Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 0:00
I'm excited to talk to you on this podcast today, and in fact, it's going to be a two-parter because there have been some pretty astonishing statistics recently coming out about how women's behavior has drastically shifted over the last 40 to 50 years. I'm talking about the last two generations of women alive on this planet are making significantly different choices for themselves, and there are some really clear reasons why. So, in this podcast and the next one, I want to bring some of those statistics to light to you, almost as like a mini satisfied woman newsflash or news report. But to get your wheels turning about how you might be leaning into some of the advantages that we have as women today, because as you hear me say often, we have more power, choice, and agency than we've ever had before. So this podcast and the next one are going to make sure that you are exercising as much of that power, choice, and agency as possible in order for you to live the most full, satisfied, and sovereign life possible. Welcome to the Satisfied Woman Podcast. I'm your host, Alanna Kaivalia. This podcast is dedicated to helping women lean into their femininity and rediscover the power of their feminine gifts. We take a look at what it means to be a modern woman and how we can live a sovereign and satisfied life on our own terms. Visit the hub at thesatisfiedwoman.com. thesatisfiedwoman.com, and if you haven't gone to the website yet, please go check it out. There's an opportunity for you to book a call directly with me. One of my most favorite things every week that I have the opportunity to do is speak with women, women exactly like you. I want to find out what you're going through, what you're carrying that you no longer have to, where your wisdom sits, and how we can turn that into greater sovereignty, freedom, and choice for you. And of course, at the heart of it, we're all learning to build more satisfied lives. So, because this is a two-part episode, we're going to go through a lot in this episode and the next one, but all of it, of course, hinges and anchors on the work of my book, *The Way of the Satisfied Woman* So, if you haven't gotten this book yet, go check it out. I also have the audiobook version. If you like listening to books, like like I do, I love listening to books. You can do it on your Kindle, on your e-reader, or you can have regular, straight-up hard copy. But one of the foundational principles that I uncovered in my research into femininity and feminine psychology, and what it means to live life on our own terms as women today, is that women really need four things in their lives always as like foundational non-negotiables in order to even approach what their most satisfied and sovereign life would be, and I call those the four keys. They are security, safety, trust, and cherishing. So, if you haven't heard me talk about those before, I definitely recommend going back and listening to some past podcasts. Can you believe this is podcast number 60-seven. So there's a lot of work and wisdom and research there for you for the learning and for the understanding, especially as we as women learn to lean into what it means to be a modern woman because it's changing. And I've got some big facts for you today to really ground this movement. You know, I wrote this book a few years ago. I've been studying feminine psychology and femininity for decades now. I've been working with women one-on-one to help them build sovereign businesses and satisfied lives for more than 10 years, and I've seen this all taking place in my own work and my own life. But we've got some data to back it up, and you can imagine, as an academic, as a researcher, I love data. So I'm going to throw some numbers at you right now, and these are numbers you can find yourself. I didn't, you know, have to dig too hard for them. They just seem to be percolating in the collective consciousness right now, so they're easily accessible. All right, so we're going to talk about how women's lives have shifted majorly on two different kind of playing fields: as relationships and marriage, and as finances.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 4:30
So, in 1975, the median American woman married for the first time at the age of 21. If you remember yourself at the age of 20-one, and I remember myself at the age of 20-one, I was not ready to get married at that age. But in 2020-five that has shifted upwards seven years. So the median age of a woman getting married in 2020-five is 20-eight and a half. Big difference. Among women born from 1940 to 1944, 80 percent were married by age 25. But among women born from 1990 to 1994, just 50 years later, only 30 percent of women were married by age 25. We're shifting into choosing to not have children. We're delaying marriage. We're prioritizing career. We're not living with spouses. One in 440-year-olds had never been married by 2021. That's astonishing. In 1990, women 30 and older accounted for about 30% of births by 2023, they accounted for more than half. So we're postponing having children, or we're deciding not to have them at all. The birth rate has declined significantly, down to 53.1 births per 1,000 women, ages 15 through 44 in 2025. This is unmistakable generational restructuring. Now, alongside these shifts that we're seeing actively happen right now in women choosing not to be married, choosing either to postpone childbirth or not have children at all, choosing to focus more on their careers, choosing sovereignty over something else, and we also see this coinciding with the our our ability to take control over our bodies and our our birth rate, whether we want to have children. So contraception