In the mid-1970s, at the height of the feminist movement, a group of women in Boston came together to create a forum for working class women to trade stories about their experiences in the office. As they compared notes, they found that they had a lot in common.
“They all had stories to tell of not being paid as much as men in their offices, of having their male supervisors take their ideas and take credit for them,” says Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
But they also wanted to use their burgeoning solidarity to improve their standing in the workplace. They started trying to organize office workers and secretaries, a movement that eventually coalesced into a formal union called SEIU Local 925.
When this organizing campaign caught the eye of Jane Fonda, it inspired the 1980 film 9 to 5, a runaway success that starred the late Dolly Parton—in her first major acting role—alongside Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Parton famously wrote and performed the eponymous theme song for the movie, which went on to win multiple Grammy awards and became something of an anthem for working women. (In a meta moment, Parton says she jumped at the opportunity when she read the 9 to 5 script: “I knew instantly that I should do it—I knew that it was a career move,” she told Rolling Stone in a 1980 interview.)
In the film, Parton plays Doralee Rhodes, the secretary to a sexist boss who frequently harasses her. She teams up with two other women at the company: a new employee who has just gone through a divorce (Fonda) and a longtime employee who was denied a promotion (Tomlin). Once they dispense with their boss—through a kidnapping plot point that veers into fantasy—they set about addressing all of the issues with their workplace, securing equal pay for their colleagues and even adding a daycare.
“What was really amazing about the movie was that they took these very real stories of women in the workplace,” DeVault says. “By placing them in a comedy, it reached a lot more people than if they’d done a documentary on what was happening to women in the white-collar workplace.”
The film drew on the real experiences of the clerical workers who were agitating for better working conditions (that is, aside from the kidnapping). Parton’s character, in particular, represented a common trope at the time—that of the attractive secretary—and turned it on its head.
“It was very important to the self-image of the head boss to have someone in that position who was good looking and had sex appeal,” DeVault says. “And that meant that there was a lot of sexual harassment of those women, both from other people [and] their bosses at the time . . . you see in the movie that [Parton] is a sex object in a lot of ways, but she’s also a smart, savvy, real woman on whom the running of the office depends.”
9 to 5 was prescient in some ways—seeding the idea for on-site childcare centers, for example. But it also highlights just how much has not changed for working women in the decades since. “I’ve probably watched it every few years, sort of by happenstance,” DeVault says. “I’m always struck by both how hilarious it is, and also how true to life I think it is. All of these things are still going on.”
While women have seen their wages grow, the gender pay gap persists to this day, especially for women of color. Years after the #MeToo movement, they continue to face sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace. Women still get passed over for promotions and lose out on professional opportunities when they have children—or get forced out of the workforce altogether. And over the last few years, the Trump administration has targeted all kinds of protections that were intended to promote equal opportunity in the workplace.
Perhaps Parton put it best when she penned 9 to 5: “You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion/Want to move ahead, but the boss won’t seem to let me/I swear sometimes that man is out to get me.”
