Dolly Parton - An unlikely, but powerful, feminist

I am genuinely so sad to hear that Dolly Parton has died. She has long been a hero of mine, and it was a dream come true to see her perform in 2014 in Leeds.

I went along expecting the songs, the rhinestones and that unmistakable Dolly warmth. What I was not prepared for was the sheer scale of her talent. She moved effortlessly from one instrument to another, told stories, made us laugh and completely commanded the stage, apparently without ever needing to remind anyone that she was in charge and a master of her craft.

And perhaps that was part of her particular magic.

Dolly Parton occupied a very unusual place in feminism. She never needed to reject femininity in order to demonstrate female power, competency and authority. In fact, she did almost the opposite. She took every stereotype about what a powerful woman was supposed to look like, covered it in rhinestones, added enormous hair and then quietly built an extraordinary career, a business empire and a philanthropic legacy underneath it.

People could underestimate her if they wanted to. She knew exactly what she was doing. Behind the rhinestones and the self-deprecating humour was a woman of enormous ambition who was decades ahead of her time in her understanding that creative freedom also required economic power. At just twenty she established her own publishing company, retained control of the songs she wrote and went on to build not simply a career, but a business empire around her talent and her name.

Women like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette were also pushing at the boundaries of what female country artists could say and be, but Dolly did something particularly remarkable. She turned her unique talent as a songwriter into ownership, celebrity into enterprise and, ultimately, female economic power. And she did not keep that power to herself. She shared it around the world through her philanthropy, funding medical research and, perhaps most beautifully, through the millions of books sent to children in her name. Some of those books are in the North East of England; that was the scale of her reach.

There is something wonderfully subversive about a woman who could make herself the joke before anybody else got the chance, while retaining complete ownership of her talent, her image, her work and, crucially, her money. In an industry dominated by men, she insisted on being credited for what she created and famously refused to surrender the publishing rights to I Will Always Love You when doing so might have brought her an enormous opportunity. Years later, that decision proved just how astute she had been.

Then there was 9 to 5. Long before conversations about the gender pay gap, sexual harassment and women’s treatment at work became part of everyday public discourse, Dolly was singing about women being patronised, exploited and denied their fair share. She later said simply that if you do the work, you should get the pay and the credit. It is difficult to think of a clearer feminist proposition than that.

Yet she never seemed particularly concerned about whether anyone called her a feminist. She was more interested in living like one.

Perhaps that is what I admire most.

She showed that a woman could be funny without making herself small. Sexy without surrendering ownership of her sexuality. Kind without being weak. Ambitious without apology. Deeply feminine without allowing femininity to become a cage.

And she reached back too. Through the Imagination Library, millions of children received books because Dolly Parton understood that where you begin in life should not determine where you are allowed to end up. For a woman born into poverty in rural Tennessee, there is something particularly moving about that.

I have been writing a lot recently about the ways women learn to navigate power. Whether we accommodate it, align ourselves with it, challenge it or sometimes diminish ourselves in response to it.

Dolly seemed to find another way entirely.

She walked into male-dominated spaces looking exactly as she pleased, kept her humour, kept her softness, kept control of her work and somehow made the world adjust to her.

What a woman.

I feel incredibly lucky that, for one evening in Leeds in 2014, I got to watch her do it.

Rest well, Dolly. The world has lost something completely irreplaceable.