happens in 1960 for the first time. In 1972, we were allowed as unmarried women to decide on our own contraception. In 1974, women were finally given the opportunity to have their own bank account without a male cosigner. And in 1988, the Women's Business Ownership Act allowed women to have access to business credit without requiring the signature of a male relative. You could not have a business loan as a woman without a male relative's signature until 1988. Guys, I was eight years old. Many of you listening to this podcast were alive at this time. Many of us have been alive and around for these massive shifts in how women are behaving and choosing to live their lives. Now, before I go any further, because I know that was a lot of data, and you know it's okay if you didn't have a notebook and a pen to write that down. I'm going to write this data in the show notes, and of course you can come talk to me on my website, thesatisfiedwoman.com. You can also simply just look it up. I mean, these are things from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Pew Research Center, the CDC. These are not hidden data, right? These are completely available, and these dates and timelines-they're easy to find, but they represent something extraordinary. Now, I've known that this shift has been happening for a long time, and again, this is one of the reasons why-well, big reason why I wrote this book. And for those of you on YouTube watching me, I've got the book open here to my dedication page, and I want to read you my dedication because this really drives home why some of this data matters, and why I'm choosing to talk about it in this episode and the next one with you. This book is dedicated to my grandmother, a woman who endured a life in which she was denied agency, so that I could live to be empowered with so much of it, I remember having conversations with my mother about the choices she never had and about how different her life would have been had she had the power, agency, and choice that I do, and I took it almost like a holy charge, that okay, Baba, that's what I called her. In honor of you, I will move my life forward in this powerful way. I will take advantage of the choices that I have that you never did. I saw how her life was affected day to day, how her light was dimmed, how her choices were squashed, how her agency was taken, and how the fullness of what and who she could have been was minimized because she lived in a time where the choices and the options that we have did not exist.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 9:34
And what I hope to do in this episode and the next, if I haven't already done it in the past 66 episodes. Is to issue this charge to you as well, sister, the one listening, because you have a tremendous responsibility. It's not small, right? The playing field has changed. Now it's not entirely level. These changes that I'm talking about, these statistics, are happening within the last few decades, within your lifetime, absolutely within your lifetime. There is barely an adult woman alive today that hasn't seen or been a part of this absolute shift happening. An adult woman alive today, when she was born, the terms of being a woman would have been different. Okay, so we are living into this future, and that means we have to establish now, right here, now, today, ourselves what our future looks like on our terms, because here's what the terms were just a few decades ago. For a woman to have any kind of safety and security, now you remember a moment ago I mentioned my four keys. A woman can't even begin to approach satisfaction and sovereignty until she has the four keys in place: safety, security, trust, and cherishing. I'm going to focus on safety and security because you know without those, there's just there really isn't isn't anything else. A woman negotiated her safety and security up to about a couple of decades ago, generally through partnership and marriage, or at least through masculine family members or counterparts, there was an historical bargain essentially between men and women. It used to be that women essentially gave up their fertility, their sexuality, their domestic labor, their emotional labor, their creativity, and social legitimacy to a partnership, they handed that over, and in return, what they were hoping to receive was providership and protection, largely through money and physical or social status, because we didn't have the opportunity to secure providership or protection for ourselves. We couldn't have our own bank account. We didn't have the option to choose when, whether or not, or if we wanted to have kids. We secured that through relationship, largely marriage, and there's that was never an equal partnership, because women could not safely refuse those things. If a woman was on her own, if she got divorced, her options were extremely limited. Not just because the culture stated it or through social norms, but because legally she couldn't even manage her own money. Socially, women in the workplace were looked down upon, not hired. We didn't have access to education for a long time. This was never an equal playing field, and it wasn't just social and cultural standards that regulated it. It was also largely the laws and the world that we live in. So, marriage or relationship wasn't just a romantic choice. I wish that it could have been, and I know. Look, I know that there are, of course, examples of men and women who've been married in a marriage for a long time, and they did choose based on love, and that worked out. Okay, I know that for some people it works out, but the playing field was never level, right? If it worked out because it was magically blessed in that way, I love that. But for