Before a script for the movie “9 to 5” even existed — when it was still just a vague concept for a story about female office workers — Jane Fonda had a lightning bolt moment about how to cast it. She was in the car listening to the radio when a Dolly Parton song came on. Immediately, as Fonda later recalled on the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America,” an image popped into her head: “I suddenly had a vision of Dolly as a secretary,” she said. “She can’t see her hands, typing with those long fingernails. Everything about it made me laugh.”

Fonda approached Parton about the role. “How hard can this be?” Parton remembered thinking, in the 2022 documentary “Still Working 9 to 5.” “If it’s big, I’ll get to roll around in the glory, and if it’s a flop, I blame it on them.”

Parton made clear to Rolling Stone in 1980 that she did not take the role in order to be part of a feminist project. “Not that I’m not for rights for everybody,” she told the interviewer. “I’m just saying I don’t want to get involved in a political thing.” Whatever you thought about the movie, she implied, it was not, at least for her, a feminist cri de coeur about sexual harassment, equal pay, child care and job flexibility. “It’s just a funny, funny show,” she said — not, most definitely not, about “bosses in general or the plight of secretaries.”

Later on in life, Parton, who died on Tuesday, would acknowledge that the movie had “a good message,” but she was clearly ambivalent about being pinned down. Given her many good works — her donations to vaccine research, literacy, disaster relief — Parton’s evasiveness has been interpreted generously by her fans across the political spectrum: It was not so much about making herself marketable as it was about maintaining her status as a unifying cultural force. She seemed to intuit that the best way she could help women fight for equality was by expressing herself her way — without labels.

Despite Parton’s protestations, “9 to 5” was, in fact, developed explicitly as a movie about the experience of low-level office workers. During the years of anti-Vietnam activism that earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane,” Fonda had befriended another activist, Karen Nussbaum, who had started organizing secretaries and clerical workers, the jobs held by about a third of working women at the time. Fonda and her team interviewed dozens of them, many of whom spoke of overt sexism and sexual harassment; some responded enthusiastically when asked if they ever fantasized about getting even with their bosses. One said she wished she could grind up her boss and serve him in the office coffee.

In the film Fonda eventually developed, Parton plays a competent and sweet, happily partnered secretary who wears feminine dresses and a green sequin cardigan at the office. She and two co-workers, played by Fonda and Lily Tomlin, are fed up with their boss, whom they describe as a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” The three women undertake an aburdist revenge plot that involves keeping him in captivity for six weeks, even suspending him from the ceiling.

Both Fonda and Parton, in their own ways, were trying to manage feminism’s image problem, which persisted despite the movement’s success in opening up women’s lives over a remarkably short span of time. The movement started picking up momentum in the early 1960s, but gained enormous visibility in 1970, when Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” helped launch the Women’s Strike for Equality, which included rallies, walk-outs and teach-ins around the country on Aug. 26 of that year. Some 50,000 women protested in New York City alone, effectively shutting down Fifth Avenue.

In 1971, Gloria Steinem, already a powerhouse political and feminist organizer, co-founded Ms. magazine, which sold out its first 300,000 copies within eight days and helped mainstream the language and mission of female equality. Within the decade, the movement had made significant strides: The passage of Title IX expanded girls’ access to sports and academic opportunities in schools; legislation made it illegal for banks to discriminate on the basis of sex, meaning a woman could no longer be required to provide a signed letter from her husband to receive a line of credit; and a 1978 amendment to the Civil Rights Act made it illegal for employers to discriminate against women on the basis of pregnancy. The Supreme Court also decided Roe v. Wade, establishing a constitutional right to abortion that would stand for nearly 50 years.

And yet even as many of these gains were broadly popular, the feminist movement was still viewed with suspicion, especially by conservatives who associated it with its most radical forms — calls for women to reject men, motherhood and caregiving. If feminists weren’t stereotyped as unshaven and man-hating, they were alternatively construed as out of touch and elite. The comedians Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin satirized those tropes in a 1981 parody sketch called “I’m Taking My Own Head, Screwing It On Right, and No Guy’s Gonna Tell Me It Ain’t,” in which O’Hara proclaims she’s happy only when she’s working 21 hours a day and Martin complains that she feels like a prisoner in her own home. Even as series like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” used humor to gently push forward feminist ideals, feminists were typically the butt of jokes in stand-up routines and on late-night shows.

