The Intertwined Legacies of Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton
The Daily
This episode of The Daily explores the intertwined legacies of feminist icon Gloria Steinem and country music legend Dolly Parton, whose dea
Key takeaways
- Gloria Steinem represented structured, political feminism through journalism, advocacy, and founding Ms. magazine to champion systemic change.
- Dolly Parton embodied feminist ideals through joy, independence, and self-expression without explicitly claiming the feminist label.
Main topics
- The legacy of Gloria Steinem
- Dolly Parton as a feminist icon
Notable quotes
"She was everywhere. I no longer accept society's judgment that my group is second class."
Conclusion
The deaths of Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton, though separated by different paths, underscore
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) The New York Times app? Unlocked? Everyone knows you need to subscribe to the Times to access all of their reporting. But what if you could explore the Times for a month, for free, without putting in a credit card? Now you can. When you download the New York Times app for the first time, your first month in the app is free. A month to go behind the paywall, to see what Times subscribers get every single day. If you don't already subscribe to the New York Times, Download the Times app today and get free access for 30 days. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Hi, this is Rachel Abrams from The New York Times. Hi, Rachel. Thank you for making time to speak with us. I'm sorry for your loss. Thank you. Big one. Big, big one. Speaker 1 (0:48) On Thursday morning, hours after the death of the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, we reached out to one of her longtime friends and colleagues, Letty Cotton Pogrebin. How did you first hear about the news of Gloria's passing? Robin called me at 6.44 a.m. and I was scared to take the call. And then it was Gloria. You know, I thought it might be God forbid someone in my family, then I realized she was. my family. She was your family. Yeah, she was. Gloria has been in my life for 55 years. So I met her in 1971 at the founding conference of the National Women's Political Caucus. And we ended up talking until three in the morning. Speaker 1 (1:40) She was interested in everyone. She thought every woman's life was a novel, a story. You know, she saw women's lives in all the complexity of women's lives. She didn't see us as any one thing. And she knew somewhere in every woman there was tragedy, comedy, and meaning. Speaker 1 (2:08) Word of Steinem's death came as many Americans were still grieving the loss of another iconic woman, Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton passed away today. She's such an exceptional singer. Beautiful voice. To me, she was kind of like a guiding light. She's kind of like our matriarch, our country's queen, in a sense. And she just has always been good and just... embodies good, reflects good back to people. And I think that that's so important. On paper, the connections between these two women seem faint and superficial. But for my colleague, Times Magazine writer Susan Dominus, the relationship between their lives and their impact was inescapable. It's Friday, September 4th. Speaker 1 (3:14) Hey, Sue. Hi, Michael. I think it's fair to say it's been a tough week and a half. I think it's fair to say it's been pretty emotional for a lot of people. Yeah. Well, tell me how you have been thinking about these back-to-back deaths of these two hugely important women, Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem. Well, to start, I have to say that the timing of their deaths so close together has really been, I think, something that's made me reflect on the way they were influential almost as a duo in my life and for probably a lot of other women around my age or maybe a little bit older or a little bit younger. But, you know, I came of age in the 70s and in a way, I almost can't remember a time when I didn't know who Gloria Steinem was. You know, she represented... Speaker 1 (4:06) feminism with a capital F, and she was fighting for a world in which women could fully express themselves and be their most powerful selves, but was also advocating for the world to change too. She was fighting for structural change, for political change, for legal change. And in a lot of cases, achieving it. Yeah, and that is definitely, I think, the side of feminism that we deflect to most often when we think about it. But the other side of feminism is the women who weren't claiming that label of feminism, but were nonetheless out there and acting and living the promise of what feminism was trying to offer to women, which is to say financial independence, total control of your life, an unapologetic inhabiting of who it was that you wanted to be and insisting on that kind of woman's right to be strong and to be fearless. And that was Dolly Parton. Speaker 1 (5:00) who, by the way, often danced around the word feminism and even often tried to avoid it. And frankly, I don't think she's necessarily the first person people think of when they think of feminism. Right. But the fact of their dying so close to each other has really made me realize that feminism needed both of those representations of what women could do. It needed the person who was the explicit... organizer and the rallier and the articulator of what these specific values were. But it also needed that person who was just embodying it and embodying it with so much joy and so much power. Well, talk, Sue, about the two very different lives and two very different approaches of these women and how you yourself experienced them in your own life. And because she died just Speaker 1 (5:52) Within the past 24 hours or so, let's start with Gloria Steinem and how she comes into your consciousness. So I've only recently thought a little bit about the fact that I was born on September 1st, 1970, which was just a few days after one of these big inflection points in the feminist movement. Speaker 1 (6:13) When there was this huge women's strike and 50,000 women marched on Fifth Avenue and closed it down. Well, the main demand, of course, is equal rights. Equal rights to have a job, to have respect, to not be viewed as a piece of meat. And I grew up with the rise of feminism, which is to say... The omnipresence of Gloria Steinem. I would not have admitted my own inequality, even though I had been refused apartments by landlords who would not rent to women. She was everywhere. I no longer accept society's judgment that my group is second class. Speaker 1 (6:50) And she was somebody who I remember kind of in the background of my entire experience of growing up in the 70s as a kid in a household with tons of magazines lying around. And what exactly was she saying? And in particular, what was she saying about feminism and women? So she really entered feminism through journalism. Her big first breakout piece of journalism was famously she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny. And revealed that this job that people from the outside thought was maybe kind of glamorous and fun was actually grueling. It was humiliating. The women there were exposed to all kinds of harassment. They were required to take these invasive gynecological exams. You know, they were underpaid. They worked long hours. And it was a piece of stunt journalism in a way. And it got her a lot of attention. But she didn't really become... Speaker 1 (7:47) active as a feminist per se until the late 60s when she was reporting on a group of women who were openly discussing their abortions. And she ended up writing a piece for New York Magazine about the women's liberation movement. From there, I think public speaking invitations started flowing in. And all of this ultimately leads to her co-founding what became Ms. Magazine. which was an incredible manifesto