most people, the social and cultural constructs didn't offer a level playing field. It wasn't just a romantic choice. It was it was an institution through which women had access to safety, to money, to housing, to legitimacy, to protection, her survival literally requires those things, and the only way it could be negotiated for a very long time was through relationship or through masculine family members and partners. Our capacity as women to negotiate this was incredibly limited, and once we are locked into that system, our capacity to challenge bad behavior in that system is even more limited, because our safety is in peril, our security is in peril. If we challenge bad behavior inside a system that has control over all of these things that we need. How can we actually speak up for ourselves? But then, women almost simultaneously in history, a short 50 years ago, acquired authority over two things that had most powerfully controlled their lives. Number one, reproduction, and number two, money. Once women could control their own pregnancy, earn their own money, hold their own credit, build their own businesses, and actually survive outside.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 14:59
Of the construct of marriage or relationship or masculine family members, the entire contract of how women operate in this world fundamentally changed, and the statistics show that. Now, a mere 50 years later, sometimes some even less for some of these things, we we in it took it was this quick. The change was this quick in in just two generations, barely two generations. We're marrying seven years later. We're putting it off. We don't need it early on. We're marrying seven years later on average. Marriage by age 25 has fallen from 80% to 30% The share of younger adults living with a spouse has been cut in half. One in 440-year-olds has never been married, and more and more women are either postponing or rejecting motherhood altogether. This is not just a demographic footnote. We're not just going. Oh wow! How interesting! This is a wholesale renegotiation of the life of a woman, because we don't need men, partnership, marriage, masculine family members, the way that we used to historically need them, so therefore, men can no longer secure women's loyalty merely by earning a paycheck. They must become worthy partners. Now, look in my work, I actually believe that this is highly beneficial for men as well. I don't think that the previous construct of how we were living, that distorted masculine patriarchal structure, benefited men either. I really don't. It reduced them to a paycheck. It meant that their only job was to go out and work. I know so many men who don't love that model because they miss their kids, they miss their wives, they miss their families, they miss out on big life experiences. They feel used, not useful. So this is in no way an indictment of men at all. It's a shifting of the entire culture, and I believe it's actually a shift for the benefit of everyone, men and women, because now on the on the kind of challenging side here, money alone is not sufficient compensation for the companionship of a woman. It's not sufficient compensation for our labor if we choose to give it, whether it's emotional labor or physical child labor. It's not enough compensation for our devotion for our entire lives. Women don't have to stay in relationships that no longer serve them, other than a paycheck. That is a huge playing field difference because now we can earn our own money, and this is the primary thing that I help women with, right? Of all the work that I do, which is it's big, it's big work. I talk about feminine psychology, femininity in the modern day, the inflection point, the big shift, the big catalyst for a woman's full sovereignty and satisfaction, is her access, agency, and ownership over her own finances. That's what gives a woman choice. She can choose to have a partnership from love, from trust, from cherishing, from fullness. We don't need a man's paycheck anymore. It's nice, sure. Like everybody loves money. You've heard me say that before, but we're not negotiating our bodies, lives, emotional labor away just so he can go slave at a job all day long. This is an imbalanced system. It didn't make anybody happy. Instead of certain cultural expectations, but nobody's happy within this very tight controlling framework. Trust me. We now want relationships on different terms. Now we want actual partnership. We want emotional safety. We want your emotional security more than we want your financial security. We want presence. We want you to show up for us. It's not enough that you might just go to work and earn a paycheck. We want you to be present for our lives. We want you to understand us, value us. We want to know your character. We want to have an emotional connection as much as we have a connection in building something here day to day as a family. We want your support, your interest, your insight. In fact, I believe that fundamentally, one of the greatest. Benefits of being in partnership, and I'm a huge advocate for partnership for women, is that women get to make decisions through their strongest gift, which is their emotion and intuitions.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 20:11
