They Called It Worth. She Was Never for Sale. | Redefining A Woman's Worth

When Worth Becomes Utility

I was watching a podcast conversation where Lewis Howes asked Big Sean about experiencing low self-worth. Somewhere in the conversation, Lewis reflected on a period of his own life when he was sleeping on his sister’s couch and realizing that outside of football, he didn’t believe he had many skills.

That word—worth—stayed with me.

So I looked it up.

Worth is connected to value. And value, particularly in an economic sense, is often connected to utility: how useful something is, what it can produce, what problem it can solve, what someone is willing to exchange for it.

In business, I understand that completely. I even teach versions of it. The marketplace determines value. You can believe your product is worth $10,000, but if no one perceives enough usefulness, relevance, transformation, status, convenience, access, or advantage in it to exchange $10,000 for it, the market has spoken.

There is nothing inherently cruel about that. That is simply how markets work.

The problem begins when we take a principle designed to determine market value and use it to determine human worth.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us learned to ask the same question about ourselves that the market asks about a product:

What are you useful for?

And that is a dangerous place to build an identity.

What If We Have Allowed the Wrong Market to Appraise Us?

Spiritually, I don’t believe the same rule applies.

But then I thought about it more.

Maybe it does.

Just not in the way we have interpreted it.

What if the universe is also a kind of marketplace—not a monetary marketplace, but a marketplace of energy, purpose, presence, creation, contribution, lineage, timing and necessity?

In that marketplace, your value cannot be reduced to what someone will pay you, whether someone chooses you, whether someone marries you, whether you produce a child, whether you make yourself convenient, or whether another human being can immediately identify your usefulness.

The currency is different.

And perhaps one of the deepest problems with low self-worth is that we have allowed the wrong market to appraise us.

The Historical Usefulness of Women

This becomes particularly interesting to me when I think about women.

For generations, women have had enormous worth placed on very specific forms of usefulness. Our bodies could bear children. We could rear those children. We could support a man, maintain a household, care for a family, provide emotional labor, preserve traditions and perform an extraordinary amount of invisible work necessary for societies to function.

Those things are not insignificant. The ability to create and carry human life is miraculous.

But when a woman’s worth becomes attached primarily to what her body can produce, whom she can support, how well she can nurture everyone around her, or how useful she can make herself to an existing system, something subtle happens.

She can begin to experience herself as a function before she experiences herself as a presence.

The Great Remembering Redefining A Woman's Worth

And I think something is changing.

I see what feels less like women discovering something entirely new and more like a great remembering. This is redefining a woman's worth.

We are reconsidering where worth comes from.

We are reconsidering who gets to assign it.

We are reconsidering whether usefulness must always mean service to something outside of ourselves.

And we are remembering that a woman can carry value before she performs usefulness for anyone.

What If the Center Is Simply Shifting?

There is an interesting cultural conversation happening around this shift. Some men interpret what is happening as female loneliness. Some women interpret it that way too. We hear conversations about women delaying marriage, having fewer children, becoming more economically independent, becoming increasingly selective about partnership, building companies, traveling alone, creating lives outside of traditional structures and refusing arrangements that previous generations may have accepted as inevitable.

Loneliness certainly exists. Human beings require connection.

But I wonder whether loneliness is too shallow an explanation for something much deeper.

What if the center is simply shifting?

For a very long time, the center of a woman’s value often existed outside of her. She could look toward marriage, motherhood, family, male approval, social acceptance or institutional usefulness and receive confirmation that she mattered because she fulfilled the role she had been assigned.

Now, more women are asking a much more unsettling question:

Who am I when usefulness is no longer the price of my existence?

That question changes everything.

Because when usefulness has been the pathway to belonging, refusing to be useful in the old ways can initially look like rebellion, selfishness, dysfunction or isolation.

But perhaps what is actually happening is identification.

A Woman Is a Presence Before She Is a Function

A woman is beginning to remember that she is not simply a tool that performs a function inside someone else’s vision of society.

She is a presence.

That distinction matters to me.

A tool derives its meaning primarily from what it does for someone else. A presence carries an effect simply because it exists in the environment.

Presence influences.

Presence creates.

Presence changes atmosphere.

Presence carries intelligence, memory, instinct, possibility, discernment, imagination, energy and power.

And when I think about women from that perspective, the conversation becomes much larger than whether women are marrying enough, reproducing enough, supporting men correctly or fulfilling the historical functions assigned to them.

What If She Is the Portal?

What if she is remembering that she is the portal?

Not simply because children can physically come through her body, but because ideas, enterprises, cultures, movements, art, systems, language, healing, leadership, philosophies and entire futures can move through her too.

What if her creative capacity was never supposed to be interpreted only biologically?

A woman can birth a child.

She can also birth an institution.

She can birth language that changes a generation.

She can birth economic ecosystems.

She can birth philosophies.

She can birth rooms that did not exist before she imagined them.

She can birth solutions, businesses, legislation, art, technology, movements and new ways of living.

Even Achievement Can Become Another Form of Proof

And even that language requires caution, because she should not have to continuously produce something extraordinary to prove that her presence deserves to exist.

That would simply be the old utility model wearing more impressive clothes.

The deeper remembering is this:

She is a presence before she is a producer.

That may be one of the most important distinctions.

Because if a woman only replaces “I am valuable because I can bear children” with “I am valuable because I can build a billion-dollar company,” she has not necessarily liberated herself from externally measured worth. She has simply changed markets.

Moving the Source of Valuation

The real liberation is moving the source of valuation.

It is learning to understand usefulness as something that can be expressed from the inside out rather than assigned from the outside in.

Then business becomes an expression of her value, not the proof of it.

Motherhood can become an expression of her value, not the proof of it.

Marriage can become a relationship she participates in, not an institution that confirms she has finally become valuable.

Leadership can become an extension of who she is, rather than another performance she uses to convince herself that she matters. That is the shift I think we are witnessing. Not the death of partnership. Not the rejection of motherhood. Not women declaring that they have no need for men.

Something much more foundational. A renegotiation of where the center sits.

When a Woman Locates Herself Internally

For generations, women have been told, explicitly and implicitly, to locate themselves through what the market around them needed them to be. I think more women are beginning to locate themselves internally first and then decide how their presence will participate in the world.

And naturally, systems built around a woman's externally assigned usefulness will experience her internal remembering as disruption.

Because it is.

She is no longer asking only:

What can I do that makes me valuable here?

She is asking:

What becomes possible here because I have finally remembered the value of my own presence?

Those are not the same question.

One produces performance.

The other can produce power.

Maybe that is the awakening underneath so many of the conversations we are watching now. Maybe women are not becoming less useful. Maybe we are finally remembering that usefulness was never large enough to describe us.

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Quadeera Teart is the Author of ManifestHer: Awakening the Power Within to Build Your God-Sized Vision, Founder of FeelWell ™, editor-in-chief of FeelWell™ Magazine. As an Influence Builder, she specializes in organizing ideas, expertise, and lived experience into premium brand assets, authority platforms, and influence ecosystems that create visibility, profitability, and legacy. Through her Seen. Heard. Profitable.™ Influence-Building Model, she teaches women how to structure and scale their God-sized vision, master their influence, and prosper in their purpose—with clarity, confidence, and sovereignty.