What Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem Taught Us About Authenticity
From an episode of Sessions with Sara Cate and Ashley
There's a moment when you're in the presence of someone deeply authentic where you just feel it. You can't always name what's happening, but your nervous system knows. It's not about what they're saying. It's about the way their voice, their body, and their whole presence line up with who they actually are.
That's what came up when Ashley and I sat down to talk about two women who couldn't be more different on the surface: Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem. Different as they are, they share something rare, an authenticity so embodied you can feel it before you can explain it.
Authenticity Isn't a Performance
Dolly Parton has spent decades being underestimated because of how she looks: the wig, the rhinestones, the persona. But underneath all of that is a woman who has never once pretended to be anyone other than herself. Gloria Steinem built a movement not by shouting the loudest, but by speaking from a place so grounded in her own truth that people couldn't help but listen.
Neither of them is authentic because she fits a mold. They're authentic because there's no gap between the inside and the outside. What you see is what's actually there, and that congruence is what we mean when we talk about embodiment in this work. Authenticity isn't a mindset or a message. It lives in the body, in the voice, in the nervous system. You can feel it in a room the same way you can feel when something is off, even if you can't say why.
Carrying Their Voices Forward
Part of what makes women like this so powerful is that they didn't invent themselves out of nothing. They were shaped by the women who came before them: mothers, grandmothers, mentors, a whole quiet lineage of women who spoke their truth however they could, even when it cost them something.
When we talk about carrying someone's voice forward, we don't mean imitating it. We mean letting it live inside us as a kind of permission. Every time we really witness someone else's authenticity, in our bodies and not just intellectually, it gets a little easier to trust our own. Dolly and Gloria hand that down, whether or not they ever meet the person receiving it.
Your Ancestors Already Gave You Permission
This is where the conversation turned inward for us. We can pull from our ancestors, not just the ones we're related to by blood, but anyone whose authenticity left a mark on us, and use that as fuel. Not to become them, but to remember that being fully, unapologetically ourselves has always been possible. Someone has already done it. Someone has already survived being fully seen.
That's a different kind of inheritance than the one we usually talk about in this work. It's not trauma passed down. It's permission passed down, just as real and just as embodied, and just as available to lean on when your own voice feels shaky.
Your Voice Is Still Expanding
Here's the part we don't want you to miss: authenticity isn't a destination. Dolly and Gloria didn't arrive at themselves and stop. Their voices have kept growing, shifting, and expanding across decades of living, and that's true for all of us too. The version of your authentic voice you have access to today isn't the final version. It's just the one you're living from right now.
You get to keep growing it. Keep listening to what's true in your body, let that shape how you show up, and trust that the process doesn't end. Every ancestor's voice you carry, every moment of embodied truth you witness in someone else, and every time you choose to speak from where you actually are instead of where you think you should be: that's you expanding your own authentic voice in the world.
Listen to the full conversation on Sessions with Sara Cate and Ashley, available on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes.
Sessions with Sara Cate and Ashley is a wellness and mental health podcast hosted by Sara Cate Moser and Dr. Ashley Zimmerman, exploring human emotions, healing, body-mind awareness, and the difficult or uncomfortable parts of the human experience. New episodes drop bi-weekly on Mondays.
You may also like…