And when they have an emotional, an emotional reaction to something or an intuitive hit on something, that is as valuable as knowledge that comes from the masculine gift of logic and reason, and when when we we have a cherished masculine partner who sees us and honors our emotion and our intuition and says, you know what, baby, I see you. I see that this is a point of suffering for you. Let's figure that out and change it. Not oh, you're crazy! When they're not trying to negotiate away our intuition and our emotions, that becomes a safe partnership. So, for a woman, these four keys-safety, security, trust, and cherishing-they're not just material. They're not materialistic keys. A woman feels safe when she is emotionally held and supported when she has that masculine wall to break those waves against when she's not negotiated out of her intuition when she's not called crazy, bitchy, bossy, pushy when she's honored for who she is as a woman and when that is seen as a strength and an asset because her emotions and intuition are going to give different and beneficial into information than just the logic and reason. Then we have fullness. Then we have fullness of partnership, and we are better together than we are alone. That said, the playing field has changed, and if money is no longer sufficient, we do need more, so this is calling men who are still trying to coast on that old paradigm. I'll just work and provide money, and that'll be enough, into a more complete and full sense of masculinity. Right, the old paradigm allowed men to provide his entire social obligation just by providing material worth and value, and again, we love that. But women can make that now too, and that's what I work with a lot of women on creating their own sovereign business so that they can earn their own value, so that this isn't something that we have to negotiate away. So today's women really are asking the men that we want to partner with to provide relational, emotional, and psychological support and safety. This is historically new, and women have been moving this needle forward pretty aggressively over the last 40 or 50 years. So, if this isn't something that the men have moved the needle forward on, and I know that there are men doing incredible work. But if you haven't done the work yet, or you haven't looked at this research yet, it's time. And I do actually have, I think, at least one podcast and one video that is for men. So, ladies, if you're listening and you want your men to like, kind of get the nutshell version of this, go find that video and and get them up to speed. So we're really changing who we are as women, and what that means is, it look there are so many implications of this. This is why this has to be two episodes, because I mean, it's like it's almost like the research that is validating what women have always wanted, which is power and choice. All right, women are powerful. Our power has been hidden from us. It has been denied to us. It has been minimized, and it has, to some extent, even been made dangerous for us to display. Those things are shifting. Choice comes for women when we have sovereignty, when we have access to our own bodies, certainly, but absolutely to our own finances, when we can't, when we when we have access to our own finances, we can stay in a relationship, and that becomes a fully connected, full-bodied, wholehearted yes to that relationship. If we don't have access to our own money in a relationship when it's controlled by our partner, we will compromise ourselves to stay. We will stay when we are belittled. We are we will stay when we have fallen out of love. We will stay for convenience. We will stay even when it's scary. We will stay when we don't want to, and unfortunately, that's not only deeply harmful, degrading, and destructive for us as women. Our men don't benefit from that either. Anybody in a partnership where one person doesn't truly, wholeheartedly want to be there, no one is benefiting.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 24:39
So when women have access to their own sovereignty, when we can say, you know what, we're better partnered, and let's pool all of our resources, or however we want to manage that, but also this is mine. It gives us a level of sovereignty and safety to always make the best choices for ourselves, and. That's what it all comes down to, all right. I want you to hear this, and if you can hear my voice, if you're listening to the audio, you can hear the emotion coming up because I think of my grandmother, right? She was very important to me. I talk about her a lot. She didn't have these choices, and so unfortunately, she had to do and choose things that were deeply compromising for her. I never wanted that for her, and I don't want it for you or any woman alive right now. Now here's the thing: these changes, these shifts, have come so fast. They've come so fast that even us as women are looking around, going, "Wow, what do we do with this? How do we handle this? We're still living with a lot of the residual effects of that old narrative and paradigm that says, "Well, as a woman, you probably should be married, and you probably should have children, and you probably should defer to the relationship or submit in a certain way, and we don't have to anymore. But there's still some social construct happening. Depending on our age, we might still have some of that inbuilt and ingrained from when we were raised as women. So it's almost like we're living through our own culture shock. The choice and agency exists, but the model doesn't yet. Except, it does. That's why I do this work. That's why I wrote this book. That's why I teach you about the four keys. That's why I hammer on and on every week about your satisfaction and your sovereignty, because we have got to hustle and take advantage of this power, choice, and agency right now. Even if it's uncomfortable, even if it flies in the face of something that we learned, even if it goes against the grain a little bit, even still today, right now, because unless we do it right now, the women next to us and the women coming up behind us won't have a model for satisfaction and sovereignty that is on our terms. We