A Woman With Money Is Everyone’s Moral Problem
Why rich men get to be complex and rich women have to be pure
Lately, I’ve been watching something that makes me deeply uncomfortable, mostly because I can see myself in every angle of it.
On the surface, we live in a world that’s obsessed with “women’s empowerment.” Brands run campaigns about it. Companies do Women’s Day panels with pink backdrops and say all the right things about financial independence. Parents proudly say, “I want my daughter to stand on her own feet.” We repost the right carousels, we clap for the right stories, we say “yass queen” under the right posts.
And then, a woman actually starts making real money.
Not survival money. Not “I can pay my own phone bill” money. I’m talking about money money. Money that changes the terms of her life. Money that means she can leave a bad marriage and not move back into her childhood bedroom. Money that lets her pick a city because she wants to live there, not because her in-laws do. Money that pays for therapy, and childcare, and a house in her own name, and a lawyer if it comes to that.
When that happens, people get nervous in a way that’s hard to unsee once you start noticing it.
I’ve watched it in comment sections, in living rooms, in founder WhatsApp groups, in my own head. A man posts his new car, his promotion, his bonus, and the responses are almost scripted: “Hard work pays off.” “Inspiring stuff, bro.” There’s an easy narrative for male wealth. It fits.
A woman does the same thing (shares her revenue milestone, mentions her speaking fee, buys herself jewellery with her own money, chooses to work less because she can afford to) and suddenly the atmosphere curdles. “She’s become very money-minded.” “So showy.” “Who is actually funding this?” If there’s a man anywhere in her orbit, he becomes the implied source. If there isn’t, people will conjure one anyway.
What’s worse is, the criticism isn’t just about having money. Women are expected to hold the moral and emotional fallout of money, too. Men get to be rich; women have to be rich and good.
A wealthy man is allowed to be a “pure capitalist” and nobody asks him to sit on a panel about inequality. A wealthy woman, especially a visible one, is immediately handed homework. Is she ethical enough? Is she giving back? Is she using her platform “responsibly”? Is her feminism radical enough to justify how much she has? It’s like the price of admission is not just competence but a kind of continuous moral performance.
I see this especially in our little corner of the Indian internet. We’re strangely comfortable with the aesthetic of girlboss-lite empowerment. Women “hustling,” women “chasing their dreams,” women starting “small businesses.” But the minute those dreams turn into actual capital and actual leverage, the questions change tone. Suddenly she’s being asked to answer for capitalism itself.
“How can you be talking about women’s rights and also charge this much?”
“How can you call yourself a feminist and still be selling X?”
“How can you post about inequality and also fly business class?”
Underneath that is an accusation: if you are a woman and you have money, you should be working full-time to atone for it.
And I’m not outside this. I’ve caught myself doing it. I have looked at women who seem to have “too much, too fast” and felt that itchy mix of suspicion and resentment. I’ve read headlines about some glossy, hyper-successful woman and thought, almost automatically, “But what is she doing with all that?” I have never had that reflex with rich men. Their existence feels… neutral. Hers feels like something that demands a verdict.
Once you notice this, it’s impossible to un-notice.
Legally, a lot has changed. On paper, in India, daughters have equal inheritance rights. Women can open bank accounts, get credit, run companies, own property. In theory, nobody is stopping us from building wealth. But the cultural software did not update at the same pace as the legal hardware. For generations, women’s relationship to money has been mediated through men: father, husband, brother, boss. We are only a few decades into the experiment of women having direct, independent control over significant sums of money, and all the old ghosts are still in the room.
Those ghosts sound like:
“Don’t fight with your brother over property, it looks bad.”
“Don’t talk about how much you earn, it’s not ladylike.”
“Don’t marry a man who earns less, it’ll never work.”
“Don’t be too materialistic, men don’t like girls like that.”
What I keep circling back to is that a woman with money is not just wealthier. She is harder to control. She is harder to frighten with “what will people say?” She is harder to guilt into unpaid labour. She is harder to keep in a marriage with the threat of financial ruin. She is harder to emotionally blackmail with “we did so much for you, you owe us.”
And that is what so much of this discomfort is trying, very politely, to protect.
We don’t say, “I am scared of what it means when women no longer need men to survive.” Instead we say, “She’s changed.” We don’t say, “I don’t want to interrogate the economic system that makes my comfort possible,” so we say, “She’s being very vulgar about money.” We don’t say, “I am threatened by her exit options,” so we ask her to justify her politics, her ethics, her consumption, her feminism, over and over again.
Why does a woman making money feel, to so many people, not just surprising or aspirational, but morally offensive?
And what happens if she stops accepting that as her burden to fix?
History Was Very Clear: Women’s Money Was Never Meant To Reduce Their Work
If you strip away the romance and culture and “values talk,” history is offensively straightforward: women were not meant to have money that changed anything.
They could be connected to money. Decorated with it. Symbolically surrounded by it. But money that could move, that could be redirected, that could buy them out of labour or obedience? That was the line.
Under British common law, coverture didn’t just say “a wife can’t own property.” It said, quite literally, that her legal and economic identity merged into her husband’s. Anything she earned became his. She existed, but she did not count as an economic subject. The world ran on her work (children, household, support, social smoothing) but the law did not see that as “work,” it saw it as default.
In India, the surface language was different, but the logic was similar. We invented concepts like stridhan, a woman’s wealth, typically in the form of gold, jewellery, gifts. In theory, it was meant to be her safety net. In practice, it became another way to tie her value to marriage and family.
Notice the pattern: the wealth we are comfortable with women having is the kind that stays close to the body or locked in the locker. Gold bangles. Wedding sets. “Streedhan.” Portable, yes, but culturally treated as family asset more than personal capital. She can wear it, she can feel “secure” because it exists, but try selling it to fund an exit from a bad marriage and watch how quickly that gold turns into a moral debate.
Land? Cash? Shares? Rental income? Historically, those didn’t flow to women. Daughters “got” jewellery and trousseaus; sons got property and productive assets. Gold for her, land for him. Ornament for her, capital for him.
Even when reforms arrived with the Hindu Succession Act, its 2005 amendment, equal inheritance on paper, they came into a world that had already trained several generations to see a woman claiming her legal share as somehow indecent. The “good daughter” is the one who signs away her rights for the sake of brotherly harmony. The “difficult” one is the woman who treats herself as an economic subject, not just a sentimental one.
We are weirdly comfortable with women holding symbolic wealth, and deeply uneasy with women commanding liquid, decision-making power.
A woman in a heavy gold set at her wedding? Beautiful, auspicious, emotional.
A woman asking who actually owns the flat she lives in? Disrespectful, “Americanised,” “creating issues.”
