Two Feminist Icons Died Eight Days Apart.

What Happens When the Generation That Remembers Is Gone?

Dolly Parton died on August 25. Gloria Steinem died eight days later.

At first glance, they seem like an unlikely pairing. Steinem became one of the most recognizable faces of the American women’s movement, confronting sexism directly through journalism, organizing, politics and the creation of Ms. magazine. Parton rarely used the language of feminism. She built her career through music, entertainment, business and philanthropy.

For more than half a century, both women expanded what female independence could look like. Steinem said it out loud. Parton lived it in plain sight.

Their deaths within days of each other arrive at an interesting moment. An entire generation of younger women has grown up with many of the freedoms these women helped normalize, without necessarily knowing how recently those freedoms were contested.

That may be one of the paradoxes of successful cultural change: once progress becomes ordinary enough, we stop seeing the struggle that made ordinary life possible.

Two Different Methods, One Result

Steinem attacked the architecture directly. She helped create Ms. because women needed more than representation inside media institutions built largely by men. They needed editorial authority over what counted as a women’s issue in the first place. Her method was institutional confrontation.

Parton worked through culture rather than movement politics. 9 to 5 turned workplace exploitation, harassment and unequal power into a song people could sing in the car. The song and film were tied directly to the concerns of clerical workers organizing against office exploitation, while Parton’s own career became an example of creative ownership and business autonomy.

One challenged the institution. The other demonstrated what female autonomy could look like inside institutions that had historically limited it. Steinem helped redefine what women were entitled to demand. Parton helped redefine what a woman could control.

She did not look less feminine in order to look powerful. She made femininity irrelevant to the question of whether she had power. The hair stayed. The rhinestones stayed. The nails stayed.

And so did the ownership.

The Generation That Inherited the Victory

When I talk with students in their twenties, many understand feminism as a contemporary identity, political position or social issue. Far fewer know the history behind a phrase like “women’s liberation.” “Women’s lib” can sound like something from an old television show. Rosie is merchandise. Ms. magazine is something they can Google. 9 to 5 is a song.

That is not an indictment of them. The culture stopped explaining the conflict because so many of its outcomes had become normal.

One measure of a successful social movement is that the conditions it fought for eventually begin to feel ordinary: women working, controlling their own income, going to professional schools and running companies.

A 2025 survey (EduBirdie, 2025) found that 36 percent of Gen Z men believed gender equality had already been fully achieved in the workplace. A separate international study (Ipsos/King’s College London, 2025) found that 57 percent of Gen Z men and 36 percent of Gen Z women believed society had gone so far on equality that it now discriminates against men.

Put those numbers next to the obituaries of Steinem and Parton and the coincidence is hard to ignore. The women who helped build the case are gone. A meaningful share of the generation that inherited the result no longer believes there was much of a case to build.

My own 2008 graduate paper at UCLA includes a TIME quote from 1961 that feels almost jarring now. Radcliffe president Mary Bunting described American girls as growing up in a “climate of unexpectation.” Adults, she observed, asked boys what they wanted to become. They asked girls where they got their pretty dresses.

That was not ancient history. Gloria Steinem was 27. Dolly Parton was 15.

A woman getting a job her mother or grandmother might have been excluded from no longer registers as a social victory. It registers as Tuesday.

That is how history becomes wallpaper.

It is not erased. It is absorbed so completely into ordinary life that younger audiences can experience the result without recognizing the conflict that produced it.

From a media-psychology perspective, that matters because we do not continually reassess everything we see. We learn cultural patterns, internalize them and eventually experience them as normal. Successful change can therefore produce a strange perceptual effect: progress becomes harder to see precisely because it succeeded in becoming ordinary.

Neither Steinem nor Parton solved gender inequality. Neither represented every woman. Feminism itself has expanded well beyond the mostly white, middle-class second-wave movement most associated with Steinem’s generation. But both women expanded the imaginable, and both assumed, perhaps reasonably, that the argument would remain legible after them.

That is less certain now. The generation coming after them has inherited the results, but it cannot automatically inherit the history. That has to be told again.

WITI Took the Lead

Carolyn Leighton, founder of WITI, watched that dynamic up close. When she booked Gloria Steinem as the first keynote speaker at WITI’s inaugural conference in 1995, more than 1,250 people showed up to hear her, at a moment when Steinem rarely appeared at technology industry events at all.

History, however, is only one part of what gets inherited. The other is a set of cultural codes, the mostly unconscious signals that tell us what authority, competence, femininity and power are supposed to look like.

In 2008, that was the question I was asking about American media. Eighteen years later, representation has changed considerably, but the cultural grammar underneath it has changed more slowly.

Lieberman MediaPsy – Women in Media Time Magazine Study (2008)