For 13 years of Britney Spears’ life, every facet of her autonomy, including her personal, financial and medical affairs, were rigorously controlled by her father, Jamie Spears, under a stringent and involuntarily placed conservatorship agreement, the pop star alleges in her new memoir.
The autobiography, The Woman In Me, details Spears’ nascent rise from Disney Channel teen idol to become one of the highest-grossing female artists of all time, including the tumultuous period of her life where she felt “stripped of her womanhood” by the allegedly “abusive” conservatorship imposed on her by her family.
Spears also writes about her time as a tabloid fixture in 2007, where she was labelled as “erratic” by the press for shaving her head and hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella amidst her divorce and custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline.
Speaking on the buzzcut, Spears divulged that the decision to shave her head—a moment captured by onlooking paparazzi—was a conscious move to assert her autonomy. “I’d been eyeballed so much growing up,” she wrote in reference to her burgeoning career as a pop supernova that started in her adolescence and highly publicised relationship with Justin Timberlake.
“I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body since I was a teenager,” she continued. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”
These acts of rebellion are what prompted her family to raise concerns about her mental state and what eventually led Spears to be placed under a decade-long legal guardianship.
Once Jamie Spears and an attorney began to enact control of the singer, Spears claims she was “made to understand that those days [of acting out and asserting autonomy] were now over.” “I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”
Touching on the impacts of the conservatorship, Spears wrote: “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me. If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out.”
Elsewhere in the book, Spears wrote in reference to the title: “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage … and to be a robot the rest of the time. Since I’ve been free, I’ve had to construct a whole different identity. I’ve had to say, ‘Wait a second, this is who I was—someone passive and pleasing. A girl. And this is who I am now—someone strong and confident. A woman.’