You can feel the line being drawn: show, don’t move.
At the same time, all this wealth, the land in his name, the jewellery in hers, the savings that never had her signature on them, depended on one massive, unpriced input: her labour.
Women’s unpaid care and domestic work have always been the subsidy under everything.
Someone had to raise the children, cook the meals, manage the rituals, keep the extended family stitched together, remember birthdays, refill the home meds, host the guests, manage the staff. None of that was valued in cash, but it absolutely showed up in men’s careers and balance sheets. A man could stay late at the office, travel, “focus,” because someone else’s body was absorbing all the friction of life.
Even when women did earn, the expectation was that it wouldn’t change that equation. A working woman was meant to layer paid work on top of unpaid work, not use money to get rid of any of it. Salary as extra, not salary as leverage.
You can see this clearly in older generations of Indian working women: teachers, nurses, bank staff, government employees. They had incomes, sometimes substantial ones. But their salaries fed into “the family pot,” and very little of it got framed as personal power. They still cooked, still hosted, still served chai to guests who had come to see their husbands. They subsidised the system twice, with time and with cash, and were praised for their sacrifice.
That’s the historical bargain:
We will increasingly “allow” you to earn, but you will not use that money to opt out of being our safety net.
Men were also allowed a learning curve with money, women weren’t; and women were drafted as the conscience of the whole system.
Young men could go to the city, blow money on bad business ideas, lose savings in speculative trading, start and shut companies. Entire families and villages would rally around the story of “at least he tried.” Financial recklessness was framed as risk-taking, naivety, “spirit.”
Young women, if they had any control over money at all, were expected to be perfect stewards. Clean savings, careful spending, no debt, no stupidity. If a woman lost money to a scammer, a bad investment, a failed business, it didn’t just reflect badly on her. It fed the larger myth: “See, this is why women shouldn’t handle finances. They are emotional. They don’t understand these things.”
Men were allowed to learn money; women were expected to just be good with it from day one.
Overlay that with the moral role assigned to women (keeper of values, nurturer, the one who “keeps the family grounded”) and you get the template that still haunts us: a good woman does not chase wealth; she manages the fallout of everyone else chasing it. She stretches the rupee. She sacrifices her desires. She “keeps her husband from going astray.” She’s the human shield between raw capitalism and the people she loves.
When you put all of this together, our current discomfort with rich, self-directed women stops being mysterious. Because if a woman has money that:
isn’t just jewellery,
isn’t controlled by someone else,
isn’t automatically funneled into family obligations,
and she is willing to use that money to reduce her unpaid labour, experiment, make mistakes, prioritise herself…
…then she’s walking out of a role that history has spent thousands of years training her for.
History didn’t just say “women shouldn’t have money.” It said, more precisely:
Women may sit near wealth, display wealth, stretch wealth, protect others from the worst excesses of wealth. They may not, under any circumstances, treat wealth as a tool that primarily serves them.
So, of course, today, when a woman uses her income to hire help, live alone, leave, say no, or even just rest, it doesn’t feel like a neutral choice. It feels like a dereliction of duty.
We keep insisting the problem is modern: Instagram, influencers, “today’s girls.” It isn’t.
And unless we drag this historical script into the light, we’ll keep mistaking our discomfort as some pure, individual, ethical reaction to “obnoxious rich women,” instead of seeing what it really is: the inherited rage of a system watching one of its key workers finally clock out.
The First Thing Women Buy With Money Is Distance
Watching women around me start to earn more, including myself, here’s what I’ve realised: the first thing most of us buy with money is not luxury. It’s distance.
Distance from drudgery. From constant crisis. From being on call for everyone’s needs, all the time. From the kind of exhaustion that used to be marketed back to us as “a woman’s lot.”
That’s where the real offence lies. Not just in women having money, but in what we dare to do with it.
In the Indian context, this is particularly obvious. Our entire middle-class existence is built on a a fungible equation: women’s unpaid labour plus underpaid domestic help equals everyone else’s ability to “focus on work.” When a woman starts using money to interrupt that equation, it’s like pulling bricks out of the foundation.
You see it in small, “silly” choices first.
A woman decides she’s done cooking twice a day and orders in more often.
A woman decides she’s hiring a cook and a cleaner, even though her mother and aunties did it all “with their own hands.”
A woman decides she’d rather pay for a cab than be dependent on a husband or father for every ride.
On the surface, these look like convenience decisions. Underneath, they’re reallocations of energy. She is saying: I am no longer willing to donate all my time to holding everyone else’s life together. I am redirecting some of it back to myself.
That’s when the comments begin.
“So you don’t even cook now?”
“Must be nice to outsource everything.”
“Why do you need a maid for such a small house?”
“Kids who grow up with nannies never feel real love, you know.”
They arrive as teasing, concern, advice. But the message is clear: yes, earn money if you want, but if you use that money to opt out of the unpaid work your mother did, you have broken the code.
Because women’s unpaid work is not just individual effort, it is the invisible subsidy that lets men have careers, parents have social standing, in-laws have domestic comfort, companies have “loyal employees” who never quite burn out enough to quit. Take even a small piece of that away and people immediately feel the loss.
We don’t hate women making money; we hate women buying their way out of care work.
I’ve seen this play out with friends who started earning enough to seriously lighten their domestic load. The anger directed at them wasn’t about their revenue numbers. It was about what those numbers allowed them to say no to.
One friend, a founder, hired a full-time nanny, cook, and cleaner after her second child because she wanted to stay in the game. The men in the family grumbled a bit about “waste of money,” but they adjusted. The harshest judgement came from women: “If you’re not raising your kids yourself, what is the point?” “You hardly do anything at home now.” “You just sit and work all day, anyone can do that.”
The fact that she was still the one paying for everyone’s medical emergencies, buying gifts, sponsoring holidays, didn’t matter. In their eyes, she had withdrawn the labour that counted: her body in the kitchen, her presence at every school event, her willingness to always be tired.
Her money hadn’t redeemed her. It had exposed her.
Women are drafted as capitalism’s conscience; men just get to be rich.
A man who earns a lot and outsources everything is efficient. A woman who does the same is “cold.” A man who says, “I don’t have time for this, I’ll pay someone,” is focused. A woman who says it is heartless, or Westernised, or out of touch with “our culture.”
We expect rich men to be ambitious. We expect rich women to be ethical.
You can see it in the questions people ask. A man who builds a successful company is asked about scale, valuation, maybe philanthropy if he’s very rich. A woman who builds a successful company is immediately asked about “giving back,” about work-life balance, about representation, about whether she pays her staff fairly, whether her feminism is visible in her vendor list. We ask her to solve capitalism while surviving it.
