Thirty-seven years ago, Congress designated March as Women’s History Month. Each year we pause to honor progress: rights secured, ceilings cracked, voices amplified.

But history is not only something we inherit. It is something we are actively writing. Historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that while the past carries its own inevitability, the future remains unwritten. We cannot revise what has already happened. But we can decide what happens next.

That responsibility for our future does not arrive with legislation or applause. It emerges from quieter places: in contracts signed, in investments understood and in the confidence to ask one more question in a financial meeting.

Women’s empowerment did not end with suffrage or workforce participation. The next frontier is fluency, and the fluidity to move through financial decisions without hesitation.

Many years ago, I drove home from a long day of work and dropped into a deck chair beside my husband, who had poured two glasses of wine. I assumed he was about to toast my upcoming 40th birthday.

Instead, he said, “Jackie, I want a divorce.”

In that instant, my sense of reality dissolved. My future, financial and otherwise, felt like floating cubes of Jell-O. That was my personal “What the hell?” moment. Not because I was incapable, but because I had not fully integrated what I needed to know about my own financial footing. As a result I developed a new way of taking inventory and tracking assets.

Decades later, I attended a Women in Leadership Conference in St. George. The speakers were accomplished, powerful women in their fields. Yet many shared their own “WTH” moments, not as confessions of failure, but as turning points toward growth.

That was when I realized the framework I had been using and teaching might matter more than I first understood. The shift is subtle, but transformative. Drawing on the science of mindfulness, particularly psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel’s definition of mind as the regulation of energy and information, we can rethink how we relate to money.

If the mind regulates energy, and money represents stored energy and future choice, then financial information becomes a form of psychological clarity and stability.

This is the foundation of what I call Wholistic Wealth: understanding both monetary and non-monetary assets as part of an integrated system of agency.

Recently, my husband and I went to dinner with a former student and her husband. The restaurant was hidden behind a bookshelf, a kind of modern speakeasy. To enter, you walk through a retail shop. My friend glanced at the clothing racks and laughed, “It’s not like I need any more clothes.”

Her husband joked, “Did you hear that? Let’s get the contract.”

Everyone laughed. But beneath the humor lies an old script: men as earners, women as spenders. Or at best, women as careful savers; guardians, not generators. That script is outdated, and yet it lingers.

National surveys consistently show that women report lower confidence in investing than men, even though long-term performance data suggests women investors perform as well as, and often better than, their male counterparts. The issue is not competence. It is fluency.

At the same time, economists project that women will control an unprecedented share of personal wealth in the coming decades. The transfer of assets already underway is historic. The question is not whether women will manage capital. It is whether we will do so with hesitation, or with clarity.

As a child, I absorbed the idea that men were the source of financial energy. It took decades of lived experience — and an MBA in business — to understand what women need to learn much earlier: financial participation is not secondary, it is structural. Women do not need domination of financial systems, we need navigation.

When we understand our net worth, our cash flow, our investments and our questions, anxiety decreases. Our conversations shift and our partnerships become real. We cannot change the roles women held in the past. But we can refuse to remain confined by them.

Women’s History Month honors what has been achieved. Honoring our future history means building the fluency, and the courage, to stand fully informed in the rooms where our life is being shaped.

The future is not inevitable. It is negotiated.

Jackie Henrion is an author, educator and co-founder of Studio Decouvrir. She holds an MBA and an MFA in creative writing and has taught courses integrating mindfulness science with financial literacy. Her forthcoming book, “Counting On Yourself: A Woman’s Way to Wholistic Wealth,” introduces the Wholistic Wealth framework for women seeking greater financial fluency and agency.

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