Photograph by Gia McKenna for the Milken Institute
On a brisk November evening in New York City, UVA McIntire’s Dorothy “Dot” Kelly walked toward a townhouse that has quietly shaped history for nearly six decades. Inside, feminist icon Gloria Steinem was hosting one of her Talking Circles, this time over dinner with about 20 women from across the country whose work centers on finance and women’s financial security.
“Who wouldn’t drop everything to go have dinner with Gloria Steinem?” Kelly says.
Steinem, now 91, remains, in Kelly’s words, “vibrant, engaged, and sharp as a tack.” For Kelly, a Lecturer of Personal Finance, the night underscored something urgent.
“In a year when AI dominated a lot of conversations and a lot of headlines, here was a dinner bringing together 20 strangers who all made a connection with each other,” Kelly reflects. “AI is great for some things, but we’re humans and we need that human interaction.”
That conviction anchors her teaching and her belief that financial health is about more than numbers. It is about agency, freedom, and community.
A Modern Talking Circle: Why Human Connection Still Drives Financial Well-Being
The meeting represented one of the many Talking Circles Steinem has hosted since 1968. The format was intimate for the group of financial advisers, academics, researchers, nonprofit founders, and an actress and author. They came from across the U.S., joined by a mission to strengthen women’s financial security.
Photograph by Gia McKenna for the Milken Institute
The conversation focused on women’s long-term financial realities. Women, on average, earn less and live longer than men, a combination that creates pressure and potential hardship.
“Women need to have more resources for a longer period of time,” Kelly explains. “And if women are not accruing them at the same rate as men, that’s a challenge.”
The dinner was part of the Milken Institute’s Women’s Financial Security Initiative. But unlike many others who focus on retirement in the middle and end of a career, she concentrates on the earliest period, when young adults first join the workforce.
“My goal is to try and get people to start looking at it now,” she says of her students. “If you start working on the problem at the beginning, it doesn’t turn into a problem. It’s just part of your budget and part of your journey.”
At McIntire, she teaches Personal Finance with a clear analogy. “I always talk about maintaining your financial health like your regular health,” Kelly explains. “It’s not that different. You don’t have to be an elite athlete to be healthy. You don’t have to be overly compulsive about your finances to be financially healthy, but you need to do certain basic things.”
Photograph by Gia McKenna for the Milken Institute
The conversation at Steinem’s reinforced that financial security is relational as well as technical. It is shaped by what women learn from one another, the role models they see, and the confidence they build together.
“One of the big things for me is the importance of role models,” Kelly says, calling Steinem one of hers for the work she has done and continues to do.
Before Equal Credit: A Recent History That Still Shapes Women’s Financial Lives
As the women around the dinner table shared stories, some spoke about grandmothers who could not leave unhealthy relationships because they lacked independent access to credit. The reason still surprises Kelly’s students.
Photograph by Gia McKenna for the Milken Institute
Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and follow-up legislation in 1976, banks routinely and legally denied loans and credit cards to women without male co-signers.
“It hasn’t been that long,” Kelly says. “We just passed the 50-year anniversary a couple of years ago.”
When sharing this startling fact in class at the Commerce School, the reaction has been immediate. The shock underscores how recent women’s financial exclusion is. Many students assume access to credit was always a given. The legal and cultural shifts that made it possible are still within living memory.
Though Steinem moved into her New York home in the late 1960s, before those protections were in place, her foundation is working today to secure the building as a permanent museum and workspace so that the Talking Circles and the stories they generate can continue.
“Students don’t realize this history,” Kelly says. “And that’s why the storytelling and the oral history are so important.”
Teaching Financial Health in a Digital Era
For her own teaching philosophy, Kelly begins with the simple idea that financial security creates independence.
“The freedom to accept a dinner invitation with Gloria Steinem, the freedom to take a trip or cut back on your hours to care for a sick or young relative,” she says is reliant on financial security. “The more financial security you have, the more freedom you have to make choices that allow you to engage with your family and take opportunities that you might otherwise have to pass up.”
At UVA McIntire, that message resonates with students eager to launch careers. Kelly challenges them to look beyond their first job.
“Most of our students should live to 90 years old if they take care of themselves,” she says. “I’m always encouraging my students to think about their life for the next 70 years, not just the next 10.”
Planning for retirement at 22 may seem distant, but Kelly frames it as preventative care. Start early. Make it routine. Reduce future crises. In an era of algorithms and AI-driven advice, bots and agents may help us to save for our later years, but she is sure that technology alone is not enough to provide the benefits of real-world guidance and lived experience. Ultimately, no matter the advancements that arise, it will be those people we’ve made relationships with who will continue to make the most important differences in our lives: “That human connection is going to carry on.”
Photographs by Gia McKenna for the Milken Institute