It’s not that those questions are wrong. It’s that they are never evenly distributed. The richer a woman gets, the more we treat her like a priestess. Are you pure enough to hold this? Are you conscious enough? Are you grateful enough?
If she is openly ambitious, openly transactional, openly uninterested in being anyone’s moral oxygen mask, it offends people in a way male greed rarely does. There is a part of us that believes women’s job is to absorb the toxins of the world, emotionally, domestically, ethically. When a woman uses money to filter those toxins before they even reach her, we feel cheated.
Rich women expose how mediocre a lot of rich men are.
When a woman with no family business, no big surname, no benevolent uncle, manages to build serious wealth on her own terms, it punctures a comforting story: that men at the top are there purely because they’re the best.
If she made it in spite of being underestimated, underfunded, underpaid, then what does that say about the thousands of men who had the wind at their backs and still only managed average? If she can shoulder domestic expectations, casual sexism, safety calculations, fertility clocks, and still outperform, what happens to the myth of male inevitability?
The easiest way to defuse that threat is not to improve the men. It’s to discredit the woman.
Suddenly, her wealth is suspect. She must have had “connections.” She must be cutting corners. She must be sleeping with someone. She must be exploiting someone. The story has to bend until her success looks like a cheat code, not a fair outcome.
Women join in, too, not because they hate her, but because her existence hurts. If you have spent your whole life playing by the rulebook, be nice, be modest, don’t push too hard, don’t overshadow your husband, and someone else tears that rulebook up and still gets rewarded, it feels like a personal betrayal. Either she is wrong, or everything you sacrificed was for nothing. Which is easier to live with?
So we judge. We make up narratives to lower her back down to a manageable size. We say “she got lucky,” or “she’s not actually happy,” or “these things never last.” We turn her into a lesson instead of a mirror.
All of this happens before we even get to the headlines of “high-earning wife, low-earning husband,” the articles about divorce rates and resentment. It happens in the mundane negotiations of daily life: who cooks, who cleans, who takes leave when the child is sick, whose work is “flexible,” whose career can be bent.
When a woman has enough money to say, “Actually, my work is not flexible; yours is,” she is not just asserting herself. She is pulling at the threads of a tapestry that kept a lot of people comfortably wrapped.
That’s why the backlash is so often disguised as concern. “You’re losing touch with reality.” “You’re becoming selfish.” “You’re burning out, this isn’t sustainable.” The subtext is rarely, “I care about you as a person.” It’s more often, “I am panicking about what happens if you actually follow this through.”
Women aren’t allowed a learning curve with money.
A man can scale back after burning out, or pivot after a failed startup, and people say he’s smart, that he learned. A woman who experiments with work, drops a career path, changes how she spends, or even just misjudges a financial decision, hears a different tone: “See, we told you not to get carried away.” Her mistakes are not treated as data points; they are treated as evidence that women with too much money become reckless, irresponsible, broken.
So she is pressured into being perfect with her investing, with her saving, with her giving. She is not allowed the luxury of simply being a person who is learning. And because we sense that, many of us pre-emptively stay small. Better to never test the edge than to fail publicly and confirm the stereotype.
A lot of women who do break through know exactly how precarious their position is. Which is why so many of them over-index on performing goodness. They overpay staff. They over-share their philanthropy. They are endlessly available to people online with questions and pain. They are trying to disarm the suspicion around their wealth by being dazzlingly, visibly useful.
We shouldn’t have to do that. Men don’t.
But until we name this double standard, we’ll keep rewarding the rich woman who bleeds herself dry to seem “relatable,” and keep policing the one who simply lives.
And that, in the end, is what offends us most: not that a woman has money, but that she might use it to become less accessible. Less self-sacrificing. Less convenient. Less available as a buffer between us and the ugliness of the world.
Money lets her build a door where there used to be open access. Everyone who used to walk in and out freely will feel that door as an insult. They will call it arrogance. They will call it Westernisation. They will call it betrayal.
Very few will admit what it really is: the first time in a long time that she gets to decide who comes in.
The Tradwife Fantasy Isn’t An Escape From Money. It’s A Different Way Of Serving It.
If the rich, self-directed woman is one side of the discomfort, the internet has given us a very polished opposite: the tradwife.
You’ve seen her. Perfectly blow-dried hair, flowy dresses, sourdough starter in one hand, husband’s tie in the other. The captions are all about “bringing back traditional femininity,” “being provided for,” “divine submission,” “nurturing the home.” She makes reels about packing his lunch, cleaning the house, laying the table. She talks about how she “opted out of the corporate grind” and “found her true purpose” in being a wife and mother.
On first look, she seems like the anti-story to everything we’ve been talking about. No ambition discourse. No revenue milestones. No “secure the bag” energy. Just soft filters and “my man is my king.”
But if you look closely, the tradwife aesthetic is not actually outside capitalism at all. It’s just playing a different role in the same game.
It’s very easy to sneer at these women, but I find myself more interested in what their popularity says about us. Why does this version of womanhood trend so hard right now, in the same feeds where “boss energy” content also trends? Why are so many young women watching both?
Part of it, I think, is exhaustion. The girlboss script promised that if we worked like men, talked like men, negotiated like men, we would get men’s outcomes. A lot of women tried. A lot of women broke their backs trying. What they got, too often, was double shifts: a job plus the same domestic and emotional labour, with a pink “you’ve got this!!!” slapped on top.
The tradwife offers a fantasy of opting out. No performance reviews. No late-night decks. No pretending to enjoy “building shareholder value.” Just baking, cleaning, loving, “being taken care of.”
She is not rejecting money; she is re-optimising herself as an asset within a very unequal economy.
The tradwife isn’t saying “I don’t care about material comfort.” She is saying, “I don’t want to compete for it directly. I want to attach myself to someone who can win, and make myself indispensable to him.”
The work hasn’t gone away. The unpaid care work is still there, if anything, more intense, because now it’s framed as her entire identity. The only difference is that instead of trying to use her own income to buy distance from labour, she’s using performance of submission to secure long-term access to someone else’s income.
And crucially, online, even this submission is monetised.
Those “simple life” reels are edited on MacBooks and shot on iPhones. The milk-white kitchens and perfect pantries are sets. These accounts are full-blown creator businesses: affiliate links, brand collaborations, sponsorships. “Tradwife” itself becomes a brand. She performs dependence for the camera, but there is a very modern back-end of analytics, negotiations, income reports humming underneath.
The tradwife doesn’t actually exit the money system. She just chooses a persona that feels safer to the algorithm and to patriarchy. She offers to play the fantasy wife so thoroughly that someone else will subsidise her existence.
