Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton: Two Roads to the Same Revolution

In This Article

• Why two wildly different women were fighting the same fight all along
• How the system tries to split women into camps so it can ignore both of them
• What Steinem's politics and Parton's rhinestones actually have in common
• The mechanism behind dismissing powerful women by focusing on their style
• Why the real story isn't their differences , it's who benefits from pretending those differences matter

Here is a thing that happened in America. In 1972, Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine and told women flat out that they deserved equal pay, bodily autonomy, and a seat at every table that had ever been built without them in mind. That same decade, Dolly Parton wrote Jolene and 9 to 5 and I Will Always Love You, and in doing so handed working-class women a mirror that said: you are seen, you are funny, you are worthy, and your boss is a fool. Different methods. Identical message. And the culture spent fifty years pretending not to notice.

The Oldest Trick in the Book

When a system wants to neutralize a powerful woman, it doesn't always come at her directly. That would be too obvious. Instead, it sorts women into categories and gets them arguing about which category is better. The intellectual versus the entertainer. The feminist versus the traditionalist. The serious one versus the one with the big hair. Once women are busy defending their lane, nobody has to deal with the fact that both lanes were heading to the same destination.

Steinem got called humorless. Parton got called a dumb blonde , a joke she turned into a weapon so fast it made your head spin. She once said it costs a lot of money to look this cheap. That line is not a ditzy aside. That is a woman explaining exactly what she is doing and daring you to be too dim to catch it. Both women knew the game. They just played it with different instruments.

What Gloria Steinem Was Actually Saying

Steinem came up through journalism at a time when female reporters were assigned the food section and told to be grateful. She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and wrote about it in a way that made the exploitation impossible to shrug off. She didn't moralize. She just described the shoes they made the women wear and let you do the math.

Her feminism was structural. She looked at laws, institutions, and economic arrangements and named who was getting crushed and why. She helped found the National Women's Political Caucus. She testified before the Senate on the Equal Rights Amendment. She built organizations because she understood that righteous anger without structure is just noise. Steinem was a mechanic. She wanted to know how the machine worked so she could find the part that was grinding women down and yank it out.

What Dolly Parton Was Actually Saying

Parton grew up dirt poor in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains with eleven siblings and a mother who sewed her a coat out of rags. She made it to Nashville, got told to change her look, her sound, and her style, and said no thank you with a smile so bright you needed sunglasses. That takes a particular kind of steel.

Her feminism was emotional and narrative. She put working women on the stage and the radio and made them the heroes of their own stories. 9 to 5 is a song about wage theft, workplace harassment, and class resentment dressed up in a bouncy hook so catchy that the people it was criticizing sang along without noticing. That is not an accident. That is craft in service of truth. Parton also quietly funded the Imagination Library, which has given away over two hundred million free books to children, because she remembered being a kid who didn't have any. She built things too. Just quieter ones.

How the Culture Tried to Use Them Against Each Other

For decades, a certain strain of cultural commentary treated Steinem and Parton as opposites. Steinem represented the supposedly alienating, bra-burning, man-hating feminist caricature that the media invented and then complained about. Parton represented the acceptable woman , pretty, non-threatening, self-deprecating enough to make powerful men feel safe. The implication was always that you had to choose. You could be respected or you could be liked. You could fight or you could sing. Pick one.

This is nonsense engineered for a purpose. The purpose is to keep women from recognizing that they are all dealing with variations of the same problem. A working-class woman in Tennessee and a New York journalist with a law school boyfriend might have looked at each other across a cultural canyon and seen a stranger. The system was counting on that. It was dead wrong.

The Rhinestones Were Never the Point

People spent a long time debating whether Dolly Parton was a feminist. Parton herself deflected the label for years, partly because she was smart enough to know the label would cost her half her audience. But watch what she does instead of what she says. She owns the original master recordings of her music.

She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice before accepting it, because she didn't want to make it political. She ran her own company. She protected her own image with the ferocity of a woman who had watched other people's images get stolen and wasn't going to let it happen to her.

Steinem, for her part, never had much patience for the argument that Parton's glitter was a betrayal of something. She understood performance. She understood that different women reach different women, and that the point was never to have one approved method of being free. The point was freedom.

Why Both of Them Got Dismissed and By Whom

Steinem was called a man-hater by people who had never read a word she wrote. Parton was called a bimbo by people who had never tried to write a song as good as I Will Always Love You, which she wrote in about an hour and which Elvis Presley wanted to record until his manager demanded half the publishing rights and Parton told him no. She turned down Elvis. Let that land for a second.

Both women were dismissed by people who had a stake in the dismissal. The mechanisms were different , one was attacked for being too angry, one for not being angry enough , but the goal was the same. Make her smaller. Make her easier to ignore. Make other women doubt whether she is the right kind of role model. It is a remarkably efficient system when it works. These two women are evidence of what happens when it doesn't.

The Thing They Shared That Nobody Talks About Enough

What Steinem and Parton shared, underneath all the surface noise, was a refusal to pretend. Steinem refused to pretend that the system was fair. Parton refused to pretend she was less than she was, even when she performed the role of someone who might be. Both of them looked at a world that had very specific ideas about what women were for, and both of them said, politely or not, that those ideas were wrong.

They also both understood that you have to meet people where they are. Steinem wrote clearly and marched publicly because her audience was ready for the direct approach. Parton wrapped hard truths in three-chord country songs because her audience needed the spoonful of sugar first. Neither approach is superior. Both approaches worked. Women who found their way to their own worth through Ms. Magazine and women who found it through Coat of Many Colors arrived at the same place. That is the whole point of having more than one road.

These two giants will be greatly missed by more than just the women.

Recommended Books

My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem , A memoir about organizing, listening, and why change moves the way it does , from the ground up and never in a straight line.

Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics by Dolly Parton , A deep look at the stories behind her songs, where craft and autobiography reveal a woman who always knew exactly what she was doing.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan , The 1963 book that named the problem women weren't supposed to name, and helped set the stage for every argument Steinem and Parton would later make in their own ways.

Article Recap

Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton represent two distinct but equally powerful approaches to women's empowerment and feminist thought, one through political organizing and one through storytelling and music, both challenging a system designed to keep women small and divided. The long-standing cultural debate about which woman was the real feminist, or the right kind of role model for women, was itself a distraction engineered to prevent women from recognizing their shared struggle across class and cultural lines. Understanding how different women fight the same fight , and why the culture tries to turn those differences into rivalries , is one of the more useful things you can do with an afternoon.

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