I have to tell you, as much as I like country music and as much as I sit around and piss and moan about how great it used to be, it’s sometimes very difficult for me to listen to the women of country music. It’s almost a relief that the industry is turning itself into a landing pad for girls that could have been on the Disney channel and washed up rockers, because you don’t have to turn your face too far towards the past before you hear songs that make you realize that “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman” is about the understatement of the century.
I was at the International Country Music Conference this spring and one of the presenters gave a talk about Patsy Cline’s reception in her own home town. If I were to tell you now that there’s opposition to preserving her home and making a museum because of how “trashy” she was, do I even have to tell you that they booed her and made her cry even after she was one of the most famous women in the country? And yet, god damn it, if she didn’t crash a parade in her own home town, her and her band, at the end of it, in her fancy car, driving like they belonged there. Which, of course, they did.
Still, it breaks my heart.
Or the other day someone was talking about how Loretta Lynn’s dad married her off at thirteen to her husband, Mooney, with advice about how to beat her to keep her in line. In Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s book, Finding Her Voice, Lynn says, “After we had kids of our own, Doo [another nickname of Mooney's] would take a belt to me as quick as he would to one of them,” and “It’s funny how it’s the old hurts that never heal.”
Of course she also said, “He never hit me one time that I didn’t hit him back twice.” But to me that sounds like bravado. But hell, so is getting in your car and joining a parade you’ve been clearly excluded from. Bravado doesn’t exclude action, I guess.
There’s another moment in Finding Her Voice, when Lynn is talking about getting grooming tips from Cline.
“You know, for years my husband wouldn’t let me wear makeup or cut my hair,” Loretta said years later. “To shave my legs, I had the children watch at the doors and the windows in case he came home. He didn’t want it, wouldn’t allow it. But I wanted to do just like Patsy Cline did, to be as pretty as her.”
I’m sitting here right now with legs I haven’t shaved in a week, hair I haven’t cut in a year, and no makeup. And, to me, that’s symbolic of my ability to buck certain gender norms, to have a little freedom from what’s culturally expected of me. But how can there be any doubt that being able to wear make-up and do your hair and shave your legs was a profound symbol of independence for Lynn?
Growing up, I didn’t feel poor. I thought we were middle class. We weren’t the richest folks in the towns we lived in. We weren’t the poorest. But going to college was a revelation about just where I stood in the pecking order, a very unfun revelation. And when I was 27, I got a raise that meant I was making more than my dad made when I was a senior in high school. And I was eating rice for dinner. It’s true that he didn’t have to pay for housing, but I didn’t have three kids.
I don’t know how to explain it, but it threw me for a big loop–making more than my dad and still struggling to get by. It made me feel like he and my mom had sheltered us from a lot, especially about how dependent our whole family had been on my mom working.
And I always thought I would get married to a man I hated.
I know that’s a strange thing to say out loud, but it’s one of the things you learn, if you spend a lot of time in church kitchens (and if you’re a girl of any age and your family was active in the church, back in my day, it meant you were going to spend a lot of women-only time in church kitchens), is that the era of 1974-1996 was full of smart, funny, articulate women who had given birth to your friends, who were tied, through marriage to men who were ruining their lives.
None of these women were feminists.
In fact, that was often very clearly articulated, not only in the familiar “I’m not a feminist, but…” formation, but also in the “Well, I’m not a man-hater like those feminists, but…”
The feminist monster gave room for women to talk about the kind of stuff that would just tear your heart out and to try to figure out what to do about it.
And the women they listened to on the radio, so many of them those great women of country music, seemed to help them make it through, which, to me, feels like a very feminist thing.
I want Loretta Lynn to be a great feminist hero. But I get why she wouldn’t call herself a feminist. Not only because the things that helped liberate her felt like ways to keep me stuck, and visa versa, but because being able to say “I’m not a woman’s libber” gave her a little wiggle room to act like one.
I despise most country music, though the Blues Brothers did a killer Stand By Your Man.
I was doing some random old school Friday meme some time ago and came across Loretta Lynn singing “The Pill”. The lyrics were interesting and kind of telling. “I’m tearing down your brooder house, cause now I’ve got the pill.”
http://www.musicsonglyrics.com/L/lorettalynnlyrics/lorettalynnthepilllyrics.htm
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I always loved Jeannie C. Riley as the feminine rebel persona, the small-timer standing up in public, flipping the bird, and giving a big Fuck You to everyone around her that wouldn’t give her the respect she deserved.
I also imagine Dolly Parton as a sort-of feminist hero — she was like a living Cinderella, rags-to-riches story, except she did what she wanted and had a damned good sense of humor about it.
[...] Go Check This Feministe Post Posted on September 9, 2009 by Aunt B. Here. [...]
@ Lauren
I too think Dolly Parton is a feminist hero. She started “Dollyworld” in (by?) her hometown to bring income to the residents.
She also set up a foundation that provides all children birthed in her county a free book a month until they’re two. In a place where education or literacy wasn’t the first priority, she’s really helped to change that mentality.
Jesse – It’s “Dollywood,” in Sevier County, Tennessee. The books program Dolly inspired is now statewide in Tennessee and is called “Imagination Library.” It may have expanded to some other locations as well, but this is the one I am aware of, as a native and current Tennessean.
Oooooh, noooooo. None of those women are feminists. Loretta Lynn isn’t even a proto-feminist, IMO. Giving herself wiggle room to resent her lousy husband isn’t feminism; a feminist wouldn’t react to his drinking and cheating by blaming other women (“Fist City,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough”) but would hold him responsible and get him to act better. Her songs are great, great songs, but I hear the same old “men just can’t be expected to act any differently” trope. She is clearly a feisty woman, but not a feminist one.
Same for Tammy Wynette. If you listen to her changing interpretations of “Stand by Your Man” over the years, they start out with her emphasizing a good woman’s door-mat-ness and get stronger (as she herself, over the years, got stronger and left her drunk husband) — but they get stronger by emphasizing “after all, he’s just a man”: as if to say, stick with the guy if you want to, but don’t expect anything more of him. Unlike Loretta, Tammy didn’t write her own songs, and maybe if she had she’d have come up with a revealing follow-up song, but as it was, eh.
Dolly Parton is a lot more complicated as a persona, but she’s on record as saying that women don’t need feminism, just hard work.
If you want proto-feminism in country music you can go back to Patsy Montana (wants to do all the things a cowboy does) or Kitty Wells (who says that women aren’t to blame for men’s bad behavior), but for the first sort-of feminists you need to get to the Jeannies: Jeannie C. Riley and Jean Sealy. ,
Yeah, but isn’t there a point at which you call that feminist triage, even if you can’t quite call it feminism? To say to a woman, even yourself, that you don’t deserve to be treated that way is a big and important first step towards expecting to be treated equally to men.
“And I always thought I would get married to a man I hated.”
YES. It is one of those things that you learn. I was so glad when it finally sunk in that I didn’t have to, thanks to all the women before me.
I don’t know about that — I think it’s weird how utterly Loretta Lynn has disappeared from country music, like, you don’t hear her oldies played on the radio, you don’t hear her hailed like Dolly Parton or long-dead Patsy Cline even though she was *huge*. And I think it’s because her songs were so raw, about being poor and a woman, in ways it’s now sort of publicly impossible to even begin to discuss. I think it relates to the way that, for example, abortion is *never* mentioned as a possible plot twist in any pop culture movies or TV, while it did come up sometimes in the 70s or 80s. Or the way that every single house or apartment in movies or TV these days is upper-class and mobile homes are nothing but comic fodder and anything in between is invisible. One of the more effective anti-feminist (and classist) moves, I think, has been to not argue anymore but to just say, “well, okay, we’re not going to have the lived experience of that be a part of the public conversation anymore”. It’s true that Lynn’s songs were not ideal feminist manifestos. But they were out there, on the radio, hugely popular, saying what a lot of real women felt and lived through. Where has that gone?
oops — cross-posted, I was responding to nm, should have clarified. I agree with Aunt B’s take.
Oh, Kathleen, I’m not defending contemporary mainstream country radio, for sure. But I just don’t see Lynn’s songs as saying — ever — that she didn’t deserve to be treated the way Mooney treated her. She stuck up for herself on a class basis (“Coal Miner’s Daughter”) and she said she wouldn’t put up with some stuff (“The Pill” or “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’”) but she never, ever said that she didn’t deserve it, or that women in general deserved better, or that men deserved to act better. I dunno … maybe in “Hey, Lorettta”? Nowhere else that I can think of offhand.
I do get that it was important for other women to hear that they weren’t the only ones with husbands like that, or with too many children and not enough money, or all the other pictures of real life that she drew so well. But while she presents the situation clearly, she never seems to think that the picture itself can be changed. She never thinks there’s anything wrong with it that can actually be changed.
Kathleen, what a good point! It is like these raw experiences have just been moved right off the public stage. I’m going to have to give that some thought, but yeah, that seems right to me.
I wonder, too, if you can’t see that happening in the twin moves of putting very young women up as stars–even if Carrie Underwood started singing about hard times, I’m not sure it would register in the same way, that it would seem authentic–and moving the focus of the nostalgia characteristic of country music from those great times back on the farm when times were hard (ha, but kind of true) to back when Def Leppard and the Eagles ruled the airwaves.
NM, I don’t know. I’m going to give what you’re saying some time to mull, but I just think there’s something very powerful about saying the truth of your experience out loud and in public. Even if you don’t think anything can or should change. It feels brave to me and it feels like an act of rebellion, like this stuff might happen to you and you might have to take it, but you’re not going to keep silent about it.
nm — I don’t disagree with you exactly, I just think — I’m not sure *I* would ever produce a feminist analysis if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to come across one articulated in a way that resonated with me. When I took intro to women’s studies in college I was curious but spent a lot of time rolling my eyes in the back row because it was so “easy” compared to my science courses and stuff like analyzing sexism in advertising seemed dumb and obvious. But they had us all buy “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and while I started consulting it for straightforward medical tips eventually its way of looking at the world seeped into my head & I was off to the races. I don’t think that’s unusual. I’m not sure Loretta Lynn was rejecting feminism by singing the way she did so much as articulating one part of what makes up the feminist world view even if she wasn’t explicitly on board for the whole package.
Aunt B — I think you are so right, like, a lot of the audience is not going to feel solidarity in the same way (even if they still think the tunes are catchy, and enjoy them) that you do when you know Patsy Cline, or Loretta Lynn, really has lived the anguish she is singing about. The whole process of gutting the possibility of feeling real solidarity — ugh, I don’t need to feel any more paranoid about a lot of pop culture than I already do, so I won’t even finish that thought.
Actually, Dolly is and was a feminist. She just doesn’t like the term, though, and that’s what she’s meant in comments like that — she’s not known for politically correct speech, just plain country talkin’. Regardless, she’s long been on the record as saying women deserve equal treatment and equal pay with men and has complained for decades of how she and other women (then called “Girl Singers”) were mistreated and underpaid by the sexist genre when she was starting out. One of her first singles in the 1960s was “Just Because I’m A Woman,” a song she wrote damning the double standard that accepts men who fool around before marriage but a woman who does it is considered a slut. She wrote the song as her own response to her husband’s reaction when he found out she wasn’t a virgin. And that’s by far not her only song with strong feminist themes. She’s been doing it — and living it — for a long time, so much so that Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine named her its Woman of the Year in 1986 for being such a good example of living feminist ideals. And remember her first Academy Award nomination was from one of the top feminist movies of all time: “9 To 5.” And to top it off, this year she earned a Tony nomination for writing the music and lyrics for the Broadway adaptation of the film, which kept its same core feminist message.
Well, since country radio stations has defined the audience it wants to reach as suburban women in their 30s, expanding into the younger-suburban-girls demographic as well recently, you have to figure that the days of Def Leppard serve precisely the same nostalgic purpose as the old days on the farm used to. And the world Lynn wrote and sang about isn’t the real world for the current desired audience; they would reject it.
The move to suburbia changes things for men singers less than for women, since their dailiness (at least the dailiness of the ways they blow off steam) hasn’t changed nearly as much. So you can keep an Alan Jackson or a George Strait on the charts (though it’s notable that Strait hasn’t put out any songs about cowboys as singles recently) but the women, not so much.
nm — I don’t agree! I mean, sure, not many people are coal miners’ daughters anymore; more like, landscaper’s daughter or photocopier repair guy’s daughter or single mom who is a telemarketer’s daughter. But just because country music has been scrubbed of real anguish doesn’t mean there is no real anguish out there — about class, about the screwy power dynamics of heterosexual relationships. That women are only offered the “spunky” “empowerful” version of how to deal with that in contemporary pop shouldn’t be taken as a description of what women’s lives actually feel like, I don’t think.
Kathleen, I agree completely with your assessment of the empowerful stuff that gets played today. But the reality of the target demographic (by which I mean the listeners the stations are targeting, and not all 30-something suburban women) is that daytime TV, self-help books, and other aspects of popular culture have taught them to want to be empowerful, not empowered. I mean, I don’t think it’s a mythical audience or even an audience that’s complaining that its musical needs for truth aren’t being served, even though that isn’t the entire reality of woman from that place and of that age. Sort of by definition, if real women reject that box they have taken themselves out of the market for the ads that fund the stations, and the stations aren’t going to bother playing anything for them. I’m sure you know that there’s plenty of country music being made for the women who opt out of artificial, unearned uplift. Just not on the radio.
I’m still wrestling with the question of whether someone like Loretta Lynn, who reflects a difficult reality but doesn’t seem to think about changing it, can be considered a feminist. Obviously, she (or her music, anyway) inspired feminists, maybe provoked or awakened feminist responses in others? Is that enough to make her a proto-feminist?
nm — well, it’s a real question. Do we get what we get b/c the market demands it, or do we get what we get because that’s what the market is giving us? In my case I almost always end up listening to pop radio because it’s catchier; it’s true that there is a lot of great alt-country but (where I live at least) it gets played on stations where you also have to listen to a lot of white dude blues, white dude jazz, or whatever weird art music the kids are into these days to get to it. And I’m not enough of a music sophisticate to really seek out my own musical universe — I just think, gosh, I wish when I turned on the radio I got more righteous pop (be it country, hip-hop, dance, whatever) music: catchy but also socially smart. So is that not being played for me because I am a teeny weird demographic of one, or is that not being played for me cause the System doesn’t like socially smart commentary in its pop for the masses? Like I actually don’t feel sure what the answer to that question is.
I’d say Lynn is a feminist. She has been quoted saying that many of her songs are about opposing double standards based on sex. t
I am not so sure that Lynn supports the notion that women are always at fault when a man strays. The allusions in her songs to a wife’s physical violence against “the other woman” always struck me as kind of macho. It is the opposite of a double standard. Lynn (who was herself at times violent against women who were after her husband) is acting the way a possessive man might act towards someone hitting on his wife. I don’t condone violence based on sexual jealousy or possessiveness at all by anyone, but I think that in a weird kind of way Lynn is just acting the way the men around her act towards sexual rivals.
First, thank you for this.
I’m trans.
I’m a woman.
I’m a woman who is learning a lot of this on personal level, despite having learned it all second hand, watching the same lessons color the life of a woman I admired.
Including the part about marrying a man you hate. Which I will talk about more in a moment.
Probably helped she was my mom, of course, lol.
At one point, you said this: “But how can there be any doubt that being able to wear make-up and do your hair and shave your legs was a profound symbol of independence for Lynn?”.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is a predominantly cis space.
But so you know, when I saw that, I said “yeah — that’s why I do it.”
Aloud.
On to the marryinga man you hate — yes. THis has been a bit of a worry of mine – since befor eI conscioulsy new I would trnasition, as my other did that herself.
Three times.
And I vowed, privately, secretly, to never do that. Nor to ever let a man determine my sense of self worth or value.
And I’ve learned its harder than I thought it would be.
I point out on my own blog often that I am not a feminist, because in the past when I have, I’ve been told I can’t be, or that this idea of mine is wrong, or that idea of mine is wrong. I’ve been told I can’t be a womanist because I’m not dark enough, or I’m too educated, or — well, you get the idea. Just easier for me to say I’m not.
I’m not sayng this as condemnation, I’m relating an experience.
In the end, for me, being a woman of independent spirit and freedom is what matters to me — after a lifetime of one kind of oppression, where I’m going now looks to be heaven.
Dyssonance, I’m really grateful that you commented, because you do a better job of getting at one of the things I’m trying to get at–that the things we do or don’t do have tremendously different meanings to individual women depending on where we’re situated.
And when we don’t keep that in the front of our minds, we, at the least, misunderstand each other in ways that hurt the women who we should be working with.
I think it is dangerous for any woman to declare other women “not feminists”- this is really counter-feminist, right?
It is hard for me to read this post and several of these comments that aren’t considerate of time or space. Pushing a current and *incredibly* subjective and personal definition of feminism on women who lived in a completely different time and space lacks critical thought.