In India, we have our own offline versions of this: “I don’t need a career, I just want a good husband,” “I’ll leave my job after marriage,” “I only work till my husband is settled.” On paper, these women are rejecting the pressure to earn. In reality, they are making a rational economic choice in a country with low female labour force participation, weak safety nets, and families that still treat daughters as temporary residents.
There’s six things to keep in mind here:
First, the care work doesn’t go away. It just gets rebranded as virtue. While the high-earning woman gets attacked for using money to buy out of unpaid labour, the tradwife is rewarded for doubling down on it. She cooks from scratch, cleans obsessively, homeschools; her entire existence is care work, presented as aesthetic choice rather than structural necessity. The labour is still a subsidy. It just looks prettier now.
Second, she is still being asked to be capitalism’s conscience. Her feed is full of “slowing down,” “simple living,” “making a house a home,” “choosing love over hustle.” All of this is set in very expensive-looking homes, with very high-cost lifestyles behind the cottagecore filters. She is not questioning the material comfort, she is offering an emotionally palatable cover for it. Look, this wealth is wholesome, she says. It’s wrapped in homemade bread, not in pitch decks. Don’t be mad.
Third, she protects male mediocrity just as effectively as the rich self-made woman exposes it. The tradwife’s husband is rarely presented as extraordinary. He is framed as generic: “my hardworking man.” What’s extraordinary is her devotion. Her entire sales pitch is: “Even an average man can live like a king if he finds a woman like me.” She offers compensatory excellence in domestic and emotional labour so that he doesn’t have to be exceptional anywhere else.
Fourth, tradwife content is often created and consumed by women who have looked at the girlboss deal and decided it’s a scam they can’t afford to fall for. They’ve seen the burnout, the pay gaps, the lack of childcare, the constant moral homework. They don’t want to be the woman earning enough to leave; that woman looks too lonely, too embattled, too judged.
Instead, they are choosing a different risk: tying their entire economic fate to one man and to their ability to stay pleasing to him. It’s not irrational if they look around and see that the supposedly liberated women are still doing two jobs for less money and more guilt.
Ultimately, both the rich self-directed woman and the tradwife are breaking the old “respectable woman” script, and both are punished.
The rich woman is punished for treating money as hers.
The tradwife is punished for treating herself as an asset.
The insults are different (“gold digger” vs “cold capitalist” vs “pick me” vs “sellout”), but the accusation is similar: rage at women who make explicit, visible deals with power instead of swallowing quiet, noble sacrifice.
No one says this out loud, because we’ve made “choice” our most sacred word. “Her body, her career, her choice.” But the choices we actually approve of for women are very narrow: earn, but not too much; prioritise love, but not too obviously; be taken care of, but don’t ever admit that money was part of the equation.
The tradwife breaks that politeness. She says the silent part out loud: “Yes, I am with him because he provides. Yes, I am optimising myself for his earning.” People recoil, not because it’s new, but because it’s honest. The economic contract that underlies most heterosexual marriages is suddenly visible, and we don’t like looking at it.
Why does this belong in an essay about why women making money pisses us off? Because both figures hrow the same accusation at the system: you lied.
You told us that if we were good, obedient, selfless, the money question would take care of itself. You told us not to be crass, not to talk about money, not to consider it too seriously in love, work, or family. You punished women who married “for money,” and punished women who refused to care about money and ended up dependent and trapped.
So now we have two spectacles:
one woman who refuses dependence and pays for it in social isolation, suspicion, and moral policing;
another who glorifies dependence and pays for it in total vulnerability if the man leaves, cheats, dies, or turns cruel.
Neither of them is safe. And both of them, incidentally, are content.
They are monetised, packaged, exported. We scroll past the tradwife and the rich founder on the same screen, feeling vaguely resentful of both. One offends us because she looks too free. The other offends us because she looks too willing to serve. What actually offends us is that both have stopped performing the fantasy of the “pure, selfless woman who will quietly absorb economic unfairness without ever using money to change her life.”
Once you see that, it becomes much harder to keep pretending that our discomfort is about individual women’s choices. It starts to look a lot more like this: any woman who treats money as something she can negotiate with, rather than something she must endure the absence or presence of, becomes a problem.
Why “New Money” Feels So Much Uglier On A Woman
“New money” isn’t just a description of when the money arrived. It’s a moral category. Old money is allowed to be terrible as long as it is quiet about it. New money is loudly disgusting. And for women, “new money” comes with a special kind of sneer.
We all know what a “new money man” looks like in the cultural imagination: flashy car, logo belt, too much cologne, loud holidays, vaguely tacky house. We roll our eyes a little. We make jokes. Then, mostly, we leave him alone. At worst, he’s a bit of a clown.
A “new money woman,” though, is rarely treated as comic relief.
The judgment comes faster, harsher, and from more directions. People don’t just comment on her taste; they comment on her character. Her clothes are “trying too hard.” Her house is “show-off.” Her captions are “cringe.” Her very comfort is read as evidence of some moral failure.
Part of this is about etiquette: we assume old money has had generations to practice how to make wealth invisible. New money hasn’t had time to be trained, so it spills. But the gendered part is more interesting. Men with new money are expected to be a bit gauche. It’s almost endearing: look at him, poor guy, came from nothing and now he doesn’t know what to do with it. Women with new money are expected to have arrived already apologising.
They are supposed to be tasteful, self-effacing, aware of their privilege, constantly signalling gratitude. They are supposed to behave like curators of their wealth, not owners of it.
We are especially disgusted when women don’t perform the “right” relationship to money.
A man can waste money in bad investments, buy stupid toys, overspend on vanity projects, and people will call it “midlife crisis,” or “founder eccentricity,” or “he earned it, let him enjoy.” A woman making unwise financial choices is treated like a walking cautionary tale. “See, this is what happens when women get carried away.” The margin for error is microscopic.
But our hatred of “new money women” isn’t only about how they spend. It’s also about who we think is allowed to be visible.
Old money women are often invisible by design. They exist in the background: in charity boards, at polo matches, at art shows, behind “family offices.” Their wealth is framed as ancestral, pure, so far removed from the vulgar act of actually earning that we don’t think of it as “hers” at all. She’s a custodian of legacy, not a woman making moves.
New money women, in contrast, are very obviously self-authored. They often come from outside the traditional circuits of power: different class backgrounds, different cities, different language, different networks. They build through startups, content, freelance careers, corporate ladders. Their money has a visible origin story, and that makes people extremely itchy. It means their success can’t be explained away as “she married well” or “her grandfather was someone.”
So we attack the story instead.
