When is the wanting enough? A story of women, greed and embracing our value

The fifth installment of an eight-week series exploring how the the Seven Deadly Sins constrain women. This week I look at greed, cloaked in shame, especially for women. But is that the whole story?

Nov 04, 2025

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The Hanukkah when I was thirteen years old I coveted a pair of designer denim jeans that many of the girls in my Long Island, New York middle school were wearing in 1973. I put it at the top of my wish list and handed it to my mother, certain that I would not be denied what I most desired. But as the eighth night of Hanukkah arrived, and I opened the final gift, it was clear that the jeans were not to be mine. Not this year, at least, which was a lean one for our family of five as my father was temporarily out of a job. Still, even as I was aware of our financial situation, I threw a tantrum very much out of character for this responsible eldest child, the dutiful good girl. I stormed upstairs to my room and lay on my bed, sobbing with the unfairness of it all. What was wrong with wanting what I wanted? A little while later, my mother came up to my room and explained that she had done the best she could this year to please me and my two siblings. Suddenly, I was overcome with shame. I had been greedy. I had wanted more than I deserved. I had behaved badly. My wanting now seemed an ugly thing and I stuffed it under my pillow, reminding myself to be grateful for what I had.

These childhood experiences and messages would become entrenched over the years, this story of shame around money: not knowing how to ask for it, to be comfortable with it, or to demand it—to be grateful, in other words, for what I had. As a woman, I am far from alone with these complex feelings around the desire for money and the security it promises, not least for how this wanting is entangled with the sin of greed.

“We feel embarrassed we want money at all. We don’t know if we deserve it. And because we’ve been urged to spend rather than save, we’ve missed out on the opportunity to accrue wealth,” writes Elise Loehnen in her fascinating book,On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good.

woman holding bag beside mural painting — Women are trained from an early age to be good consumers rather than savers and investors, as if it’s our duty to family and country. Photo by Hc Digital on Unsplash

“Believing greed to be sinful, we deny our own security.”—Elise Loehnen

This is the fifth installment of a series exploring the Seven Deadly Sins (plus sadness, one of the ‘Eight Demonic Thoughts’ posited in the 4th century), inspired by Elise’s book. (She also writes the newsletter Pulling the Thread and hosts the excellent podcast of the same name). Recently, Elise released a companion workbook,Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self.

In On Our Best Behavior, Elise explores how these insidious and pervasive concepts seek to control women but can in fact set us free. Each week, I offer questions for us to explore together, so do hop over to the comments. The Seven Deadly Sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Catch up with the previous essays here:

This woman’s inner sloth delights in her very sinful naps

Envy shows the way to our deepest desires

Pride & prejudice: How the ‘deadly sin’ of pride caused me to swallow my voice

A woman of appetite embraces her gluttony

For women, the double bind of greed

That younger me should have known better than to throw a fit over a pair of jeans that my parents simply couldn’t afford. I had watched countless times while my mother sat at the kitchen table, balancing the checkbook. She was the one who would count out our allowances each week, tell us that we could wear our winter jackets one more season. And the hushed conversations between my parents at night, while we were supposed to be sleeping, were often around money. We were a middle-class family, one that did not lack for the basics but didn’t splurge. We didn’t take vacations, aside from one trip to Disney World when I was twelve, in part to visit my grandparents in West Palm Beach. Yet each summer, she found the money to send me to 4-H camp in Riverhead Long Island for two weeks because my mother knew how important it was to me.

My mother was the household CEO but that didn’t necessarily give her the power. My father had the full-time job outside the home and she was a full-time mother for most of my growing up years. Historically women did not have wealth and as Elise reminds us, until the mid-1970s, married women could not get credit under their own names—not a bank account, not a mortgage. “Women were an extension of the property of men…a visual reflection of his worth,” she writes. “What a weird legacy.”

That legacy creates a double bind, as Elise points out: “Within this construct, there’s little room for women to create an unmediated relationship with wealth. We are then persecuted doubly by greed: we are trained away from money, taught it’s not really for us, and we are, at the same time, programmed by our cultural messaging to believe it’s our job to drive the economy by buying stuff. Society champions our consumerism. The women I know are deeply ambivalent about money: we’re attracted to its promise of security and power and repelled by the inequities it perpetuates.”

The specter of scarcity

Like so many girls, I was taught not to talk about money, let alone embrace an ambition for obtaining lots of it, to make the pursuit of my own financial security a top priority. I understood, given my family’s limited income, I had to work my way through college and would be responsible for supporting myself after graduation and repaying my own college loans. While I sought to create a firm financial foundation for myself, out of necessity, this was firmly rooted in earning “just enough” and not more than what I “deserved.”

In my first few years of work out of college in the journalism field I discovered I could make money but the larger financial world was an intimidating mystery to me. Throughout my twenties, I still had my father do my tax return. When I married at twenty-nine, the taxes became a task for my then husband. I also handed over to my ex every other aspect of finances that I felt I had no aptitude for (or interest in) like budgeting or investing in the stock market. And yet for nearly the entirety of my 33-year marriage, I was the breadwinner. While I could earn the money, and earn well, I didn’t trust myself enough to manage it or invest it. I know I’m not the only woman to feel the bitter bite of this particular irony.

