Gloria Steinem named Dolly Parton a Ms. Woman of the Year in 1987. Their deaths, eight days apart, close a long argument about women, work, and who gets to use the word feminist.
“People who haven’t listened to Dolly Parton or to feminism may be surprised to learn that they go together,” Gloria Steinem wrote in the January 1987 issue of Ms. magazine, in the citation naming Parton one of the magazine’s Women of the Year. Parton collected the award at the Roseland Ballroom in New York on Jan. 12 of that year, a week shy of her 41st birthday, with Dollywood not yet a year old and “9 to 5” already six years into its second life as an office anthem. The two of them had almost nothing in common in the way they presented themselves in public, and they had arrived, by very different roads, at the same set of conclusions about money, work, and who gets to decide what a woman does with her day — that is to say, the woman, of course.
Parton died Aug. 25 at 80, after a brief bout with cancer. Steinem died Sept. 2 at her home in New York City at 92, her foundation announced, in a Post obituary that did not give a cause. Eight days separated these losses. The obituaries filed them under different headings: one under country music and philanthropy, the other under politics and journalism, which obscures how much of the same ground the two of them were covering and how early each of them noticed the other.
Steinem noticed first, and in print. Her 1987 citation credits Parton with having “crossed musical class lines to bring work, real life, and strong women into a world of pop music usually dominated by unreal romance,” and with using “her business sense to bring other women and poor people along with her.” Steinem was describing something the women’s movement had struggled with for most of its second wave, which was reach. Ms. arrived on newsstands in 1972 and became the first national magazine run by and for women. Parton reached women who were not looking for a movement at all, and Steinem, who understood the difference, wrote the citation to say so.
Parton and Steinem also shared a problem that rarely gets written up as a problem, which is that both of them were beautiful in a way the culture could not get past. Steinem sat in a taxi and listened to Gay Talese tell Saul Bellow, in her presence, “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.” Clay Felker, the editor who gave her her first serious assignment, remembered meeting her and thinking “she had great legs,” and allowed that the piece she turned in was “excellent.” She went undercover as a Playboy bunny in 1963 and then spent years worrying that the article had taught editors to see a bunny instead of a writer.
Parton met the same obstacle from the opposite side, having built the wigs and the figure herself and then spending 50 years explaining that they were deliberate. “It’s certainly a choice,” she told Barbara Walters in 1977, and she never softened the position afterward. “I know exactly what I am doing and I can change it at any time. I make more jokes about myself than anybody,” she said. What she wanted people to hear underneath the joke, she told The New York Times, was the rest of it. “This isn’t all I am. It’s not even most of what I am. Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart, and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”
But the clearest place Parton and Steinem overlap is a movie about secretaries. “9 to 5” grew out of an actual labor organization, the group 9to5, which Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy started in Boston in the early 1970s with a newsletter for office workers. “We keep Boston’s businesses and institutions running smoothly. Without us, they would grind to a halt. Yet we are underpaid and undervalued,” the first issue told its readers. Jane Fonda met Nussbaum through antiwar organizing, heard the stories, and turned them into the comedy that also starred Lily Tomlin and Dabney Coleman along with Parton.
“They all had stories to tell of not being paid as much as men in their offices, of having their male supervisors take their ideas and take credit for them,” Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told Fast Company in August. “What was really amazing about the movie was that they took these very real stories of women in the workplace. By placing them in a comedy, it reached a lot more people than if they’d done a documentary on what was happening to women in the white-collar workplace.”
Parton wrote the title song, and it went to No. 1 on both the country and pop charts in 1980, a crossover Fordham University noted in its own assessment of her legacy. Steinem, writing seven years later, put “9 to 5” alongside “Working Girl” and called both of them anthems “for the millions of women flooding into the paid labor force.” She quoted the lyrics in the citation, including the line about being a step on the boss man’s ladder, which is a policy argument delivered at a tempo people can dance to.
“The women’s movement understood that changing the workplace to accommodate family was just as vital as getting women in the door of workplaces,” Kirsten Swinth, a professor of history at Fordham, said of the period the film captured. Its plot turns on exactly that, with three secretaries redesigning their office around flexible hours and on-site child care once the boss is out of the way.
