Dolly Parton died two weeks ago. Gloria Steinem's passing came a week later. Both were admirable, powerful, and unique women who made indelible marks on important civil rights issues. And if my words seem to massively understate the importance of their lives and work, I can only plead guilty. Words do sometimes fail us all.
Rather than writing general remembrances or half-informed biographies of either of these women, I will use this column today to comment on some notable aspects of their profound social impacts. And although I am more than a bit uncomfortable doing so, I should note up front that my discussion of Steinem's legacy will include a genuine disagreement with a person with whom I almost never disagreed.
First, Dolly Parton. As many have commented, she somehow lived through one of the most divisive times in American history, when no one is universally liked (or even tolerated), yet everyone loved her. Genuinely. She might be the last person who could make everyone happy. When the "King's Guard plays '9 to 5' outside Buckingham Palace in moving tribute to Dolly Parton," something special is afoot.
What is more surprising is that she managed to do all of that seemingly with no effort, without guile or calculation. That is, she never tried the musical equivalent of Michael Jordan's infamous "Republicans buy sneakers, too" dodge (a comment that has its own Wikipedia page, calling it "a stance often attributed to his desire to maintain broad, bipartisan commercial appeal").
Not Parton. (As relatable and even lovable as she was, I refuse to follow the crowd and call her Dolly, because doing so strikes me as presumptuous.) She was a feminist, a beloved LGBTQ+ ally, and openly progressive in her views. Jennifer Rubin ended her piece on Labor Day by honoring the "Nashville Association of Musicians (AFM Local 257) and SAG-AFTRA member, philanthropic giant, and musical genius, Dolly Parton." She was not an in-your-face celebrity spouting off on political issues, choosing instead to walk the walk.
And she did so even when it was uncomfortable. For example, more than ten years ago, Parton publicly denounced North Carolina's infamous "bathroom bill," long before trans activism was common (and even before trans activism was called trans activism). Shortly after her death, CNN ran a piece titled "What Dolly Parton's allyship meant for the queer community," and the excellent YouTuber Matt Baume offered a touching "Dolly's Quilt of Many Colors," with this description:
How did Dolly Parton become a gay icon? And what did she do for the queer community? Her style inspired countless drag queens, and her big open heart brought people together across religious and political divides. Her outspoken support for marriage equality, trans rights, and people living with HIV would have been enough to cement her place in history as an ally. But through her company Sandollar, she and her gay best friend Sandy Gallin produced a documentary called Common Threads: Tales from the Quilt that transformed America's relationship with AIDS.
In other words, by the time that terrible bathroom bill came along, Parton was decades deep into being an ally.
And when it comes to racial matters, channels that I have never before visited posted pieces with titles like "WHY BLACK PEOPLE LOVE DOLLY PARTON - RIP" and "Why Black Folks Invited Dolly Parton to the Cookout," the latter of which came with this description: "Why do so many Black people genuinely love Dolly Parton? It is about more than 'Jolene,' rhinestones, or her unforgettable personality. Dolly Parton earned the affection of many Black Americans through a pattern of respect, generosity, accountability, and public support." She treated the Black Lives Matter "question" as if it was simply bizarre even to ask it, and her "well obviously" answer was more than too many people were able to cough up (including many White politicians, who tried to go with "Well, all lives matter," which was deliberately obtuse).
So when I say that it is amazing that there were no prominent voices grumbling in the background after Dolly Parton's death -- even Donald Trump wrote something positive about her, whereas he had trashed Rob Reiner when he died -- I mean to highlight that she gave the political right every opportunity in the world to vilify her.
Which is to say that even though culture warriors are still unable to define "woke" as anything other than "liberal stuff that I can't make a coherent argument against but want to dismiss anyway," they do have an ad hoc checklist, and Parton ticked every box on it. But they stayed silent and at least claimed to love her anyway. If that is not evidence of a superhuman power, what would be?
Speaking of culture wars, I do feel the need to comment on something that appeared in a very positive review of Parton's life by one of the op-ed columnists at The New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom. Parton was, of course, a child of Appalachia, which Cottom described as "a place that is just as mythologized, mocked and misunderstood as Dolly was. It's a place where people are rarely allowed to speak for themselves. Instead, they are interpolated through coastal biases about white trash and red states."
Well, this is where I can speak as a reasonably informed observer. How? Because I am not "coastal," having grown up not just in the hyper-uncool Midwest but in Toledo, Ohio, which is the butt of almost as many jokes as New Jersey and West Virginia (or, for the Canadians out there, Newfoundland). Toledo is, in other words, nobody's idea of a snobby place. Even so, Parton was just as mocked in her early years in places like Toledo, Cleveland, and Chicago, as she was anywhere else.
Yes, there were country music fans in the upper Midwest, but there are country music fans in California and on Long Island, too. Most of the country, not only the coasts, simply failed to get Parton's self-effacing joke. The guys on "Hee Haw" who wore rhinestones on their leisure suits were laughingstocks, and at least until Parton's music started to cross over with some mainstream hits, she was easy to lump in with the rest of them. In other words, it was not the coasts condescending to Real America (as Republicans now like to frame it) but rather the non-South laughing at the gaudy excesses of the most Southern genre out there. Cottom is certainly no friend of the American right, so I was especially disappointed to see her casually reinforce that false line of attack.
"What I felt like inside was a plump brunette from Toledo, too tall and much too pudding faced." So Gloria Steinem wrote in one of her books, as recounted in an obituary in The Times. Yes, this is called a segue. I could have gone with a 1987 piece in Ms., "Dolly Parton’s Unique Feminist Power, as Told by Gloria Steinem," but hometown bias has its place. After all, Steinem's formative interest in journalism was sparked by her mother's career writing for the local newspaper, The Blade. (Side note: Toledo's namesake city in Spain is famous for forging swords from Toledo Steel. As much as I would like the newspaper's name to have a gay rights origin, it is not so.)
