The Woman in Me

“I had tried to go back to being an ordinary teenager, but it hadn’t worked. I still wanted something more.”

Spears’s life is different from normal teenagers due to her participation in the entertainment industry. Though she sometimes finds the pressures of life as a performer to be intense, when she tries to take a break, she feels as if there is something missing from her life.

“I couldn’t help but notice that the questions [Justin Timberlake] got asked by talk show hosts were different from the ones they asked me. Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.”

The experience of being a young star is different for Spears than it is for her male co-stars. She notices that she is sexualized from a young age in a way that her male counterparts are not.

“I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?”

Spears does not understand why the image she presents as a teen star generates so much controversy. She internalizes her early experiences of this pervasive distrust as shame, damaging her self-esteem and distorting her view of herself.

“I wish I’d tried something different. If only I’d been brave enough not to stay in my safe zone, done more things that weren’t just within what I knew. But I was committed to not rocking the boat, and to not complaining even when something upset me.”

As she looks back on her career in her memoir, Spears feels like she has been complacent for much of her life, especially as a celebrity. She regrets giving up opportunities that she may have enjoyed and wishes that she had spoken up for herself more—a self-awareness that reflects her journey to Reclaiming Womanhood and Autonomy.

“When you’re successful at something, there’s a lot of pressure to keep right on doing it, even if you’re not enjoying it anymore. And, as I would quickly find out, you really can’t go home again.”

The Pressures of Celebrity Status begin to wear on Spears. She finds that she is expected to keep going when she wants a break and that the home she once had is changed forever because of her new fame and lifestyle—another reflection that foreshadows the way the rise of her fame and financial success shifted her relationships with her family.

“There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women. And I see how men are encouraged to talk trash about women in order to become famous and powerful.”

Spears frequently struggles with the double standard for male and female celebrities. Her breakup with Justin Timberlake makes this double standard even more apparent, as she is vilified in the media, while Timberlake is not.

“Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my twenties? Whose business was it if I’d had sex or not?”

The details of Spears’s sex life are tightly controlled by her managers, who want her to keep up the impression of being a virgin, even when she is an adult. She is not given control or agency over her own sexuality—illustrating The Pressures of Celebrity Status that she continually faces.

“Britney Spears got HUGE! Look, she’s not wearing makeup!” As if those two things were some kind of a sin—as if gaining weight was something unkind I’d done to them personally, a betrayal. At what point did I promise to stay seventeen for the rest of my life?”

When Spears is pregnant with her second child, the acute media attention and criticism escalates, becoming unbearable. The commodification of her image in tabloid headlines makes her feel dehumanized, as if her body is not her own but rather a product that she owes the rest of the world.

“So getting awards and all that fame stuff? I liked it a lot. But there’s nothing lasting in it for me. What I love is sweat on the floor during rehearsals, or just playing ball and making a shot. I like the work. I like the practicing. That has more authenticity and value than anything else.”

The quest to find a sense of personal authenticity and meaning amid the specter of her public career forms a key thread of Spears’s memoir. Though she likes certain aspects of fame, she also struggles with it, highlighting how it can be inauthentic and distracting from the hard work of her artistry.

“I began to suspect that I was a bit overprotective when I wouldn’t let my mom hold Jayden for the first two months. Even after that, I’d let her hold him for five minutes and that was it. I had to have him back in my arms. That’s too much. I know that now. I shouldn’t have been that controlling.”

Spears faced many struggles as a new mother in the celebrity spotlight and acknowledges that she often did not act as she wished she would have. Moments of self-reflection like this occur throughout her memoir and allow Spears to talk about past events with the benefit of hindsight. However, her instinct to protect her infant son so vigorously points to the ways in which so much of her own life was controlled by others, and highlights how precious the experience of motherhood felt to her—an idea apparent throughout her book.

“My mom always made me feel like I was bad or guilty of something, even though I had worked so hard to be good. That’s what my family has always done—treated me like I was bad.”

Spears’s parents are often unkind to her, and she feels that nothing she ever does is good enough for them. This unkindness contributes to her later issues with self-esteem and confidence, which allows her parents to manipulate and control her more easily.

“Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.”

Spears shaves her head at a point in her life when she feels like she has very little control over what is happening. Her children have been taken from her, and she is able to see her sons only in limited ways. Shaving her head is a way for her to control something and to fight back against the world’s prescribed expectations of her.