Parton knew that Fonda was being strategic by casting her in “9 to 5,” in the hopes of bringing in a Southern audience. Fonda has been even more explicit that she viewed the movie’s humor as a vehicle for delivering a strong feminist message in a palatable way. “Even if people don’t want to deal with the issues we’re raising,” Fonda told the producer of “Dolly Parton’s America,” “they’ll like the movie anyway, because it’s really funny.”

I saw the film at age 10 with my sister, and I think it’s safe to say our reaction was shared by countless viewers: It was Parton who made us laugh the hardest, who we were really rooting for. The rage and revenge on display in the film might have seemed unhinged or ugly — the stuff of violent radicals — but somehow, with Parton at the center, their actions seemed almost plucky: You could push a sweet, smiling flower of a human only so far before she’d show you what she was made of.

The movie was not only a blockbuster — it made $100 million at the box office, the second biggest hit of the year — but according to the organizers who helped Fonda conceive it, it also changed culture in precisely the way they hoped it would. Before its release, “we had to argue that women’s work was plagued by discrimination,” Nussbaum was quoted as saying in Fonda’s memoir, “My Life So Far.” “The movie put an end to that debate. … The audiences recognized it and could laugh at it. Now the debate could shift to what we should do about it.” Ellen Cassedy, an organizer who worked with Nussbaum, said the movie “changed my life, and I can say that without a doubt, it changed offices, bosses and the whole atmosphere of office life.”

It’s unlikely that the movie would have been as effective without “9 to 5,” the theme song Parton wrote for it (a condition of her taking the role). The song starts with a driving, repeating single note, the song’s beating heart, music that’s quickly overlaid with what sounds like a clacking typewriter, even the ping of a cartridge. Written on set, with Parton’s acrylic nails her only instrument as she worked it out, the song universalizes the experiences of “folks like me, on the job, from 9 to 5.” Everyone starts their day with that cup of ambition; everyone has that boss who’s on the make; everyone hates on the man while simultaneously despairing of ever joining his ranks.

The song is sometimes considered a feminist anthem, but as the Canadian podcast “Material Girls” pointed out in March, it might be better considered a rallying cry for what the historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called “labor feminism.” Labor feminism brought working-class women into the fold, recognizing, in Cobble’s words, that “the personal interaction between men and women at work and the sexploitation of women’s bodies were as much labor issues as wages and benefits.” On the album “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs,” on which Parton released the song, her sympathies with labor are in some ways more pronounced than her allegiance to feminism: She chose to cover the famous Woody Guthrie labor and immigrants’ rights song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” a raw and heartbreaking story of erasure and exploitation.

Like Parton herself, the song “9 to 5” is unexpected as a feminist symbol — it’s playful, unlike many of the most important feminist anthems of the ’70s, which demanded respect, talked of survival, of being petrified. (In “I Am Woman,” Helen Reddy speaks of “wisdom born of pain.”) Fonda has said that she knew, from the moment she heard it the first time, it would be a cultural landmark: “If this movie’s not a big hit, this song will be — it’ll make us a hit,” she said in the 2022 documentary.

Parton took real professional risks in collaborating with Fonda, who earned the enduring enmity of thousands of Americans after she was photographed, laughing, sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun while on a visit to Hanoi in 1972. In one of the early interview clips featured in the 2022 documentary, Parton suggested she was not having an easy time being asked “how I deal with Jane, what my folks think about Jane, and what the South thinks about me being a friend of Jane.”

But Parton never seemed to have regrets about making the film. She was herself a savvy career woman, and the film — her first — catapulted her into a new level of celebrity. Whatever her intentions, her performance can be credited with smashing the clichés of what a feminist looked like, even if she wouldn’t use that word to describe herself. She also helped reframe feminism’s image to emphasize more universally relatable demands for an egalitarian, humane workplace — better pay, better conditions, more respect. Getting ahead, getting the raise, getting the credit: It’s a song every American can hum along to.

Photographs by Steve Schapiro/Corbis, via Getty Images