One embraced the word feminist, one refused it: Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem fought the same battle in opposite ways

One of them wrote the vocabulary of modern feminism. The other refused the label outright, then spent a lifetime demonstrating what it looked like in practice, rhinestones and all.

Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton died eight days apart, and their deaths have set off a wave of grief that has crossed generations and continents. Between them they represented two versions of a single proposition: that a woman should know herself well enough to make her own decisions, in private life and in public. Their passing has left many asking who steps into that space next.

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Steinem was explicitly political. She went undercover as a Playboy bunny to report from the inside, founded Ms Magazine, and built a career around persuading women to back one another. Parton took the opposite route, casting herself as a storyteller from the American South whose songs made room for everyone, while declining to take political sides or accept the feminist label.

"Dolly taught us to dream big. Gloria taught us to speak up," wrote DeMond B Nason, a New York City singer, adding that both had shown a woman could reject the identity handed to her and choose another.

Steinem claimed her decades ago

Parton never accepted the connection publicly. Steinem made it anyway, and she made it early.

Writing in 1987, when Ms Magazine named Parton one of its Women of the Year, Steinem argued that if feminism meant locating your own power and helping other women locate theirs, the singer qualified on both counts.

That framing has held up. Swati Narayan, writing in American Kahani, an outlet serving Indian and South Asian Americans, said both women trusted women to decide who they were and to look after each other.

Ms Magazine republished Steinem's 1987 essay in the window between Parton's death on August 25 and Steinem's on September 2. An editor's note described Parton as a shrewd businesswoman who turned femininity into a source of humour and leverage, and who directed her earnings towards working women, poor communities and the people of her native Tennessee.

Why Parton said no

Parton's refusal of the label was deliberate, and she explained it more than once.

"I don't do politics. I have too many fans on both sides of the fence," she said in 2019 on Radiolab's podcast Dolly Parton's America. She had opinions, she said, but had learned long ago to keep them to herself.

Asked directly whether she was a feminist, she said no. She did not want to be attached to what she saw as political extremes, she explained, even as she argued for women and their prospects. To her, she said, the word had come to sound like a rejection of men.

Her songs said otherwise. She wrote about teenage pregnancy, abortion and adoption in "Down from Dover". She backed equal pay. One of her best-known records is titled "Just Because I'm a Woman".

She was also clear-eyed that the industry she entered had been run by men, though she declined to describe it in the language of grievance. Asked at a 2019 awards show whether it had been a man's world when she started, she agreed that it had, and said she had enjoyed herself anyway.

Words like oppression and patriarchy stayed out of her vocabulary. So did endorsements. During the 2016 campaign, asked on CNN to choose between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, she said she thought both were nuts. At the 2017 Emmys, when her "9 to 5" co-stars Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda aimed a barely disguised jab at Trump, Parton deflected into a joke. They did their thing, she said afterwards, and she did hers.

A movement that has since splintered

The years since have been hard on the coalition Steinem helped assemble. Fights over abortion policy, Clinton's defeat in 2016, Trump's rise and the arrival of identity politics all pulled at it.

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Steinem's version of feminism now sits closer to the Democratic Party at a moment when American politics has moved right. She lived to see the Supreme Court strike down Roe v Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion that her generation had treated as foundational. The Equal Rights Amendment is still unratified. The United States has still not elected a woman president.

Her position never changed: the label was beside the point. What mattered was whether a woman knew herself well enough to make her own choices instead of being defined as somebody's wife or daughter.

Even the mourning split along party lines

The divide showed up in how the two deaths were received. Parton's drew tributes from across the spectrum, from Trump to her fans in the LGBTQ+ community. Trump ordered flags flown at half-staff in her honour.

Steinem's did not travel as far. Two days on, there had been little acknowledgement from conservatives who had previously credited her as a significant historical figure. On the left, particularly among her own generation, the response was immediate. Hillary Clinton, who had also paid tribute to Parton, said Steinem's activism rested on optimism maintained in the face of obstacle after obstacle.

(With inputs from AP)