I have to tell you, as much as I like country music and as much as I sit around and piss and moan about how great it used to be, it’s sometimes very difficult for me to listen to the women of country music. It’s almost a relief that the industry is turning itself into a landing pad for girls that could have been on the Disney channel and washed up rockers, because you don’t have to turn your face too far towards the past before you hear songs that make you realize that “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman” is about the understatement of the century.
I was at the International Country Music Conference this spring and one of the presenters gave a talk about Patsy Cline’s reception in her own home town. If I were to tell you now that there’s opposition to preserving her home and making a museum because of how “trashy” she was, do I even have to tell you that they booed her and made her cry even after she was one of the most famous women in the country? And yet, god damn it, if she didn’t crash a parade in her own home town, her and her band, at the end of it, in her fancy car, driving like they belonged there. Which, of course, they did.
Still, it breaks my heart.
Or the other day someone was talking about how Loretta Lynn’s dad married her off at thirteen to her husband, Mooney, with advice about how to beat her to keep her in line. In Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s book, Finding Her Voice, Lynn says, “After we had kids of our own, Doo [another nickname of Mooney’s] would take a belt to me as quick as he would to one of them,” and “It’s funny how it’s the old hurts that never heal.”
Of course she also said, “He never hit me one time that I didn’t hit him back twice.” But to me that sounds like bravado. But hell, so is getting in your car and joining a parade you’ve been clearly excluded from. Bravado doesn’t exclude action, I guess.
There’s another moment in Finding Her Voice, when Lynn is talking about getting grooming tips from Cline.
“You know, for years my husband wouldn’t let me wear makeup or cut my hair,” Loretta said years later. “To shave my legs, I had the children watch at the doors and the windows in case he came home. He didn’t want it, wouldn’t allow it. But I wanted to do just like Patsy Cline did, to be as pretty as her.”
I’m sitting here right now with legs I haven’t shaved in a week, hair I haven’t cut in a year, and no makeup. And, to me, that’s symbolic of my ability to buck certain gender norms, to have a little freedom from what’s culturally expected of me. But how can there be any doubt that being able to wear make-up and do your hair and shave your legs was a profound symbol of independence for Lynn?
Growing up, I didn’t feel poor. I thought we were middle class. We weren’t the richest folks in the towns we lived in. We weren’t the poorest. But going to college was a revelation about just where I stood in the pecking order, a very unfun revelation. And when I was 27, I got a raise that meant I was making more than my dad made when I was a senior in high school. And I was eating rice for dinner. It’s true that he didn’t have to pay for housing, but I didn’t have three kids.
I don’t know how to explain it, but it threw me for a big loop–making more than my dad and still struggling to get by. It made me feel like he and my mom had sheltered us from a lot, especially about how dependent our whole family had been on my mom working.
And I always thought I would get married to a man I hated.
I know that’s a strange thing to say out loud, but it’s one of the things you learn, if you spend a lot of time in church kitchens (and if you’re a girl of any age and your family was active in the church, back in my day, it meant you were going to spend a lot of women-only time in church kitchens), is that the era of 1974-1996 was full of smart, funny, articulate women who had given birth to your friends, who were tied, through marriage to men who were ruining their lives.
None of these women were feminists.
In fact, that was often very clearly articulated, not only in the familiar “I’m not a feminist, but…” formation, but also in the “Well, I’m not a man-hater like those feminists, but…”
The feminist monster gave room for women to talk about the kind of stuff that would just tear your heart out and to try to figure out what to do about it.
And the women they listened to on the radio, so many of them those great women of country music, seemed to help them make it through, which, to me, feels like a very feminist thing.
I want Loretta Lynn to be a great feminist hero. But I get why she wouldn’t call herself a feminist. Not only because the things that helped liberate her felt like ways to keep me stuck, and visa versa, but because being able to say “I’m not a woman’s libber” gave her a little wiggle room to act like one.