Dolly Parton’s Unique Feminist Power, as Told by Gloria Steinem (January 1987)

(As the world mourns Dolly Parton, Ms. is revisiting Gloria Steinem’s tribute to the country music legend, originally published in the January 1987 issue, when Parton was named one of Ms. magazine’s Women of the Year. Steinem celebrated Parton not only as a gifted songwriter and magnetic performer, but as a shrewd businessperson who transformed femininity into a source of humor and power—and used her success to lift up working women, poor communities and the mountain people of her native Tennessee.)

People who haven't listened to Dolly Parton or to feminism may be surprised to learn that they go together. In fact, she has crossed musical class lines to bring work, real life and strong women into a world of pop music usually dominated by unreal romance.

She has used her business sense to bring other women and poor people along with her.

And her flamboyant style has turned all the devalued symbols of womanliness to her own ends.

If feminism means each of us finding our unique power, and helping other women do the same, Dolly Parton certainly has done both.

In 1986 she crossed two more boundaries. "Dolly's Smoky Mountain Christmas," an ABC made-for-television movie based on her original idea and produced by her own company, brought down-home style and her own songs into our living rooms. The story of a disillusioned entertainer whose Christmas spirit is restored by children in her poor mountain home, it also let us share the reality and beauty of isolated mountain life in Tennessee. Dollywood, a theme park she established in the Smoky Mountain foothills earlier last year, was a far greater accomplishment; a realization of Dolly's longtime dream of bringing jobs and understanding into that isolation. It has already attracted more than a million tourists to everything from mountain crafts and a river ride to a back-porch theater and mountain-style restaurants; all with an eye to economic development for residents.

This strength, this capacity to dream what she could not know, seems to have been born into Dolly as one of 12 children of a poor family in those mountains. By the time she was seven, she was playing the guitar, reading books and dreaming of a world beyond the poverty and beauty of the Smoky Mountains. By the time she was 10, she had coaxed support from her free-thinking mother, braved the opposition of her protective father, and earned her first public applause by singing before live audiences at a radio station in Knoxville. With that taste of success, she vowed to conquer the larger world beyond the mountains, but never to betray the country way of life that had nurtured her.

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