“There were times when I needed my father over the years and I reached out, and he wasn’t there. But when it came time for him to be the conservator, of course he was on the case! He’s always been all about the money.”

In The Woman in Me, Jamie Spears embodies all of the worst ways in which his daughter is abused and exploited by those whose role it was to protect her. Spears expresses deep hurt that her father always prioritized the wrong things in her life. She wanted him to be a loving father who was there for her when she needed him, but instead, he prioritized money over a caring relationship with his daughter.

“She was on morning talk shows trying to sell her book about when I was in hospitals and being driven insane because I was separated from my babies for weeks on end. She was making money off that dark time.”

Instead of supporting her daughter when she was struggling, Spears’s mother writes a book about her, further violating her privacy and benefiting financially from Spears’s suffering. In Spears’s view, both her mother and father neglect their duties as parents in favor of making money.

“But again, the question was nagging at me—if I was so sick that I couldn’t make my own decisions, why did they think it was fine for me to be out there smiling and waving and singing and dancing in a million time zones a week?”

Spears points out the great logical fallacy of her conservatorship: the fact that she is expected to keep up a grueling schedule of performances and media appearances while supposedly being too sick to take care of herself. She highlights the way her father and those around her stripped her of her autonomy by utilizing her career and her body as a tool to make them money.

“A strict diet you’ve put yourself on is bad enough. But when someone is depriving you of food you want, that makes it worse. I felt like my body wasn’t mine anymore.”

The granular control Spears’s conservatorship placed her under further alienated her from her own body. Her father controls what she eats and how much—an excruciating reality for Spears that provides a grim metaphor for the social and political attempts to control female bodies that signal systemic misogyny.

“Once you start to see yourself that way—as not just someone who exists to make everyone else happy but someone who deserves to make their wishes known—that changes everything.”

Spears identifies a key shift in her view of herself that leads to her Reclaiming Womanhood and Autonomy. For most of Spears’s life, she describes herself as being the kind of person who just wants to please others. Once she stops downplaying her own wants and desires in order to make others happy, she begins to feel powerful and confident.

“What do we have except our connections to one another? And what stronger bond is there than music? Everyone who spoke out for me helped me survive that hard year, and the work they did helped me win my freedom.”

Spears identifies Music as a Source of Power in her life. Not only is it a great passion for her, but it brought her community of fans together to advocate and fight for her freedom when she was forced into the mental health facility.

“At a certain point, I’d rather be ‘crazy’ and able to make what I want than ‘a good sport’ and doing what everyone tells me to do without being able to actually express myself. And on Instagram, I wanted to show that I existed.”

After having every aspect of her image controlled by others for so long, Spears finally finds a freedom of expression on Instagram, where she can post pictures of herself without anyone’s approval.

“In that moment, I made peace with my family—by which I mean that I realized I never wanted to see them again, and I was at peace with that.”

Spears challenges the narrative that “making peace” with someone means forgiving them. To her, making peace with her family means finding contentment in setting a personal boundary around those relationships.

“I put up with being held down for a long time. But when my family put me in that facility, they took it too far. I was treated like a criminal. And they made me think I deserved that. They made me forget my self-worth and my value.”

Spears’s vulnerability and willingness to reveal the abuse she endured during her conservatorship creates dramatic tension that builds toward the memoir’s climax: the dissolution of her conservatorship and the reclamation of her freedom. Spears accepted her parents’ mistreatment and control over her life because they made her believe in the version of herself constructed by them. For her, Reclaiming Womanhood and Autonomy is also a reclamation of her true self.

“After having my father take credit for everything I did for so long, it meant everything to have [my attorney Matthew Rosengart] tell me that I’d made the difference in my own life. And now, finally, it was my own life.”

In reclaiming her agency, Spears is able to put events into motion that eventually free her from the conservatorship. Her ability to tell her story in court and advocate for her own freedom forms a major turning point in her arc.

“Freedom means that I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else.”

In her definition of freedom, Spears suggests that, in her case, The Pressures of Celebrity Status made the consequences for her mistakes and missteps disproportionately high. She repeatedly acknowledges the mistakes in her past, as well as the ways they were weaponized to imply she was not fit to care for herself by those who wanted to exploit her fortune and influence for their own gain.