Will Hines

flavorpill:

On the country woman badass scale, Loretta Lynn surely earns a place at the top. Lynn was a mother four times over before she had turned 19, taught herself guitar, and began belting out anthems about working class women’s lives. She often sang about birth control and the constant mill of pregnancies that kept women like herself in the home in songs like “One’s on the Way,” but her most famous and controversial song is “The Pill.” Its celebration of birth control got Lynn banned from several country stations, and her label delayed its release by three years. It remains one of the only country singles to directly address reproductive rights, and one of the songs that’s sure to turn up in any biopic of Margaret Sanger. (See also: “We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby” with the immortal lyric “Second class don’t turn me on at all.”)

A feminist guide to country music