In India, especially, the class discomfort is loud. A woman from a small town who now lives in a glass-fronted Mumbai high-rise, flies business, posts about her team and products in slightly clumsy English? She offends a lot of unspoken hierarchies at once. Her very existence suggests that the rules can be broken. That education and caste and accent and boys’ club networks are not the only route to power.
The easiest way to restore emotional order is to declare her distasteful.
This is also where the Indian specificity of symbolic versus liquid wealth shows up in a different costume. We’re not actually uncomfortable with the amount of money; we’re uncomfortable that she hasn’t yet learned the choreography of disguising it. Old money has had centuries to perfect the art of pretending wealth doesn’t exist while quietly reproducing it. New money hasn’t had time to build those reflexes. That rawness is what chafes people.
And again, women join in too. We critique her fashion, her captions, her tone. We call her “a bit much.” We talk about how “real class is quiet.” We rarely turn that same standard on visibly nouveau-riche men. In them, it’s crass but forgivable. In her, it’s proof she doesn’t belong.
A new money woman might actually leave the system that shaped her. She might move cities, cut ties with abusive relatives, marry outside her caste or not at all, invest in things her family doesn’t understand, live in ways that can’t be easily supervised. Old money is tied to place and lineage; new money can move. And when that mobility sits in a woman’s hands, it pokes at every control mechanism we’ve built around her.
So we code that discomfort as “vulgarity.”
We say she has “no culture.” We call her wedding “too much.” We call her house “hotel-like” and mean it as an insult. We circulate her photos in groups and tear them apart. We invent stories about her being rude, entitled, cruel to staff. Anything to explain why our bodies are reacting like this to a stranger’s success.
A rich woman who is not also emotionally palatable, politically correct, intersectionally literate, and visibly charitable feels like a breach of contract. You, of all people, we think, should know better.
We don’t say, “Men should know better.” We rarely even ask them to. But with her, we do. We are comfortable with the idea of money turning men ruthless. We are weirdly enraged by the idea of money making a woman less nurturing.
So “new money” is a kind of double heresy: she is new enough not to have been fully trained in the etiquette of hiding wealth, and she is woman enough to be expected to shoulder everyone’s moral fantasies about what wealth should do.
When she refuses both roles, we paint her as grotesque.
A lot of us (and I include myself here) were handed a script that said: be smart, but not greedy; work, but remember family comes first; be ambitious, but don’t prioritise money over meaning; don’t be “that type” of woman who only cares about money. We internalised it. We tried to be good. We proudfully undercharged. We said yes when we wanted to say no. We made a certain virtue out of not being “crass” about money.
And then comes this intrusive image: a woman our age or younger, less “refined,” less careful, more nakedly transactional, charging what she wants, negotiating hard, buying things she likes, not apologising, not explaining. She is, in many ways, the woman we secretly wish we’d had permission to be.
It is unbearable to sit with that. So instead of saying, “I am grieving the version of myself that never got to exist,” we say, “She is tacky and gross.” We put the ugliness outside so we don’t have to sit with it inside.
We forget that somewhere above her, three floors up in the hierarchy, are the old money families who never had to learn in public at all. Their grandmothers made these mistakes in private, their mothers ironed them out, their daughters were born fluent. We are asking women who are first-generation wealthy to be as smooth and silent as people who have had a hundred-year head start.
And when they fail that impossible standard, we call them vulgar.
Under language, it’s the same old message:
If you, as a woman, insist on having money, at least have the decency to suffer quietly with it.
Don’t enjoy it too much. Don’t learn too loudly. Don’t let it show.
The Trap Question That Always Arrives
At some point in every conversation about women and money, someone will lean back, cross their arms, and deliver what they think is the killer argument:
“But shouldn’t we be dismantling capitalism instead of asking for more women to succeed within it?”
It sounds righteous. Progressive. Morally unassailable. It’s also, conveniently, only ever aimed at women.
Nobody asks male founders to apologize for raising Series Bs while inequality exists. Nobody expects men to solve poverty before accepting promotions. Nobody suggests that male wealth is a betrayal of the revolution. Men are allowed to survive and thrive in the system we have while working toward the one we want. Only women are told that participating in the economy as it exists is a form of collaboration with the enemy.
Here’s what that question really does: it demands that women remain economically powerless until some perfect post-capitalist utopia arrives. It asks us to boycott our own survival in protest of a system that will keep extracting from us whether we consent or not. It insists that women alone must be pure enough to reject money, noble enough to choose poverty, while we wait for men to get around to redistributing theirs.
The woman asking for a raise isn’t betraying feminism. The woman charging what she’s worth isn’t endorsing exploitation. The woman buying herself safety and choices isn’t the reason capitalism is brutal. She’s just refusing to be its voluntary victim.
You know what actually helps dismantle an unjust system? Having resources. Having power. Having enough money that you can take risks, fund alternatives, support others, and yes, survive the pushback that comes when you start making noise.
You know what doesn’t help? Telling women that their poverty is praxis. That their exhaustion is ethical. That staying small is solidarity.
The same people who ask “why would you want to succeed in an unjust system?” never seem to ask “why would you want women to fail in the only system currently available?” They never explain how women’s continued economic dependence on men is supposed to bring about the revolution. They never admit that keeping women poor has always been the system’s plan, not resistance to it.
So let me be extremely clear. You don’t have to choose between wanting money and wanting justice. You don’t have to solve capitalism before you’re allowed to pay rent. You don’t have to have perfect politics before you deserve financial security. You don’t have to burn down the master’s house with your body still inside it just to prove you disapprove of the architecture.
When someone suggests that women shouldn’t want money because “capitalism is problematic,” what they’re really saying is: your suffering is acceptable collateral damage. Your dependency is a reasonable price. Your fear is less important than keeping the moral high ground.
No. Women having money isn’t the problem with capitalism. Women not having money is.
The Machine Knows Exactly What To Do With This Disgust
The world doesn’t just emotionally dislike women with money. It is very efficient at making sure fewer of them exist.
You see it first in the places where women go to get money: investors’ rooms, compensation discussions, promotion rounds. All the research I’ve read basically repeats the same story: when a woman starts to move towards serious power, the room gets nervous and punishes her for it.
There’s that classic Heidi vs Howard experiment from Harvard that I can’t get out of my head. Students were given the same founder CV. Half saw the entrepreneur named “Howard”, half saw “Heidi.” Same achievements, same quotes, same track record. Everyone agreed they were competent. But “Howard” was liked and respected; “Heidi” was respected and… not liked. People literally said they wouldn’t want to work with her.
