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

by Sarah Smarsh

It’s about an unfashionable quality in our angry society—grace—and its ability to inspire the best in others.

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 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.

there’s a powerful wisdom in just leaving the bullshit for someone else to fix.

Sometimes even middle-class women, those of us who could stay and try to change the worlds in which we find ourselves, realize we could give our entire lives to shift things an inch. Is the inch worth our lives?

Sometimes a woman who knows her worth ought to lean in. But sometimes she ought to just leave.

Parton knew little of that world—direct political activism, an understanding of one’s own agency in democracy, statistics and testimonies leveraged to change public policy.

1978 poem by Adrienne Rich: “A wild patience has taken me this far.”

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.

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