One gave us a better way to navigate the world. The other wrote songs that imagined a bigger one. But Gladys Mae West and Dolly Parton had something else in common: they outsmarted the stereotypes waiting for them.
From GPS to Jolene
Last week’s death of Dolly Parton and hearing the story of her roots got me thinking about another little Southern woman we lost earlier this year—Dr. Gladys Mae West. Now, Gladys Mae West and Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean are probably two names you wouldn’t expect to hear strung together in a sentence, much less an essay. But stay with me.
I’d like to offer you a bit of knowledge about these two super women and who they became because of stereotypes.
Dr. Gladys Mae West and Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean, both products of rural America, both faced stereotypes as obstacles to their success, and both understood education made a difference. Both changed the world.
First, a little bit about Dr. West.
Gladys Mae Brown was born in 1930 in rural Dinwiddie County, Virginia. This was Jim Crow Virginia. And America had a picture of a Black girl from the South: ignorant, incapable, intellectually inferior. So, opportunities for a Negro girl were limited. Her options were working in the tobacco fields, growing corn or cotton, or finding a position in the local tobacco-processing factory.
Gladys Mae wanted something different. Education or book-learning called to her at an early age. She excelled in school, became valedictorian of her high-school class, and earned a scholarship to Virginia State College, now Virginia State University. There she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1952 and her master’s in mathematics in 1955.
Think about those dates. She was fighting for higher education before Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. Segregation ruled the land as she pursued higher degrees in mathematics.
In 1956, she was hired as a mathematician at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was the second Black woman hired there and one of only four Black professional employees at the facility. This was her big break in science. Gladys Mae became a programmer working on computers and sophisticated data satellites. In the 1960s, she helped study the relationship between Pluto and Neptune and worked on satellite ocean-monitoring projects.
West used complex algorithms that accounted for gravitational, tidal, and other forces, and programmed an IBM 7030 computer to produce accurate mathematical models that became crucial to satellite geodesy and the precision of GPS.
She worked at Dahlgren for 42 years. When she retired, she returned to school and earned a doctorate at Virginia Tech at age 70. This is a stupendous accomplishment for the girl who could have spent her life in a tobacco factory.
It becomes extraordinary knowing that every time you pull out your phone and ask for directions or track a package, you’ve touched Dr. Gladys Mae West’s technology.
When a plane finds its route, a ship crosses an ocean, an ambulance finds an address, your Uber or Lyft or Instacart finds you, it’s because of the little lady who didn’t let Jim Crow stereotypes stop her.
Now that Other little Southern Lady
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946 in rural Tennessee, one of twelve children.
Her family was poor. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, couldn’t read or write. America had a stereotype for her, too: the poor, uneducated Appalachian hillbilly.
But Dolly learned to read and write, and when she encountered the town tramp, she wasn’t reviled by this Appalachian woman. She was intrigued by her beauty and red fingernails. As Dr. Gladys Mae pushed away from the stereotypes, Dolly leaned in. She took that stereotype, put it in heels, added rhinestones, teased its hair toward the heavens, made it work for her, and started a music career.
At age 10 she began writing songs and performing publicly. At age 13, she performed at the Grand Ole Opry and was introduced by Johnny Cash. She received 3 encores. After high school, she moved to Nashville to pursue music full-time and landed a spot on the Porter Wagner show in 1967. This gave her the opportunity to perform on TV and to continue developing her songwriting talents. We know her for “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “9 to 5,” and “I Will Always Love You.”
“I Will Always Love You,” written as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1974. Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston recorded her famous cover for The Bodyguard in 1992, and it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1992.
Whitney Houston’s recording became one of the biggest-selling singles in music history. Dolly, who wrote the song and retained publishing rights, received royalties, some of which she donated to charities and invested in Black Nashville neighborhoods. Dolly is one of the most charitable singers in the world, having given through her foundation, the Imagination Library, money to provide free books directly into the hands of children.
What began in one Tennessee county grew across the United States and then beyond it. Today the program operates in five countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Republic of Ireland—and distributes more than two million free books every month.
Hundreds of millions of books have gone into children’s hands.
Two southern women have both impacted the world. They understood how stereotypes can hinder a career and then plotted paths to succeed. So one confronted the stereotype with quiet mathematical precision. The other dressed the stereotype in rhinestones and laughed all the way to the bank.
Just two little dreamers who understood the same fundamental truth:
Your beginnings may describe where you started.
They do not have to determine where you end.
That’s sort of sounds like how a writer writes a novel. So if Dr. Gladys Mae and Dolly can dream big, what’s stopping you?
By the time you hear this podcast, Book Number 32, Murder in St. James’s Park, will be out in the world.
This is the next installment in the Lady Worthing Mystery Series.
Lady Worthing has been experiencing a few marital difficulties.
Let’s just say…
That might not be the case by the end of this book. Check it out. Order it where books are sold. Tell your library about it. Request it. Read it. Talk about it.
And then come back and tell me what you think.
And Bookmiser has a few signed copies of Fire Sword and Sea and Murder in St. James’s Park.
You can also try one of my partners in the fight, bookstores large and small, who are in the trenches with me.
You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.
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