That’s the likability-competence tax in one picture. The more competent a woman is perceived to be, the colder she becomes in people’s minds. A competent man is “strong.” A competent woman is “hard.”
In hiring and promotion processes, this gets even more blunt. When women succeed in “male” domains, people don’t just go “oh wow, she’s good.” They start docking her for being insufficiently warm. She must be a little selfish. She must be bad with people. If she also tries to prove she’s nurturing, collaborative, soft… she gets pegged as “not quite leadership material.” You can’t win. Either you convince them you’re competent and they don’t like you, or you convince them you’re lovely and they quietly mark you down.
We love telling women to “just negotiate more.” Be assertive. Lean in. Ask. The subtext is always: if you’re still underpaid, it’s because you didn’t push hard enough.
The data refuses to co-operate with that story. When researchers look at MBA grads, for instance, they find women are already negotiating as much as or more than men. They’re asking for raises, they’re pushing on promotions. And still, ten years out, the earnings gap yawns open. The women who negotiate don’t magically end up with equal salaries. What they often end up with is reputational damage. Evaluators describe them as “less nice,” “harder to work with.”
So we give women advice that, when followed, gets them punished.
In venture capital, the pattern is cartoonishly clear. Female-only founding teams get a tiny slice of the funding pie, even in markets where women are launching more and more companies. And when you dig into how they’re being evaluated, the gendered discomfort is everywhere.
Women get more “prevention” questions: how will you avoid loss, what happens if things go wrong, are you sure this isn’t too risky. Men get more “promotion” questions: how big could this get, what’s the upside, how fast can you scale. By the time the pitch is over, she’s been forced into defending herself against imagined disasters, while he’s been allowed to sell a dream.
Investment memos describe male founders as “visionary,” “confident,” “high potential.” Women with identical numbers get called “cautious,” “inexperienced,” “emotional.” Committees spend more time discussing risks for female-founded companies and take longer to decide. The average cheque size is smaller. The follow-on support is weaker. The system doesn’t just feel uneasy about backing women; it institutionally treats them as the risky edge case.
And then, a few years later, everyone nods sagely and says, “See, there just aren’t that many big women-led outcomes.” As if it’s fate, not engineered scarcity.
There’s this one statistic from years of “Women in the Workplace” reports that just sits like a stone in my stomach: for every 100 men promoted to manager, only around 80 women are. That’s the first real step up. The rung where you stop being an individual contributor and start having actual authority.
The gap is small enough to be deniable, but big enough to accumulate. 100 men, 80 women. Repeat that at every rung and, surprise, you get a pyramid with men at the top and women stuck somewhere in the mushy middle, exhausted and over-mentored.
Again, it’s not that women aren’t asking. It’s that when they ask, they’re read differently. That old disgust we talked about slides into performance reviews. She’s “not ready yet.” She “needs to work on her people skills.” She hasn’t “proved herself enough.”
He’s rough around the edges, sure, but “he’ll grow into it.”
Underneath, there’s an unspoken belief: a man with power is the default; a woman with power is an exception. Exceptions must be perfect.
Relationships have their own version of this economic discomfort. There’s data pointing out that in marriages where the woman earns more, a few things happen very reliably: she often does more housework anyway to “compensate.” She under-reports her income in surveys (he over-reports). There are higher rates of marital strain. In some places, those couples are less likely to marry in the first place; they live together, but never formalise.
We’ve internalised, deeply, that a man’s money is stabilising and a woman’s money is destabilising. People genuinely talk about high-earning women as “marriage risks.” Not because the money itself is harmful, but because it threatens everyone’s idea of who is supposed to be grateful to whom.
And here again, women enforce it too. Mothers warn their daughters not to intimidate their husbands. Aunties tell them to downplay their jobs, or not accept a promotion in another city, or “manage” their success so he doesn’t feel small. We smooth over male fragility with our own earning power. We make ourselves smaller while growing the balance sheet. Then we call it compromise, and feel very mature about it.
We rarely ask: what is being compromised, exactly?
This isn’t the market “sorting itself out.” This is disgust and anxiety baked into the rules of the game.
I keep coming back to this: the same culture that reposts “pay women what they’re worth” carousels also thinks a woman who openly loves money is tacky, and a woman who unapologetically uses money to protect herself is dangerous. The system doesn’t just prefer women poor. It prefers women financially anxious. Dependent enough to be careful. Grateful enough to be pliable.
So when we’re talking about why women making money pisses people off, it’s not metaphor. It’s not just aunties in drawing rooms. It is active, measurable bias that shapes who gets capital, who gets protection, who gets out.
And it explains why the next part of the story is linguistic. You don’t maintain a structure like this through laws alone. You maintain it through labels. Little words that make women doubt themselves the second they start to move.
Bossy. Gold digger. High-maintenance. Girlboss. She-E-O. New money. Too much.
Those aren’t just insults. They’re tiny electric fences.
The Names We Give Her Are The Cages We Want Her In
By now it should be obvious that we don’t only control women with laws and salaries and inheritance. We control them with… pet names.
Not the cute kind. The kind you hear in passing at a dinner party, or see in a quote-tweet, and suddenly feel yourself shrink a little, recalibrating what feels safe.
It starts early.
Ask any woman who has, at some point, wanted something slightly beyond what was on offer: a nicer restaurant, a better gift, a cab instead of walking in the dark, a raise that matches her output. The word arrives almost on cue:
“High-maintenance.”
Said with a laugh. Said with affection. Said as a warning.
High-maintenance doesn’t literally mean “requires a lot of maintenance.” It means that you refuse to substandard conditions. You are willing to let your discomfort inconvenience other people. You are willing to say, “No, this is not enough for me.”
For men, there is another word for that: standards.
For women, it is a problem to be managed.
“Gold digger” is the louder cousin. It appears whenever a woman seems a little too interested in financial comfort. Marrying a man who is stable, ambitious, generous? That’s sensible. Saying out loud that money matters to you in a relationship? Gold digger. Negotiating hard on alimony or division of assets after a divorce? Definitely a gold digger.
Meanwhile, entire generations of men have been raised on the idea that a “good husband” is one who provides. They are actively told to view their earning as central to their identity. When women treat that earning as something that affects their choices, we act like they have introduced money into a space where it never existed before.
Then there’s the girlboss.
When it first arrived, the term pretended to be flattering. Look at you, a boss, but make it cute. A boss, but with lipstick and hashtags. It took less than a decade for it to curdle into an insult. Now “girlboss” means delusional, cringe, exploitative in pink. Its sisters, the She-E-O, the boss babe, the mompreneur, do the same thing: shrink a woman’s authority into something smaller, sillier, more palatable. No one says “boyboss.” No one says “he-E-O.” That asymmetry is not random. It tells you exactly who we think the default boss is.
