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

by Sarah Smarsh

That an iconic female trailblazer in music, business, and popular culture wasn’t up on the feminist conversation du jour might reveal Parton’s origins: a place where a woman’s strength and independence are more about walk than talk. In the women’s movement, that talk—the articulation, study, and theories of advancement toward gender parity—has been crucial to social progress. Of equal import and less acclaim, though, is what poor and working-class women do for the cause.

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.

When a woman eventually does become president, she will face the same sexist media questions that women like Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and Hillary Clinton have faced, and she will be criticized for her appearance and decisions as all of them have been. She will remember when men held some sort of power she was forced to navigate, whether the harassment Doralee survived for a paycheck, the body-shaming Parton received in Hollywood, or the second-guessing she received from accountants on her own payroll. But she will be this country’s first female boss, her leadership inevitably shaped by the trials of womanhood.

She could afford to look refined and sophisticated but has held fast to a personal style modeled after her poor-country vision of glamour. She could adapt the way she speaks in the company of higher classes but keeps on saying “ain’t.” She could sing and speak about her world travels and decades of rarefied experiences but keeps talking about the poor folks what brung her. As Jancee Dunn wrote for Rolling Stone in 2003, “Many people who are raised in near-poverty try to distance themselves from their upbringing, but not Parton, whose ticket out turned into a round-trip.”