Steinem’s work on the same question ran through legislation, magazines, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, which she helped found in 1971. Parton’s ran through payroll. She opened Dollywood in 1986 in Pigeon Forge, in a county whose economy needed it, and Steinem described the park in 1987 as “a realization of Dolly’s longtime dream of bringing jobs and understanding into that isolation.” By 2022, the park’s parent company was covering tuition, fees, and books for any employee pursuing higher education, and Parton’s Imagination Library had distributed more than 300 million free books, according to the Post.
Parton kept her distance from the word feminist for most of her life. She joked that if she had set fire to her bra it “would have burned for four days.” Asked directly by Time magazine in 2020, she allowed the label in conditional form. “I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to,” Parton said, and went on, “I just really feel I can live my femininity and actually show that you can be a woman and you can still do whatever you want to do.”
“Have we ever seen her in public not wearing a wig? She was deliberately crafting a public persona that was different from her private one,” Swinth told Fordham, which is a useful reminder that the reluctance was itself a piece of stagecraft, managed by a woman who managed everything.
“She didn’t tell us she was a feminist. She showed us — in her actions and her words and in her songs,” Lynn Melnick, author of “I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive,” told The Associated Press in a piece published Aug. 29.
“She was always in charge of her life. She was always in charge of her talent and her business and her career,” Fonda told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now on Aug. 31, when Goodman asked whether she would call Parton a feminist. “Yes, she was in charge of her life. She was a feminist.”
The evidence for that reading is largely financial. Parton refused to hand Elvis Presley half the publishing rights to “I Will Always Love You” when he asked to record it, a decision that eventually made her enough money to have bought Graceland outright, the Post reported. She left Porter Wagoner’s show in 1974 and settled his lawsuit for $1 million rather than fight it. She wrote more than 3,000 songs, sold more than 100 million records, and held a fortune Forbes estimated last year at $450 million. “Parton projected a sweetly defiant self-possession throughout her career in a man’s world,” the journalist Sarah Smarsh wrote of her, in a passage quoted in the Post’s obituary.
Steinem spent her career arguing that this kind of self-possession was not available to most women without organized pressure, and she was blunt about how narrow her own movement’s early lens had been. “Racism and sexism are linked,” she wrote in the Post, “and cannot be ranked except by individuals in their own experience.” Christine Stansell, a history professor at the University of Chicago, once wrote in Glamour that Steinem “was to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights: the galvanizer.”
Steinem’s beginnings sat closer to Parton’s than her Smith College degree and her New York bylines suggested. She was formally enrolled in school only at 11, and she cared for her mother in a rat-infested house in Toledo. “What I wanted most in life then,” she told People magazine, “was a cage to sleep in, so I’d be safe.” Parton grew up one of 12 children in a cabin in the Smokies with no plumbing and no electricity, wearing dresses cut from feed sacks, and turned the ridicule that came with it into “Coat of Many Colors.”
“She pushed open doors not just for herself, but for literally millions of women behind her,” Hillary Clinton said of Steinem in the tributes NPR collected on Sept. 3, naming Title IX, Roe v. Wade, and Sally Ride’s flight among the things Steinem made possible without being in the room for any of them. Parton was rarely in those rooms either, and she said so plainly, telling the podcast host Jad Abumrad in 2019 that she didn’t “do politics” because “I have too many fans on both sides of the fence.”
Both of them built institutions rather than only reputations, which is the part of the record that will outlast the arguments about vocabulary. Ms. is still publishing, and it republished Steinem’s Parton citation on Aug. 27, two days after Parton died and six days before Steinem did. The Imagination Library still mails books. The organization 9to5 became a local union inside the Service Employees International Union in the early 1980s.
DeVault, who watched the movie again this summer, said the durability of its premise is what stays with her. “I’m always struck by both how hilarious it is, and also how true to life I think it is. All of these things are still going on,” she said.
“I’m old,” Steinem once said, “but the movement is young.”
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