We invented a whole vocabulary to mark female power as counterfeit.
Listen closely and you’ll hear that none of these phrases are about accuracy. They aren’t descriptions, they are corrections. They are ways of saying, “You stepped out of character. Come back.”
Language gives us a way to express our disgust without admitting we’re disgusted. No one has to say “I’m threatened by you having options.” They can say, “You’ve become so money-minded, yaar.” No one has to say, “Your exit potential scares me.” They can say, “You’ve changed, you’re not grounded anymore.”
We hand these tiny electric words to each other and learn very fast where the fence is.
And of course, women don’t just receive these labels. We use them.
We call another woman “too expensive” because she has non-negotiables. We call her “intimidating” because she’s not performing helplessness. We roll our eyes at the “crypto girl,” the “D2C girl,” the “influencer aunty” who posts #ad one too many times. We share screenshots of wedding décor budgets and write “for what?” in the group chat. We use irony, “okay, new money queen”, to distance ourselves from her choices. We carve out a safe distance: she is that type, I am not.
I’ve done it. I doubt you haven’t.
Part of it is petty, garden-variety envy. But part of it is something else: fear of being contaminated by association. We know that the world already reads women’s money as suspect, so we rush to prove we aren’t like “those” women. We pre-emptively side with the prosecution.
The language around “new money” is especially revealing. When a woman from a different class background starts earning visibly, the commentary is rarely about her actual work. It’s about taste.
She’s ruined her face with fillers.
She bought the wrong car.
She wears all her brands at once.
Her house looks like a hotel.
She’s going on holiday again.
Taste policing is how class discomfort camouflages aesthetic criticism. And with women, it does extra work. It says, you may have the money, but you don’t know how to carry it. You are not one of us.
For old money men, the rules are different. They can be bland. They can be sloppy. Their wives and PR teams and private bankers smooth everything out. Nobody expects them to be ideological about their wealth. They are allowed to simply be rich.
For women, there is no neutral vocabulary of wealth. There is only a pendulum swing between judgement and exception. Either she is cast as the selfless philanthropist, using her riches to uplift, educate, empower, or she is cast as the cartoon villain, hoarding and flaunting and corrupting.
The middle category, just a woman with money, who likes some things and doesn’t like others, who gets some decisions wrong and others right, who is neither saint nor villain, almost doesn’t exist in our language.
The words we have for her are all barbed.
You can feel this most clearly in how we talk about “expensive” women. Men are allowed to be costly in obvious ways: tuition, hobbies, gadgets, bad habits. Women are allowed to be expensive only if the expense is selfless: elaborate meals, perfect hosting, the kind of mothering that looks good on Instagram. If a woman’s “expensiveness” is tied to her own standards: nice sheets because she likes how they feel, hiring a driver because she’s tired of begging for rides, outsourcing cleaning because she’d rather read. That expense is framed as indulgence.
High-maintenance again. Demanding. Spoilt.
If we had different words, I suspect we would have a different world. Imagine if a woman who refused to settle for a low offer was called precise rather than greedy. Imagine if a woman who left a marriage because she could afford to was called prudent rather than heartless. Imagine if we described a financially ambitious woman as serious instead of scary.
But we don’t talk that way. We reach for the same old vocabulary, because it’s what we’ve inherited, and because it lets us keep pretending that the problem is her personality, not the systems around her.
We don’t have mass language yet for a woman whose relationship with money is unapologetically self-interested and still deeply ethical. We know how to talk about the selfless giver and the selfish hoarder. We don’t know how to talk about someone who says, “I want to be safe, I want to be free, and I am willing to make money central in getting there.”
So we mislabel her. We misdiagnose her. We drag her into one of the old boxes and punish her for leaking out.
And then, to complete the loop, we hand those labels to girls early. We joke that the little one “likes fancy things” when she cries in the heat or refuses itchy clothes. We tease teenagers about being “materialistic” when they notice brand hierarchies the world has been shoving in their faces since childhood. We teach them that caring about comfort, safety, aesthetics, and money is embarrassing. We raise them to be the kind of women who will later apologise for wanting what they want.
By the time they are old enough to earn, they already have a fully stocked internal vocabulary of shame.
It’s no accident that the women I know who are most visibly comfortable talking about money had to build a new language for themselves. They had to learn phrases like “I charge X,” “my rate is Y,” “this is too low,” “this isn’t worth it for me,” “I’d rather pay for ease.” They sound shocking the first time. They get stuck in your throat. But over time, they become the greatest gift you can give yourself.
The question, then, isn’t just “why does women making money piss us off?” It’s also: what are we willing to start calling things by their proper names?
High-maintenance, or unwilling to be treated badly?
Gold digger, or honest about wanting stability?
Bossy, or finally done performing smallness?
New money, or the first in her line to not be broke?
Because until we change the words, we’ll keep doing the system’s work for it. We’ll keep putting collars around each other’s necks and calling it personality.
And that brings me to the last part of this: what we do with this discomfort once we’ve seen it. Not how we fix capitalism, not how we make things perfectly fair, but what it would look like to stop treating women’s hunger for money as a personal failing and start treating it as… sane.
Not cute. Not vulgar. Not inspirational. Just sane.
Maybe A Woman Who Wants Money Is Not Corrupt. Maybe She’s Awake.
This is the part where, in a normal essay, I’d pivot to solutions.
Five ways to fix the wage gap. Seven steps to overcome internalised patriarchy. Ten affirmations to repeat before your next salary negotiation.
I don’t have that essay in me.
What I have, instead, is a question I keep circling back to, privately, in therapy, in my notes app, in WhatsApp voice notes to friends who are equally tired and equally ambitious:
What if a woman who wants money is not greedy or damaged or “too much”? What if she is simply… sane?
Not aspirational. Not #boss. Not aesthetic. Just a person who correctly understands that in the world we live in, money is the difference between:
staying and leaving,
begging and negotiating,
waiting for someone to choose you and choosing yourself.
We’ve spent years telling women that money shouldn’t matter. That love matters, that purpose matters, that meaning matters. All of which is true. But we rarely say the rest out loud: money is what lets you walk away from people who use “love” as a leash. Money is what lets you pursue “purpose” without having to endure abuse at work because “this job is my dream.” Money is what lets you say no to the kind of “meaning” that is just unpaid labour.
Women are not just discouraged from wanting money. We’re drafted to be the ones who keep everyone else’s relationship with money morally tidy.
We are expected to hate billionaires on behalf of the world. To think about workers’ conditions when we shop. To boycott the wrong brands, read the right essays, have perfect politics, redistribute generously, volunteer, donate, signal that we see the injustice in every transaction. We’re not just supposed to manage our own survival. We’re supposed to be capitalism’s conscience.
