The Intertwined Legacies of Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Barbaro** (0:31)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:36)
Hi, this is Rachel Abrams from The New York Times.

**Letty Cottin Pogrebin** (0:39)
Hi Rachel.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:40)
Thank you for making time to speak with us.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:42)
I'm sorry for your loss.

**Letty Cottin Pogrebin** (0:44)
Thank you. Big one. Big, big one.

**Michael Barbaro** (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 Cottin Pogrebin.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:00)
How did you first hear about the news of Gloria's passing?

**Letty Cottin Pogrebin** (1:04)
Robin called me at 6:44 a.m. and I was scared to take the call. And it was Gloria.
You know, I thought it might be God forbid someone in my family, then I realized she was my family.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:18)
She was your family.

**Letty Cottin Pogrebin** (1:20)
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 3 in the morning.
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 the tragedy, comedy, and meaning.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:07)
Word of Steinem's death came as many Americans were still grieving the loss of another iconic woman, Dolly Parton.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:17)
Dolly Parton passed away today.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:18)
She's such an exceptional singer.

**Letty Cottin Pogrebin** (2:20)
Beautiful voice.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:21)
To me, she was kind of like a guiding light. She's kind of like our matriarch, our country's queen in a sense.

**SPEAKER_8** (2:30)
And she just has always been good and just embodies good, reflects good back to people. And I think that that's so important.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:40)
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.
Hey Sue.

**Susan Dominus** (3:14)
Hi Michael.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:16)
I think it's fair to say it's been a tough week and a half.

**Susan Dominus** (3:19)
I think it's fair to say it's been pretty emotional for a lot of people. Yeah.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:23)
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.

**Susan Dominus** (3:36)
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 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.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:21)
And in a lot of cases, achieving it.

**Susan Dominus** (4:23)
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, 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.