Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton: Two Very Different Feminists, Their Legacy and the Work Before Us

A special episode to mark the deaths of two feminist icons three weeks apart: Dolly Parton on 25 August, aged 80, and Gloria Steinem on 2 September, aged 92. One the soundtrack of a generation, the other the face of a movement. Both, in their way, women who gave the money back.

Kavita knew Gloria, most recently over dinner at her townhouse on the Lower East Side just before Christmas.

Sanam and Kavita take this opportunity in remembering these two icons to asses where feminism is at the it's role to play in this time of great global change.

In all the tributes Kavita sees something uncomfortable about how we grieve now: that the wall of photographs of ourselves with the famous dead has become as much about us as about them, and she is trying consciously not to do it. She also notices who was largely missing from the tributes, and what that absence says about whose feminism got told as the story.

Kavita teaching a course this autumn called Feminism Remains Foreign, and the title works in two directions. Foreign to the West, which still cannot see feminism outside its own frame: abortion is still illegal in Germany, women could not hold their own bank accounts in parts of Switzerland within living memory. And foreign in the other sense, the way women's organising everywhere else gets dismissed as a Western import the moment it asks for anything.

Sanam grew up with the other version. In 1970s Iran, public sector workers had equal pay and abortion was legal, and the word feminism was barely needed. When she looks at the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the headline says Eleanor Roosevelt. Read below the headline and it was Latin American, Indian, Pakistani and Arab women who insisted the word "women" appear at all.

The heart of the conversation is culture. Both hosts argue against ceding it. Sanam on the lawyers who told her culture was the enemy and only law could deliver rights, and why that is exactly the logic that lost Roe. Kavita on Sakena Yacoobi, who asked an imam's wife and daughter to come and teach what the Quran says about women's dignity, and on Leymah Gbowee beginning to untie her turban in Ghana. Sanam on the church elders in Sierra Leone who bared themselves to the RUF, and on the women's societies in Cameroon that the British never thought to dismantle because they only ever looked at the men's.

They disagree with Gloria too, openly, on sex work. And they end on bodies: on Gloria who never stopped feeling like th