Men can be rich and thoughtless and boring and nobody treats it as a philosophical problem. With women, we ask: what does it mean that she has money? Does she deserve it? Is she doing enough with it? Has it made her less kind, less available, less “real”?
We make women answer, alone, for inequality they did not design, inside a system they did not build, while standing on ground they did not own for most of history.
And while that interrogation is happening, the machine hums along, extracting more value from their labour and paying it, mostly, to men.
So here is the first permission slip I want this essay to offer, even if it makes you squirm:
You are allowed to want money just for yourself.
Not as a tool to “empower your community.” Not as a way to “prove women can do it too.” Not as a noble, over-intellectualised project. Just for the boring, embarrassingly simple reasons men have always been allowed: comfort, safety, choice, pleasure, margin for error.
You are allowed to want money so you can be less tired. So you can say no without spiralling. So you can leave when you’re done. So you can stop doing maths in your head every time a plan changes. So you can pay for help instead of paying with your body.
You are allowed to want enough money that you’re not constantly in the emotional equivalent of a cramped middle seat on a delayed flight.
That doesn’t mean you stop caring about justice. It doesn’t mean you suddenly become a monster. It means you stop accepting a role that was never fair: unpaid moral auditor of a system that runs quite happily without your approval.
It also means you have to do something much harder than reposting feminist infographics, which is this: you have to start noticing where you are the one doing the system’s work.
And this is where it will get uncomfortable, if you let it.
Think about the last time you saw a woman talk openly about her rates, her revenue, her net worth, her investments.
Did you feel a little irritated? Did you think, “Okay, relax, we get it”? Did you suspect she was lying? Did you privately downgrade her taste, her intellect, her class? Did you feel the urge to poke holes in her story?
Think about the last time a friend asked for more than you thought she “deserved” in a job, a relationship, a divorce settlement, an inheritance conversation. Did you advise caution? Did you tease her for being “materialistic”? Did you find yourself playing devil’s advocate for the people who would benefit from her settling?
Think about how you speak about your own money. Do you immediately add a self-deprecating joke? Do you rush to talk about how lucky you are, how undeserving, how you’re “still figuring it out,” even when you know how hard you’ve worked? Do you mention your privileges like a confession, not a context, as if the only way to be a good woman with money is to apologise for it in advance?
I am not asking these questions from a pedestal. I have done every one of those things.
I have rolled my eyes at other women’s money aesthetics because they threatened the version of myself I had made peace with being. I have flinched away from my own financial goals because they sounded vulgar in my own mouth. I have bent myself into shapes to be “relatable,” to not look like I think I’m above anyone, to prove that I am still good, still soft, still the right kind of girl.
And every time I did that, I wasn’t just ducking judgement. I was shrinking the space available to all of us.
Each time a woman with money chooses to play small, to disavow, to distance, to tear down another woman who doesn’t, the system wins twice. Once by keeping her in line. Once by using her as an example to keep everyone else from even trying.
So no, I don’t have a neat list of how to fix this. But I do have, for myself and anyone reading, a set of small non-negotiables I’m trying to practice.
One: when I feel that flash of contempt or disgust at a woman’s wealth, I assume the problem is mine before I assume it is hers. What is she showing me that I wanted and never let myself want? What rule is she breaking that I obeyed without question? The answer is almost never flattering. It is almost always freeing.
Two: I refuse, as much as I can, to be the “reasonable” woman in rooms where someone is asking for more. If the instinct is to say “be realistic,” I try, at least once, to say, “What if this is realistic and the bar is just low?” Especially if the asker is a woman. Especially if the money at stake would meaningfully change her life.
Three: I have started treating my own money like something that belongs to a human being I love, not a test I’m being graded on. That means I’m allowed to make mistakes. To learn. To try things and backtrack. To buy joy, not just necessities. To factor in my sanity as a legitimate line item, not as an optional bonus if there’s anything left at the end of the month.
Four: I am trying to stop demanding purity from women who have what I want. Is she rich and sometimes tone-deaf? So are half the founders and VCs we worship. Is she figuring out her politics in public and getting it wrong? So have men forever. If I can hold complexity for them, I can learn to hold it for her. I don’t have to stan. I also don’t have to crucify.
Five: I am slowly, painfully, letting myself say out loud: I want more. Not because I hate what I have. Not because I think money will save me. But because I am tired of making every decision inside a margin designed by people who imagined a woman’s needs as afterthoughts.
None of this is heroic. It will not dismantle patriarchy. It will not fix the financing gap or the wage gap or the fact that in many places, women are still beaten for earning.
But it might, if we practise it together, do something almost harder. It might stop us from being the last line of defence between other women and their own possibility.
The world already has enough forces telling women to be grateful, to be careful, to be small. It doesn’t particularly need your help or mine.
What it doesn’t have, not yet in any widespread, boring, normalised way, is women who can say, without flinching, “I like money. I want more of it. I will use it to make my life larger and kinder and freer. I will make mistakes. I will not apologise for existing outside the financial comfort of men.”
I don’t think that woman is vulgar.
I think she is what we were warned about.
I think she is what we were waiting for.
If there is a part of you that wants what she wanted, to have enough, in your own name, to not be predictable, you are not the villain in the story.
You are, in many ways, the consequence.
The consequence of generations of women who were told to be content with symbolic wealth while everyone else built real capital. The consequence of mothers who put their salaries into other people’s dreams. The consequence of grandmothers who never saw their own names on title deeds. The consequence of sisters who signed their rights away in the name of family peace.
If you want the story to end differently with you, of course it will piss people off.
Of course it will sound, even in your own mouth, like you are being selfish.
Selfish compared to what, though? To a standard where “good woman” and “self-erasing” were synonyms?
Maybe we’re done with that.
Maybe the point is not to become the perfect ethical rich woman that the world thinks it wants. Maybe the point is to become a flawed, learning, occasionally clumsy woman who has enough money to be fully human.
I don’t know what that looks like yet, in detail. I am still in the middle of figuring it out. Losing some people, finding others, raising my rates, fumbling investments, oscillating between panic and possibility every time I open my banking app.
But I know this much:
I would rather live in a world where more women get the chance to be wrong with money, and then try again, than a world where we stay permanently right and permanently broke.
I would rather be slightly embarrassing, slightly “too much,” slightly new money, slightly high-maintenance, than perfectly palatable and permanently afraid.
And if that unsettles people, if it makes them roll their eyes or call me names, then so be it.
They were never meant to be the ones funding my freedom anyway.