can build a life on our terms now. Prior to 40 or 50 years ago, those terms were dictated for us and to us, and they weren't made by us. The workplace terms were not made with a woman's life, body, and sovereignty in mind. Relationship terms were not designed with a woman's life, body, and sovereignty in mind. Our cultural shape was not crafted with a woman's empowerment, sovereignty, agency in mind. We are coming out of, depending on when you start the timeline of when this patriarchy started. It's anywhere between three and 8000 years of patriarchy. We're coming out of several 100 years of really established culture as we know it right now, and it's just in these last 40 to 50 years. And look how quickly the needle has shifted. You know, I imagine I I live um, I live in Texas now, and the cicadas are coming up. Have you guys seen this? I saw this the other night. It's it's bizarre. I don't know if you've ever seen it. I was stunned. I had to look it up and figure out what is this giant lumbering. It looks like a little truck, like a little tank. This thing comes out of the ground, and he's kind of ugly. He has a big old butt, and he waddles up to a wall or a tree and goes straight up, and then sometime overnight, he basically unzips the back of his outfit. And I think of how difficult sometimes it is for us as women trying to unzip that zipper on the back of the dress, especially if we're not partnered. And he or she, the cicada, cicada could be a lady, lady cicada. She slides out of that shell, and she sits there for a moment. And in those in that moment, she's translucent. She's shimmery. She's all white, you know. And the liquid hasn't gotten to her wings yet because they've been all compressed.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 29:15
And she's got to kind of move and jiggle for the liquid to fill up her wings. And when she does that, she suddenly turns green and flies away. I mean, this is exactly what's happening to us because these cicadas they hide underground for years. You know, there's that that big movement every 17 years or something. But then there's regular ones that happen every two to five years. They just hang out underground. It's like they've been hiding. That's what we've been doing, women. We've been hiding, and not through any fault of our own. We're just here living in this social construct. It is what it is. It's nobody's fault, actually. We've all agreed up until this point, and we are starting to not agree. And we see the statistics showing us that. Okay, so we've started to not agree. And we've crawled out of the ground. We're seeing the light. We've unzipped that difficult zipper in the back, and we're standing there, and we're trying to push the liquid into our wings. Ladies, you have to do it now. You have to do it now, because if you don't take advantage of this incredible moment in history and show women next to you and behind you what to do, if you don't push that water into your wings, you don't fly. I don't care how I do care. I care that I'll say it this way. I don't care how scary it seems. I don't care what other people will think. I don't care how uncomfortable it will make other people. I don't care the protests you'll you'll confront by living your life on your terms. I guarantee you. I guarantee you, with all of my heart, with everything that I am, that if you do this, if you take advantage of your power, choice, and agency right now, not only will you be better for it, but everyone else around you will too. There's always been a strong narrative that a woman doing something for herself is immediately selfish. Absolutely not. Statistics will also show you that women rarely do things just for themselves. When a woman when a woman owns a business, it doesn't benefit her; it benefits her community. A woman, when she gets money, will not simply invest in herself; she'll invest in her family and the world around her. If a woman isn't happy, though, she is the emotional calibrator of her space, and no one around her can thrive either. It
Speaker 1 31:44
starts with you, and it starts right now. I mean, those women 40 or 50 years ago, when things started really moving
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 31:59
in 1960, when the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1974, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited lenders from discriminating based on sex or marital status, and we could have our own bank accounts. These are big deals. These are big deals. That's the that's the moment, and we're living into it now. So what are we going to do? That's my question. What are you going to do? How are you going to honor the power, choice, and agency that you have? How are you going to own your sovereignty so that every choice you make is for your highest good, because the women who who lived before you not that long ago, they could not make those choices. And if you believe you are still stuck and don't have the ability to make choices for your highest good, then I want you to come talk to me. I want you to book a call. Go to thesatisfiedwoman.com and book a call with me. Let's talk about where you still feel stuck, where you still feel compromised, what you're still carrying that you no longer have to, and let's get through this together. Let's push the water into the wings so you can fly, sister. All right, part two is coming next week. I hope this got you a little bit excited, and I hope that you'll do some of your own research as well. These facts exist. They're fun. They're empowering. They're validating, and they are showing us that women are making bold choices for themselves. What's going to be yours? So until next week, do everything you can to stay sovereign and satisfied.
