One of the first times I remember seeing Dolly Parton as a child was on a talk show. Late Night With David Letterman, most likely, though I don’t remember exactly which man was in the chair. How could I, when Parton, with her big smile, sky-high hair, and pronounced…assets was also on my screen? On the cusp of puberty myself and feeling the way my existence in the world was changing alongside my body, I asked my mother why Parton looked the way she did. She responded that she wanted people to look at her. That it was part of showbiz.
Many of us encountered the image of Parton, who died Aug. 25 at 80 years old, before we understood her music. It was hard not to. Parton’s look was so memorable that you could recognize her from a silhouette; it was so distinct that when she entered a drag Dolly Parton lookalike contest, she actually ended up losing. But Parton’s looks, I’d come to learn, were about much more than showbiz. Despite whether or not she claimed the term “feminist,” her actions and her songs painted a picture of an artist who was eager for the world to allow women the same circumstances and opportunities we do men.
And she was keenly aware that, for women, so much of that experience begins with being looked at.
To be a woman, we understand from the earliest of ages, is to observed. We are desired and judged, we are measured by the thickness of our thighs, size of our chests, sparkle in our grin. Something is always too big; something else, too little. How we look tells a story to others about our own capabilities in a narrative we had no hand in writing. Parton, who moved to Nashville in 1964, was immediately confronted with this paradox. Her idol of beauty growing up, she said, was a woman everyone else referred to as “the town tramp,” and her guidebook was a copy of the racy lingerie catalogue Frederick’s of Hollywood (it is fitting that Parton saw the allure in a woman whom everyone else dismissed).
So she teased her hair, lined her eyes, and embraced showy, form-fitting clothing. Her choices weren’t exactly embraced by those around her. “The main advice that people wanted to give me was to change my look — to go simpler with my hair and the way that I dress,” Parton told the WorkLife podcast. “Not to look so cheap, nobody was ever going to take me seriously, they would say.”
Parton’s response was to go bigger. She knew there was no way to win: a woman’s intelligence and competence were always going to be intertwined with her looks. You think a blonde woman is dumb? She went blonder. You think a Southern women’s version of beauty is too garish? She went louder. In that work, she began to untangle our knotted ideas and expectations of how a woman presents herself. Womanhood, she knew, was a performance.
Over the years, as people awkwardly asked about her breasts in interviews, she’d defuse the question with a joke: “How can people not? They’re all you can see,” she told the Guardian in 2011. Parton’s chest may have been accentuated, but wasn’t she just unearthing the quiet gaze that women feel on a daily basis?
While she was writing what would go on to be some of the greatest country songs of all time, her appearance confronted any ideals of what an “authentic” female artist should look like. As far as country bona fides go, no one had more than Parton, but she couldn’t have looked further from what we thought, and still think, might be an appropriate presentation of it. She leaned into the word “fake” and admitted to plastic surgery. Her genius was packaged in the exact opposite of what was expected — and Parton knew that no type of woman could ever satisfy society’s requirements (which made her support of the trans community even more impactful). “If I can’t make it on my talent, then I don’t want to do it,” she told Playboy, always wanting to challenge the disconnect head on.
Parton started singing about these ideas early. Her 1966 debut album, Hello, I’m Dolly, included a song called “Dumb Blonde”: “Just because I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb/’Cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” By the follow-up, Just Because I’m a Woman, the double standards presented to women were at the very top of her mind. The title track was born when her husband Carl Dean asked his new wife if she had been with any other men before they met. She told him the truth.
“I had had sex before we met, but I hadn’t mentioned it, and he hadn’t asked,” Parton told Rolling Stone in 2003. “We were married for eight months, happy as we could be, and all of a sudden he decides to ask. I told him the truth, and it broke his heart. He could not get over that for the longest time. I thought, ‘Well, my goodness, what’s the big damn deal?’”
“Just Because I’m a Woman” is the song she wrote in retort, but it’s not the only other feminist critique on the album. “The Bridge” is about a woman who, abandoned by the man who got her pregnant, takes her own life on the spot where their love affair began. It was 1968, and the feminist revolution was unfolding around her. No one else in country music, let alone the South, was singing about anything vaguely similar. Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” was still several years from release.
But Parton was digging deeper into feminist themes (regardless of whether she used the word, which she was careful not to). Her 1970 album, where she wrote about giving a child up for adoption (“I’m Doing This for Your Sake”), stillbirth (“Down From Dover”), and even a woman who had been committed to an asylum after her husband had an affair, presumably for being “hysterical” (“Daddy Come and Get Me”), was called Fairest of Them All. The cover depicted Parton glancing at her usually dolled-up self in a mirror. If others had difficultly squaring her image with her art, then that was their problem, not hers.
Parton reinforced that notion in 2008 with a song called “Backwoods Barbie,” which served as the story of her own life and, once again, a rebuttal to those who dismissed her based on how she appeared. “I’ve always been misunderstood because of how I look,” Parton sang.
We may not all don rhinestones, but Parton knew that one of the heaviest things that women wear is the weight of being looked at. She helped make it all a little lighter.
