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

by Sarah Smarsh

It was a painful time for the women who blazed the trail Parton was on—a trail most blocked and treacherous for women of color, gay women, and others outside the cisgender, straight, white mold more palatable to American systems of power. For any woman on that path, the decade was a cluster of mixed messages: Work a “man’s job” but for less pay than men. Wear shoulder pads to evoke a man’s strength but also high heels to click delicately down the hallway. Be independent enough to drive to the office but answer to a male boss and cook your husband’s dinner when you both get home from work.

She had conquered a man’s world the best a woman could and found it a place that would treat her like dirt even when she was on top. There was only one thing left to do: create her own damn world.

Don’t assume the men in suits know what they’re doing, she warned, and don’t concern yourself with their appraisal of your worth.

we must give women the freedom to do feminism however they please, whether it strikes us as correct or not.

If Parton’s struggles and successes as an implicit rather than explicit feminist teach us anything, it’s that the most authentic female power does not always align with the politics of a movement. If you take Parton’s decisions thirty years ago and hold them up against some of the things said and written by activists, academics, and other movement-approved experts from the same time, I would wager that Parton’s feminism has aged just as well and in some cases far better.

Like the entire nation, for which conservatism now shapes law and dominates the White House, the country music industry is suffering a swing backward, against gains women made in the late twentieth century. During the first half of 2016, songs sung by female artists accounted for less than 10 percent of country radio plays, according to Forbes magazine. In that same time, only five female artists appeared on Billboard’s Top 30 Country Airplay charts.

Whether Parton has another groundbreaking hit or not, her entire life is now understood to have broken ground—for female artists, for poor girls with dreams, for women who would like to be bosses without hiding their breasts.

But seen in the light of the twenty-first century, with woke young fans and greater female representation in the media that sets the narratives about her, Parton’s place in culture finally shifts from objectified female body to the divine feminine—a sassy priestess in high heels.

Parton’s sense of ownership about her body is a defiant act in a culture that managed to obsess over her breasts so thoroughly that the first cloned mammal, a sheep created from a mammory-gland cell in 1996, was named after her.

A woman’s voice, whether on the radio, onstage, or in a presidential race, will be celebrated but only so far. The airplay will be minimized. The speech will be cut short. Someone will yell, “Lock her up.”

The glass ceiling that hindered lifelong public servant Hillary Clinton’s campaign battle against a morally bankrupt, incompetent man is the same one that made Dolly Parton answer more questions about her measurements than her songwriting over the decades.

Parton helped pioneer the sort of feminism on display in contemporary pop music: serving up T&A on your own terms, subverting objectification by having a damn good time with it.

So much of what ails our country now, politically, is that we do not share a common set of definitions.

In constructing the story of her life through interviews, live performances, books, and autobiographical TV movies, Parton has masterfully forced the world to reckon with that which patriarchy tries to conceal.

Whatever sort of icon she is, whatever she represents to her fans and the rest of society—a wax sculpture wearing sequined shoulder pads in a Los Angeles museum of celebrity likenesses, a barefoot bronze in East Tennessee, or a living national treasure who defies easy categories—Parton survived and even changed a man’s world so brilliantly that one occasionally sees on T-shirts or online memes an unlikely reference to perhaps the most powerful, least political feminist in the world.