in your place.

And it's it teaches us that it takes a very long time to undo patterns of seeing and ways of being, you know, like, I'm 50 years old.

And, and, you know, 30 years ago, I would just be some old gross lady, and now we see women maintaining a sexual hotness into their crone years.

And I intend to try to do that, as well, right?

By showing wrinkles and being normal and not plastic surgery in it for a man and getting the boob job and all of that, but, but embracing a different kind of feminine attraction and trying to not go silent and unseen.

as I age, there's all kinds of things that I could talk about that the patriarchy totally messes with our brains about, and how if we see it, clearly, we use a place like Egypt to see it.

We're like, Oh, crap, it's everywhere.

It's all around us.

And that we're just as ancient as we ever were.

So how are we going to make something really, really new?

And really different that works for all this?

I think we can all agree that society right now looks pretty bad.

Kalee Boisvert: Yeah, I agree.

Absolutely.

Well thank you so much.

I love this conversation.

I could talk this kind of stuff all day long.

I know very much like the focus of my book, which is really about women and money and, and trying to exactly understand that and how can we change this?

And just yeah in ourselves like how can we really be happy and satisfied then as women in our careers in our financial lives and with family and all that to resolve this pressure?

So, love this conversation?

If anyone wants to read further, what's the best way for them to I guess, reach out to you or find your books or anything like that?

Unknown: Yeah, if you Google my name Kara with a que Cooney with a C, you'll find my website pretty easily.

Okay, and you can go from there.

I have a podcast called afterlives with Kara Cooney, and I make the ancient world relevant.

And we look at the past and I'm like, Oh, my God, this is still happening today and look at this craziness.

And we, we look at where we came from, to try to understand where we are.

And I'm on substack.

And I'm also on Facebook and Twitter.

I find myself posting there less and, and trying to control a little bit more of my content now that what's his face is by Twitter, you know where to go, right?

Elon Musk, and so, you know, all these billionaires, all these kings, just taking more and more.

It's very annoying.

And so I like to go to those platforms that are a little smaller, more Mom and Pop, and try to say more there.

Kalee Boisvert: Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

And I can include some of that in the show notes as well.

Oh, yeah.

Great.

Thank you so much.

That was awesome.

I love this conversation.

Unknown: Thank you so much, Kaylee.

It was fun.

Kalee Boisvert: It's good.

It's empowering as women talking about this because it's like, Okay, we got work to do and we know it now.

And let's be aware, and let's do something about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you everyone for listening into this episode, and I will catch you on next week's episode.

Good bye for now.

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