Dolly, Lindsay and Good Good Being Bad Bad

Dolly Parton, the Lindsay Clancy Case, and Patriarchal Golf Companies… What Do They Have in Common?

If you haven’t heard already, the beautiful soul Dolly Parton passed away yesterday. Her death came after weeks of women reliving their own postpartum suffering while watching the Lindsay Clancy case unfold—and on the same day a painfully stupid golf ad depicting violence against a woman made its way onto our screens.

Women are pissed.

And we have every right to be.

Dolly said, in effect: This body is mine. My femininity is mine. I get to decide what being a woman looks like.

Dolly seemed to understand firsthand the paradoxes of being a woman and the judgment that comes with refusing to fit neatly into one category. She was a feminist icon who knew how to play the game while simultaneously telling complicated stories about women long before our culture had language for many of their experiences.

On the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, Dolly talks about writing what she called a lot of “sad-ass songs”—so many that the first episode is appropriately titled “Sad Ass Songs.”1

One of those songs was “Daddy Come and Get Me,” which was inspired by a woman in Dolly’s own family—an aunt who, in Dolly’s words, was married to a man who “drove her crazy.” After his infidelity caused her tremendous emotional distress, her husband had her committed to a psychiatric institution, turning her heartbreak into something that was treated as pathology.

Then there is “Down from Dover,” in which Dolly writes from the perspective of a young unmarried woman who becomes pregnant, is rejected by her family because of the shame surrounding her pregnancy, abandoned by the baby’s father, and ultimately gives birth to a stillborn baby.

Dolly considered “Down from Dover” among her best songs, yet country radio largely refused to play it. What made the song so controversial wasn’t that a baby died. It was that the woman was unmarried and pregnant.

These songs were written more than 50 years ago, yet they wrestle with questions we are still asking today:

Which brings me to Lindsay Clancy.

The Clancy case has women everywhere remembering just how hard postpartum was for them, too. It asks a terrifying question: What happens to a woman’s mind and body when postpartum overwhelms her—and do our systems actually know how to recognize and care for a woman in severe psychiatric crisis?

This case has me shaken with a kind of ragey sadness as testimony exposes the cracks in Lindsay’s care, her deteriorating mental state, and the complexity of what was happening around her.

I am not going to speculate about her criminal responsibility. That is for the court to determine.

What I want to talk about is the suffering that came before the crime.

Lindsay was a mother suffering profoundly in the postpartum period. She experienced debilitating insomnia, anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, and suicidal thinking. She repeatedly sought psychiatric help, went through numerous medication changes, and even voluntarily hospitalized herself—and yet her mental health continued to deteriorate.

Whether she was experiencing postpartum psychosis at the time of her children’s deaths is being litigated in court. But what isn’t debatable is that she was a postpartum woman in tremendous psychological distress who was trying to get help.

This case is extraordinarily complicated, and I don’t pretend to know everything about it—or even everything about postpartum psychosis. Perinatal and reproductive mental health is a highly specialized area of psychology, as it should be.

My deepest understanding of this particular corner of women’s mental health comes from my own lived experience.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I experienced extreme anxiety throughout my pregnancy after surviving a complicated and traumatic first pregnancy involving a life-threatening placental abruption.

I was lucky.

My OB-GYN saw through my rising blood pressure and recognized that something more was happening. She had recently started a reproductive psychology program at Kaiser in San Diego and enrolled me as one of her patients. That meant I was monitored more closely and given an hour at each of my appointments to check not only on my baby, but on me and my mental health.

I will forever be grateful that she saw all of me, not just the pregnant part.

I think this is part of why so many mothers see pieces of themselves in Lindsay Clancy’s story.

Not because we imagine harming our children.

But because many of us remember the intrusive thoughts. The anxiety that felt too enormous for one nervous system to carry. The depression. The sleep deprivation. The crushing responsibility of realizing that tiny human beings depended on us to stay alive while we ourselves were bleeding, hormonal, exhausted, overwhelmed, and trying to recognize the person looking back at us in the mirror.

Again, I was lucky.

My mother came and lived with my husband and me for a month after I gave birth. She took care of all of us. She cooked. She cleaned. She made sure I ate. And my husband grocery shopped and made dinner, just as he had before we had children, because frankly, he’s better at it than I am.

There is one memory from my second postpartum period that still haunts me.

I was sitting in the backseat of my car between my toddler and newborn. We were parked in front of H&M, about to shop for loose clothes that might feel comfortable on my wonky postpartum body.

Suddenly, I felt panic rise through me.

I felt the weight of being responsible for these two tiny humans while my aching breast produced milk on demand and my most intimate body parts were being held together with a few stitches.

“Mom, I can’t do this,” I said.

She turned around from the driver’s seat, locked eyes with me, and said:

“Yes, you can. And I’m here. Nothing bad is going to happen. I got you.”

And something shifted.

The panic passed because, in that moment, I remembered:

I wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t entirely up to me to keep everyone safe.

Someone was keeping me safe, too.

Every postpartum woman deserves that.

And if she doesn’t have a mother, sister, partner, friend, or community capable of showing up that way, then I believe we should have systems designed to help provide it—especially if we’re going to call ourselves “pro-life.”

Countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Iceland have built policies around the understanding that raising a baby isn’t solely a mother’s private responsibility. Paid parental leave, leave for fathers and partners, affordable childcare, and broader family supports make it possible for more people to participate in caring for a new family.

Research backs this up. A 2023 systematic review published in The Lancet Public Health examined 45 studies and found that more generous parental leave—particularly longer and paid leave—was generally associated with better maternal mental health, including fewer depressive symptoms, less psychological distress, and less burnout.2

Supporting mothers isn’t just good for women. It’s good for entire families and societies.

Postpartum care in America didn’t become isolating overnight. It happened gradually as birth moved from the home and community into the medical system.

Over the last century, we have increasingly medicalized birth while privatizing postpartum—sending women home during one of the most physically, hormonally, and psychologically vulnerable transitions of their lives and expecting individual families to figure out the rest. While other cultures have long recognized something we in the U.S. seemed to have forgotten:

After a woman gives birth, someone needs to mother the mother.

Which brings me back to Dolly.

Dolly was known for too many wonderful things to name here. But there’s one part of her songwriting I want to focus on:

She gave suffering women a voice.

Dolly grew up listening to the Appalachian ballad tradition, including old murder ballads like “Knoxville Girl.”

“Knoxville Girl” tells the brutal story of a young woman murdered by a man who supposedly loves her. But here’s what matters: the story belongs to him. The ballad tells us of his violence, his guilt, his punishment, his tragedy. The woman he murders doesn’t even get a name. She’s simply the Knoxville girl.

Dolly didn’t literally rewrite “Knoxville Girl.” She did something more interesting: in her own songwriting, she began shifting the perspective of the tradition she inherited.

She asked: What if we heard from the woman?

In “The Bridge,” which Dolly wrote when she was remarkably young, she places us inside the experience of an abandoned pregnant woman standing on the bridge where her relationship began, contemplating ending her life.

Dolly’s gift wasn’t simply that she wrote songs about suffering women.

Instead of asking:

What did this woman do wrong?

What happened to her?

What did the man do?

She invited us to ask:

What does it feel like to be a mother of three small children suffering profoundly postpartum?

What does it feel like to be a female reporter doing her job and have a powerful man tell you to “be quiet”?

What does it feel like to walk into a doctor’s office knowing women have historically been understudied, undertreated, and sometimes disbelieved?

What I hear from many women that I work with is that it feels increasingly uncertain.

Women describe feeling objectified, dismissed, expected to work harder, expected to care for everyone, expected to have babies and somehow not be changed by having them, expected to enter doctor’s offices and advocate relentlessly to be taken seriously, expected to carry enormous emotional and domestic loads without appearing to have needs of their own.

We expect women to be superhuman.

And then we wonder why they’re exhausted.

The recent Good Good Golf and Callaway ad showed a male golfer running toward a female golfer, shoving her to the ground, standing over her, and warning her not to touch his new driver.

I shouldn’t have to explain why this is a problem.

Even if women weren’t navigating a culture in which violence and intimidation toward them are real concerns, the ad would still be problematic because it turns male violence and physical domination of a woman into a joke and a marketing device.

And once again, a woman’s body becomes the punchline.

Somehow, in 2026, that concept made its way through enough meetings, executives, creatives, marketing people and legal people to become an actual advertisement.

That reveals something almost embarrassingly primitive underneath all our supposed progress:

Dolly didn’t spend a lifetime showing women how to inhabit themselves fully so that we could continue reducing women to bodies that can be controlled, dismissed, consumed, or used as punchlines.

She didn’t sing the stories of abandoned, shamed, institutionalized, grieving women for us to stop listening now.

She didn’t embody self-acceptance and freedom so that another generation of women could be told to become smaller, quieter, easier, or less threatening.

And she certainly didn’t spend decades reminding people that there was room for all of us—the glamorous and grieving, sexual and spiritual, ambitious and tender, complicated and contradictory—only for us to forget that women are whole human beings.

Every one of us is.

So here we are, we’re mourning a woman who showed us what it looks like to fully inhabit herself.

We’re watching a courtroom wrestle with one of the most devastating stories imaginable about motherhood and mental health.

And we’re watching major brands apologize after somehow deciding that throwing a woman to the ground was funny enough to sell golf clubs.

Underneath all three is the same question:

I’m choosing to believe that some of what we’re witnessing is coming to the surface because this is a wound that can no longer remain hidden.

Maybe we’re in the painful part of cleaning it out. Maybe we’re finally looking directly at what has been infected for a very long time, and hopefully what comes next can be healing and restoration.

I want a world where women and marginalized people can safely inhabit their bodies. Where female bodies are researched and cared for with the seriousness their unique biology deserves. Where mothers are supported after they give birth. Where women are listened to when they say they’re hurting. Where femininity isn’t synonymous with weakness and violence against women isn’t entertainment.

And where women are revered and cared for—not because of what we produce, how attractive we are, how agreeable we can be, how much labor we perform, or how well we care for everyone else. But because…..

I believe everyone’s life would be better in that world.

Well, maybe the manosphere would have a rough adjustment period.

But they might benefit from a little tough love, accountability, and growing the f*ck up, too.

With care,
Chrissy