She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Parton’s popularity seemed to surge the same year America seemed to falter. A fractured thing craves wholeness, and that’s what Dolly Parton offers—one woman who simultaneously embodies past and present, rich and poor, feminine and masculine, Jezebel and Holy Mother, the journey of getting out and the sweet return to home.

There's a powerful wisdom in just leaving the bullshit for someone else to fix.

There is, then, intellectual knowledge--the stuff of research studies and think pieces--and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have.

The woman who speaks about feminism is not always the one truly insisting on equality behind closed doors.

Parton’s musical genius deserves a discussion far beyond and above the matters of gender and class. But the lyrics she wrote are forever tied to the body that sang them, her success forever tied to having patterned her look after the “town trollop” of her native holler. For doing so, she received a fame laced with ridicule; during interviews in the 1970s and 1980s, both Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey asked her to stand up so they could point out, without humor, that she looked like a tramp.

Political headlines were fixating on a hateful, sexist version of rural, working-class America that I did not recognize. Dolly’s music and life contained what I wanted to say about class, gender, and my female forebears: That country music by women was the formative feminist text of my life.

I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read, and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music. Its sincere lyrics and familiar accent confirmed, with triumph and sorrow, that my home—invisible or ridiculed elsewhere in news and popular culture—deserved to be known, and that it was complicated and good.

I feel sexy,” Parton said. “I like being a woman. If I’d-a been a man, I’d-a probably been a drag queen.

Working-class women might not be fighting for a cause with words, time, and money they don’t have, but they possess an unsurpassed wisdom about the way gender works in the world. Take, for example, the concept of intersectionality. A working-class woman of color might not know that word, but she knows better than anyone how her race, gender, and economic struggles intertwine. There is, then, intellectual knowledge—the stuff of research studies and think pieces—and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have.

Feminism and all movements for social progress inevitably contain a gap between what’s on paper and what’s really going on: between the feminism proclaimed and the feminism enacted, the women’s rights legislated and the women’s rights enforced, the progress in policy and the progress in culture. Women of Generation X, of which I represent the youngest contingent, had more freedom than their mothers in meaningful ways. We were the first full beneficiaries of Title IX protections guaranteeing access to education and outlawing sexual discrimination in the workplace. We were entering our first romantic partnerships as the Violence Against Women Act became law. But the cultural cues we received growing up were full of gaps and dissonance.

That evening at Steinem’s talk on the University of Texas campus, I was struck by her explanation for how such venomous misogyny could overrun the presidential election in 2016. The moment a woman is statistically most likely to be murdered by her male abuser, Steinem pointed out, is when she escapes. Losing control of her is the unbearable threat that makes the violent ex-husband snap. Expanding this idea to a patriarchy losing control of half of the U.S. population would indeed explain a lot about recent years: Abortion provider George Tiller’s murder in Wichita in 2009, Hillary Clinton’s treatment and loss in 2016, the reliable track record of violence against and hatred toward women among male perpetrators of this century’s mass-shooting epidemic. It would explain, too, perhaps, how a self-possessed, powerful woman like Parton gets turned into a boob joke. Like Steinem, Parton is an icon of American womanhood in the twentieth century, still going full force today, perhaps with the energy other women their age who made more orthodox decisions must offer to their grandchildren. Steinem did not come from wealth, but the two women nonetheless had different experiences of socioeconomic class: one went to college, and one took a guitar to Nashville. In different ways and with different tacks, they both charted the course for us to nominate a woman for president in 2016.

Oh, I’m a female and I believe that everybody should definitely have their rights,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re Black, white, straight, gay, women, men, whatever. I think everybody that has something to offer should be allowed to give it and be paid for it. But, no, I don’t consider myself a feminist, not in the term that some people do, because I just think we all should be treated with respect.” Her answer might break your heart if, like me, you speak the language of college-educated activists. But I speak another language, too —poor country— and can attest that as an independent teenager in small-town Kansas who believed women and men should receive equal treatment, I might have given a similar answer. So much of what ails our country now, politically, is that we do not share a common set of definitions. In the context of her native class, Parton’s gift to young women is not a statement but an example. One wishes for both from a hero. But, if I could only have one of the two, I’d pick the latter.

Drake song “Make Me Proud” with a direct invocation: “Double D up, hoes. Dolly Parton.