I not only lacked financial confidence but I was also haunted by a sense of scarcity, in part due to the sudden, lean times of my childhood when my father was jobless and money was tight. When we grow up in financially-stressed homes—even if the financial stress isn’t as dire as it could have been—its imprint stays within us, feeding a sense of anxiety around money. Even when I was earning very well in my 40s and 50s, I never felt we lived in abundance, even if, on paper, as a family, we certainly appeared to be well off. We had a lovely big home, I could financially support our daughters’ pursuit of private college and post-graduate education and we went on nice vacations.

Yet I never turned down a job as a business and sustainability copywriting consultant; I didn’t dare. It wasn’t just that my family depended on me; somehow the specter of suddenly not having enough was never far from my consciousness. Yes, the earning burden was on my shoulders (and my acceptance of that situation for so long is something to explore in another essay) but more insidiously, the anxiety over money never abated.

Elise grew up in a household with a mother who also felt this anxiety, even though she was the wife of a doctor, because of a money-stressed childhood. “Anxiety is often irrational, tethered to a future that is uncertain, and that many of us swim in, frantically scanning the horizon for our next lifeboat. It doesn’t matter if we’re rich by the standards of others, the anxiety is there,” she writes. This dovetails with the societal constructs in which we live, she adds. “It makes sense that women, specifically, feel scarcity—it’s core to our identity within the patriarchy, and it feeds the illusion of our dependence on men and authority structures.”

Owning our ask

As women, the stories we tell ourselves about money are ripe for rewriting and I have begun to tell—and live—a different story in my 60s. The pursuit of financial wealth and independence is not shameful nor greedy, I began to tell myself. The financial earning imbalance that characterized my marriage was not just on him—it was on me, too, for enabling the situation and not standing up for myself.

When I initiated a divorce three years ago and we were hammering out our Marital Settlement Agreement (MSA) between ourselves and our lawyers, I had to cultivate my skills at negotiation. Women are typically great when negotiating on someone else’s behalf but “not when they are negotiating on behalf of themselves,” Elise writes. “Then we struggle to own our own ask. Our tendency is to over-explain, worriedly justify, or fold. The art of negotiating requires the temerity to sit in uncomfortable silence, a difficult practice for everyone, but especially for women who are often taught to ensure everyone is happy and at ease.”

I was the one who initiated the face-to-face conversations, laden with potential conflict (which I tended to avoid) over the MSA. And I sat in uncomfortable silence while giving my ex-husband the space to consider my offer, raise a counter offer and then move on with our discussion. This reminded me of all the times I had negotiated consultancy fees over the years, a skill I had never given myself credit for. There were many times I had asked for more—in my career and in the dissolution of my marriage—and there was no longer any shame in it. Greed was not part of the equation.

Investing in the market—and ourselves

Similarly, I have learned since my divorce that I am perfectly capable of understanding the stock market—not like a seasoned pro—but well enough to know how the market works, and smart enough to hire a good advisor to help me manage the investments, since day-to-day stock market maneuvers is still not—and will never be—my thing.

My newfound aptitude and appetite for investing makes me a rarity. While the gender pay gap is 82 cents on the dollar, the gender wealth gap is 32 cents on the dollar and moving in the wrong direction.

Part of the inequity is due to the lack of discourse around money for women, less financially literacy and more pressure to spend on consumer goods rather than stocks, as noted in On Our Best Behavior. But it goes deeper, Elise notes: “Women don’t participate in the market to the same extent as men because women feel it’s wrong to make money materialize without effort. If we view money as a balancing agent, as finite, boundaried, exchanged for goods or employment, the idea of passive income feels sinful.”

I am now in control of filing my tax returns, with the help of a good accountant (on both sides of the Atlantic, given my situation living in Spain as a US citizen required to declare world income). I hired a financial advisor in 2024 to help fill some knowledge gaps who guided me on retirement planning, and set me up with a simple but effective budgeting software tool. Each step towards command of my finances, however belated, feels incredibly empowering.

The real question is our value, not our worth

I am still in the process of unraveling these questions around money, wealth, greed and generosity, want versus need, scarcity and abundance, especially in a world where so many live in extreme lack—and I suppose I always will be. Yet the idea of any of it being a sin is no longer part of my thought process. How women achieve security, including financial security, is far too complex and nuanced a story to end with the finger-wagging of a sin.

A helpful way to look at is to consider our value rather than our worth, and this section of Elise’s book was one I re-read closely. She writes: “Worth is an exterior validation from the world deciding what you deserve, your corresponding status. Worth is equivalent to what something costs, including your time. Value, on the other hand, is an internal calculation, it is much more profound, personal, the importance of something to you specifically.”

So, the question becomes, How do we view our own value?

As Elise writes, “We hustle to show our worth, every single day” (or we’d slide right into the sin of being slothful).

When a woman knows her own value—and demonstrates it, proudly and unflinchingly—that’s when we begin to tip the scales towards a healthier relationship to meeting our own needs and those of others.

LET’S CHAT!

What’s your relationship to this “sin” of greed and how does it play out in your life?

What kind of childhood messages did you receive about money and greed, abundance and scarcity, meeting our wants versus our needs?

How does thinking about your “value” rather than your worth change things for you? Would you feel more confident negotiating if you believed you were asking for your value rather than your worth?

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