Amber A’Lee Frost’s Jacobin eulogy for Dolly Parton tells her story through class and labor, anchored in 9 to 5 (1980) and the working-women’s movement that inspired it. Dolly never forgot the poverty of her Tennessee cabin — and never treated anyone as beneath her.
The movie gave voice to the “pink-collar ghetto”:
- Underpaid, overworked, harassed office women, surveilled and stolen from by shitty bosses
- The fantasy office takeover: equal pay, daycare, flex hours, rehiring the unfairly fired
- Jane Fonda produced it after meeting 9to5, National Association of Working Women (Nussbaum and Cassedy, founded while both were Harvard secretaries — later SEIU District 925)
- Organizers used “actions,” not “demonstrations” — too radical a word for their members
Dolly’s labor solidarity was quiet and consistent:
- Nearly sixty years as a card-carrying member of artists’ unions
- Her team “consistently filed AFM union contracts” so bands and studio musicians got union benefits
- On equal pay: “I don’t get out and have to preach it or march in the streets; I write about it”
One of twelve children in a cabin without plumbing or electricity, she sang about work, struggle, poverty, freedom, and being a woman — her acrylic nails clicking out the typewriter percussion on “9 to 5.”
Frost’s closing warning to the left: don’t “Gritty-fy” her. Dolly wasn’t a mascot or a code to crack — she was a brilliant artist and a genuinely good person, loved across America A and America B. “You don’t need a political reason to love Dolly Parton. She’s Dolly. Our Dolly. Woman of the People.”