Steinem was one of the all-time giants of feminism, and when I was coming of age in the 1970's, her impact on public discussion of civil rights for women was incalculable. Indeed, I had barely become a teenager when I started to hear discussions about feminism and thought, "Well, of course I'm a feminist." In the years since then, I graduated from one of the "Seven Sisters Colleges," taught at three more of them, had a cross-appointment on a Women's Studies faculty at a state university, joined the International Association for Feminist Economics, and made the transition from economics to law via a network of brilliant feminist legal theorists.
None of that, however, makes me an expert on feminism -- or even necessarily a feminist. I stipulate the latter because I became aware early on that some women who are feminists reject the notion that men can be feminists, and although I continue to disagree, I understand their argument. More generally regarding my minimal-at-best expertise, I would need a refresher course to be able to describe the various waves of feminism at all competently. But I do know that Steinem was an architect of Second-Wave feminism, which transformed women's lives around the world in ways that are difficult even to comprehend today. Should women be able to have credit cards in their own names, without their husbands' permission? If you answer "yes," thank Gloria Steinem and the movement that she helped to lead. And that is only one example of her impact.
All of which brings me to the uncomfortable part of today's essay. After hearing last week that Steinem had died, I of course felt sadness and loss. At that point, however, a thought occurred to me: Was she one of the feminists who took Bill Clinton's side in the Lewinsky scandal? I honestly could not remember. I certainly knew that Steinem was not the source of the worst vileness, such as this comment from a then-prominent feminist legal scholar: "Lewinsky at least appears to have flirted her way to a job at Revlon and, when that disappeared, a $2 million modeling offer and the status of the most-sought after woman in the world. Not bad, some might say, for someone who can’t type." Even so, I had a sense that Steinem had been a Clinton defender.
The same source from which I drew the quotation above, a 2007 Vanity Fair column by Marjorie Williams, makes it very clear that feminists were divided about the Clinton-Lewinsky question, and Williams also makes it clear that she disagreed with Clinton's defenders, including Steinem, whom Williams quotes:
"We’re not against sex; we’re against the use of sex to cajole, humiliate, coerce. But, according to what Lewinsky says, this was not the case with her…. We need to trust the women here. If we say a 21-to-24-year-old has no sexual will, we’re going against the whole struggle for self-determination and taking responsibility for our own lives." ...
Williams ends with this brutal assessment: "There it is, fellas, in case you’re still confused: it seems we just lowered the bar.""We would not be doing our job if we didn’t take into account that this president and his policies are crucial to the lives and welfare of the majority of women in this country,” Gloria Steinem assures me. “That’s not bending over backwards: that’s being sensible. Having said that, if Clinton had raped women, beaten up Hillary—real private sins would not be forgiven, no matter what the value of the public behavior.
But the key question here is whether Steinem continued to hold and defend those views as time went on. A 2017 piece in The Guardian by Molly Redden includes this (referring to an infamous 1998 NYT essay by Steinem):
Steinem’s op-ed has been held up as a prime example of how Democrats and their allies reflexively rallied to Clinton’s defense, an argument made most forcefully by the writer Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic.
“It slut-shamed, victim-blamed and age-shamed; it urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused,” Flanagan wrote. “The notorious 1998 New York Times op-ed by Gloria Steinem must surely stand as one of the most regretted public actions of her life.”
But if those regrets exist, they are not Steinem’s.
“I’m glad I wrote it at the time,” she said. “Because the danger then was we were about to lose sexual harassment law because it was being applied to extramarital sex, free will, extramarital sex, as with Monica Lewinsky.”
Steinem added this: "The problem at the time was, the sexual harassment law was in danger. If Clinton had resigned, that would have endangered the law.”
Again, this is uncomfortable. I am, however, skeptical of the claim that "sexual harassment law was in danger." How could it have been? Al Gore would have become the President. Was the worry that he would have responded to a blatant example of sexual harassment by agreeing to weaken sexual harassment law? Maybe Steinem knew something that the rest of us do not know, but if so, she did not share it. And it is simply puzzling how applying it to extramarital sex would somehow "lose sexual harassment law."
Indeed, when I say "a blatant example of sexual harassment," this brings us to the more fundamental reason that I continue to disagree with the pro-Clinton feminists' argument. At the time, I was glad that the Clinton impeachment trial's result was a political loss for Republicans. Even so, there was no question that he had done something very wrong, and seeing it as being wrong did not in any way undermine the agency of women or imply a failure to "trust" them. Put simply, the President of the United States made a sexual advance on a very young subordinate. Even though she said that she agreed, that is an abuse of power, and if both parties to the sexual encounter had been men (or women), the abuse of power would have been the same.
This is the same reason that it was a very big advance when universities finally instituted policies against professor-student sex, even when it appears to be consensual. And if it seems that professors have too much power in that kind of situation -- and they do (and have been willing to abuse it for far too long) -- where should we stand on the power balance between the most powerful man in the world and a young adult in his office? Yes, I view that as a rhetorical question.
Again, I claim no special knowledge or status as an expert on these issues, certainly not in comparison to an icon like Gloria Steinem. Even so, it seems important to show my respect for her by making it clear that I view her as human and thus fallible. I do disagree with her -- emphatically -- about this matter.
Two women -- great in different ways, but also in similar ways -- made the world a better place. They were not perfect (although Dolly Parton came close), but we are worse for no longer having their voices to guide us.
- Neil H. Buchanan