Loretta Lynn and the Case for Southern Feminism

On Tuesday, when the news began circulating that Loretta Lynn had died, my friend Tara (a Southern literature scholar and poet) posted a link to Lynn’s song “The Pill.”

I knew her songs were radical in a lot of ways, but I was still surprised to hear this feminist anthem from the early 1970s. Even before she died, it was getting more attention after Roe fell and Clarence Thomas argued the Court should reconsider the due process rights to birth control access (the pill wasn’t universally available until the Court’s 1972 ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird ).

Lynn wrote the song that same year, but her label held it back until 1975. Even then, country music stations were reluctant to play it. But it became a crossover hit, and eventually the highest charting pop single of her career.

In the song, she laments that marriage hasn’t lived up to her husband’s promises to show her the world: “But all I’ve seen of this old world/Is a bed and a doctor bill” because of her multiple pregnancies. But now that she has the pill, she’s tearing down the house, getting rid of her maternity clothes, and going out on the town, just like her husband. (The lyrics about ditching the maternity wear are fabulous: “This old maternity dress I’ve got/Is goin’ in the garbage/The clothes I’m wearin’ from now on/Won’t take up so much yardage”).

The song is an anthem to sexual liberation, calling out men for leaving women at home to do all the work while they’re out enjoying sex and pleasure. I love that Lynn suggests women go out and have as much fun as the men are having: “It’s getting’ dark it’s roostin’ time/Tonight’s too good to be real/Oh, but daddy don’t you worry none/’Cause mama’s got the pill.” The pill levels the playing field, and opens the world up for women.

I’m not sure Lynn has the feminist icon status of say, Dolly Parton, but nonetheless it’s important to recognize the feminist work her songs did, especially when rural women were being left out of national women’s rights movements (as she documents in the 1971 song “One’s On the Way”: “​​The girls in New York City, they all march for women’s lib/And Better Homes and Gardens shows the modern way to live/And the pill may change the world tomorrow/But meanwhile today/Here in Topeka, the flies are a-buzzing/The dog is a-barking/And the floor needs a scrubbing/One needs a spanking/And one needs a hugging, Lord/One’s on the way”).

Lynn herself had four children before she was 20. She was born in 1932 in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in a coal-mining area (made famous in her song “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and later the 1980 film by the same name). Her songs are clearly rooted in Southern, rural places. Thinking about her as a Southern feminist, or at the very least considering her songs as Southern feminist songs, is important work, especially right now as many Southern states ban abortion and people outside the region describe it as Gilead, from The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Problem South, or Southern exceptionalism, is nothing new (when I moved to South Carolina a decade ago from Oregon, some West Coasters were aghast, “but that’s where the racism is!,” without reflecting on the not-accidental demographics of that state being 90% white). After Trump, Southern exceptionalism in relation to race seems to have fallen away somewhat as Americans fully grapple with the reality of racism being (obviously) a national problem.

In her 2017 article “No Place for a Feminist: Intersectionality and the Problem South,” Southern sociologist Wanda Rushing makes the case that this tendency to paint the region with large patriarchal brushstrokes erases the actual history of feminist work in the region. Since Roe fell, I see the same trend resurfacing, that the South is where the patriarchy is, a backwards place of women quietly accepting their fate as they shuffle meekly into churches.

This, of course, is not the case. The South encompasses a wide and endlessly complex swath of local communities fighting for rights on all levels. There are feminist spaces here, and queer spaces, and Southern women who for a long time have been explaining what women here need. Rushing makes the case that we should more deliberately consider place as component of intersectional identity—along with race, class, gender, sexuality, and others. This would mean, rather than dismissing the South as a place inherently backwards or unenlightened, we value it as a space constituting local knowledge systems and ways of being.

This would allow us to redirect our ire where it more appropriately belongs: the corrupt politicians and local elites that block democratic, anti-racist and feminist progress in the name of religion and their own greedy self-interest. We’ll do more to fight them if we insist on imagining the South as a place for feminism too.