Debt That's User-Friendly:
At New York's Womanshare, the members pay their bills in skills
from Worth Magazine, April 1995 by Elizabeth Royte

Jane Wilson, 69 years old slipped on an Oriental rug a year ago and sustained multiple fractures of her pelvis and wrist.   Doctors set her recovery time at three months, but Wilson surprised them by taking only six weeks.  To what does she attribute her Herculean rebound? Going into debt.

"We encourage debt," says a friend, Diana McCourt, from her book lined apartment in the heart of New York City's politically liberal Upper West Side. "It oils the system."

The system is called Womanshare, and it operates on a novel system of credits and debits.  Wilson and McCourt, sitting back against Guatemalan throw pillows in McCourt's home, are happy to explain how the group started.  Four years ago, Wilson, a former caterer, and McCourt, 57, who had just sold her woodworking business, were looking for "new ways to be in the world".   They began trading labor: help with a dinner party in exchange for building a shelf.  "We were very comfortable with that," Wilson says.  "Then we began meeting in the mornings, with our oats and berries and yoga, and we began telling friends."

Eventually, a plan for a "cooperative skill bank" emerged.  New members, they determined, would list five resources (such as a computer or a car), five interests (concerts, walking), and five skills (counseling, designing).  In action, it works like this: Sally needs a wedding cake.  She peruses her Womanshare "yellow pages" which are updated four times a year, and finds Lucy, who bakes the confection and gets three hours credit in the "bank."  Lucy can then trade in her credit for, say, three hours of psychotherapy from Anna, or any of 180 available skills.

Womanshare currently has 80 members who cross racial and socioeconomic lines and rage in age from 30 to 72.  McCourt and Wilson believe they have room for another 20 - women, that is.  "Having just women was easier," say Wilson, "because men tend to take over.  Women barter out of need and more cooperatively," she adds.  "It's not tit for tat."

Womanshare has consciously not imitated the market economy and assigned credits to skills.  And, perhaps surprisingly, no member has balked at the idea that walking a dog for an hour has equal value to an hour of private detective work. "That's a yuppie mentality, that if you need it, you buy it." Says Wilson "But in the '90s, we feel a need to come together and support each other.  We're looking for community again."

A central tenet of the group is that women respect each other's time, whether they're caring for plants, writing a will, or walking the dog.  Or having poetry read to them while their broken bones mend, which is how Jane Wilson got better and fell into grateful debt.