09/03/2026
As women gather in Key West this week for Womenfest, this year’s theme, “Lost Women in the Arts,” honors the creators, visionaries, and performers who were written out of history, silenced, or still searching for their voice. It’s a celebration of women reclaiming the space to be heard, seen, and taken seriously as artists and thinkers.
It’s a theme that lands differently this year. In the last two weeks, we’ve said goodbye to four women who spent their lives refusing to be lost, who built platforms, wrote songs, shaped films, and led movements that made sure other women wouldn’t have to disappear either.
Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at 92, at her home in New York City. She didn’t just report on the women’s movement, she built its infrastructure. Co-founding Ms. magazine in 1971 gave women a platform “controlled by women,” in her own words, at a time when almost nothing was. She helped launch the National Women’s Political Caucus, fought for reproductive rights for six decades, and never stopped showing up: at rallies, in classrooms, on the road, because she believed no room was too small to matter. Hillary Clinton put it simply: Gloria “pushed open doors not just for herself, but for literally millions of women behind her.”
Just over a week earlier, we lost Dolly Parton at 80, following a brief battle with cancer. Where Steinem organized, Dolly built an empire, a legacy of generosity, and a version of feminism that never asked permission. She turned her image, her music, and her business savvy into something entirely her own, all while quietly changing lives through her Imagination Library, which has put more than 300 million free books into children’s hands worldwide. She proved that softness and strength were never opposites, and that you could be unapologetically yourself and still be taken seriously.
“Lost Women in the Arts” fits them all because
Gloria Steinem spent her career making sure women’s voices weren’t lost. Before Ms. magazine existed, there was, in her words, nothing for women to read that was controlled by women. She built the platform so that women writers, thinkers, and activists wouldn’t have to fight to be heard one at a time, they’d have a home. That is exactly the spirit of this year’s Womenfest theme: not just remembering the women history overlooked, but building the spaces that keep it from happening again.
Dolly Parton lived the other half of that story. She was never lost, but she spent decades being underestimated, dismissed as “just” a wig and a voice by people who couldn’t see the songwriter, the businesswoman, and the philanthropist underneath. She wrote her own songs, owned her own image, and turned Dollywood and the Imagination Library into proof that a woman’s creative and entrepreneurial instincts, taken seriously, could outlast anyone’s doubt. She is, in the truest sense, a “found” woman in the arts — one who never let anyone write her out of her own story.
Cassandra Wilson refused categorization her entire career, and that refusal is its own act of reclamation. Critics tried for decades to fit her into a single box: jazz singer, blues singer, folk singer, and she resisted every time, moving fluidly between the Great American Songbook, Delta blues, and Joni Mitchell covers because no single tradition could hold everything she carried. Her voice was described as carrying the sound and spirit of Mississippi wherever it traveled. That refusal to be reduced to one genre, one story, is precisely the creative freedom this year’s theme is asking women to reclaim.
Andrea Eastman is probably the most literal “lost woman in the arts” of the four. As Paramount’s head of casting, she is the reason Ali MacGraw got Goodbye, