Half a Chance: What Dolly and Gloria Taught Us About Claiming Our Own Power

This is the second week in a row that this has happened. I have the draft of a musing; it is almost complete. And then there is death in the outside world that causes me to rethink my original premise. That turns my thoughts upside down and inside out.

Last week my musing started as a diatribe around women contorting their feet into high heels (you can read it here) and then Dolly Parton died. And so, instead of a diatribe about high heels, I mused on the notion that we should have the freedom to choose what fits.

And this week? I had wanted to share the story of how my fourteen years with a Fortune 200 printing company ended. How on my very last day, one of the men who had reluctantly reported to me in my role as manufacturing supervisor looked me straight in the eye and said, “You would have been good if we gave you half a chance.”

It stung because I knew exactly what he meant. Upper management may have supported me, but on the manufacturing floor, being a woman in authority was another matter entirely.

Yet I’ll save that topic for another day, for what upended that musing was another death. The world lost Gloria Steinem.

What struck me was how dissimilar Dolly and Gloria were.

Two highly influential women who, in their own unique and very different ways, lived into using their unique strengths to lift others.

• Dolly used her singing voice; Gloria used her way with words.

• Dolly was soft and approachable; Gloria was fierce and challenged the status quo.

• Dolly operated within the system; Gloria strove to change the system.

Yet, in spite of their differences, they shared many similarities.

• Both claimed their agency, owning their truths, and changing the world.

• Both named the things shunned by our culture – poverty, acceptance, sexism.

• Both made an indelible mark on the world.

Perhaps the most fundamental thing they shared was that they created something better. They didn’t just talk about injustices like poverty and sexism. Dolly created a musical empire that she controlled, all within a male-dominated industry.  Gloria created a women’s movement, a magazine, and a place for women to give voice to a vision of a more equitable world.

They changed the world through their actions, and both used story to convince, connect, and shift perceptions. Steinem used journalism and personal narrative to illuminate social structures. Parton used songs—often deceptively simple ones—to illuminate poverty, class, work, motherhood, heartbreak, ambition and women's lives.

Both empowered women, but in strikingly different ways. Gloria challenged the feminine script. Dolly played with it.

Steinem questioned expectations about marriage, beauty, domesticity, sexuality and women's dependence on men. Her public presence said, in effect: Women don't have to live according to the rules we've inherited.

Parton's approach was almost mischievously different. She embraced exaggerated femininity—towering hair, rhinestones, high heels, curves, makeup—and simultaneously refused to surrender authority.

She didn't reject the stereotype. She appropriated it.

Steinem made power visible. Parton sometimes hid power in plain sight.

Their relationship with feminism is another intriguing difference

Steinem became one of the most recognizable faces of American feminism. Her life's work was explicitly political and structural: reproductive freedom, equal rights, workplace equality, racial justice and women's political power.

Parton has generally resisted political labels and partisan positioning. She rarely presents herself as an activist in the Steinem mold. Yet many of her choices embody principles associated with women's liberation: financial independence, creative ownership, freedom from conventional expectations about motherhood, professional ambition, and the right to define herself.

Thinking about these two powerful women, so different yet so similar, has caused me to pause.

Is changing systems more powerful than demonstrating, through your own life, that those systems don't get to define you?

Gloria gained influence by being willing to make people uncomfortable.

Dolly gained influence by making people comfortable without making herself smaller.

Both approaches can change the world. Their lives, played out in different ways, suggest something less binary.

Women can claim power through confrontation or connection.

Through activism or art.

Through rejecting expectations or playing joyfully with them.

Through marching in sensible shoes or walking onto a stage in five-inch heels.

There is no single right way to be a powerful woman.

Instead, it might be:

How many different ways are there for a woman to become fully, unapologetically herself—and in doing so make more room for the women who follow?

Which brings me back to that man on the manufacturing floor: “You would have been good if we gave you half a chance.”

Maybe that's another lesson Dolly and Gloria leave us.

Don't wait for someone else to give you half a chance. Create your own.

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