What Does It Actually Mean to Be a Sovereign Woman?

I’ve been thinking about sovereignty a lot lately and what it means to be a sovereign woman. In a world where you have to perform rather than just being who you are, where you’re called ‘too much’ for expressing your feelings and emotions, reclaiming your sovereignty is a rebellious act, where you get to choose that you are no longer going to shrink to fit expectations.

Long before the word existed in the form we use it now, there was a goddess who embodied it entirely. Her name was Ishtar. In ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), there was no war between masculine and feminine, no hierarchy of one above the other. Both were sacred. At the centre of that feminine sacred was Ishtar, goddess of desire, of love, of war and raw, unapologetic power. She was not soft and palatable. She embodied the full spectrum of what it means to be a woman; the creative and the destructive, the tender and the fierce, and she was honoured for all of it.

Then something changed. The patriarchal structures that rose to dominance didn't just ignore the feminine, they rewrote it. Goddess figures were diminished or reshaped into cautionary tales. The full, complex feminine became something to be managed. Made small. Made shameful. We have inherited that. Every woman alive today has been shaped by it, whether she knows it or not. Think back to when you were young. Think about the feedback you received, not just what people said, but what was praised, what was rewarded. 'Don't you look pretty.' 'She's so good, she never causes any trouble.' 'Be kind, be nice, don't upset anyone.'

Girls receive these messages so consistently that it becomes invisible. They are told that their worth lies in their appearance and their compliance. Look pretty. Serve. Don't take up too much space. Don't feel too much. Each time someone calls you 'too much', something in you collapses a little. You reach for less. You make yourself easier to be around. Maybe they're right. Maybe you should have said less. That’s what you tell yourself. 

This is the wound I see most consistently in women; the belief that the fullness of who they are is somehow wrong. And it runs deeper than the personal, it lives in our language, in the insults we throw, in the way we have spent centuries calling femininity weakness. Many of us have been punishing ourselves for our softness ever since.

But let me say clearly what sovereignty is not. It is not about hating men. It is not about armouring up or performing in a masculine way. We know that trap well, the woman who has to be twice as hard to be heard, who gets called hard-nosed or hard-faced and thinks, ‘at least they took notice’. That isn't freedom. That's just a different cage. Real sovereignty doesn't look like armour. It looks like roots.

Sovereignty feels like noticing when you're about to say yes because it's easier than the discomfort of saying no, and pausing. Actually pausing. And choosing. It feels like the moment you stop dressing for the room and start dressing for yourself. Not as a statement. Just a shift in who you're doing it for.

It is the daily practice of coming back to your own truth. Of tending your inner world not because the world outside suddenly got safer, but because you decided you were worth tending. Ishtar held the full spectrum of herself and was worshipped for it. The conditioning we inherited told us to hold less, want less, be less. Sovereignty is just the gentle work of remembering that we were never meant to.

 If some of this resonated, I’d love to work with you. Take a look at ways you can work with me here. I can’t wait to meet you!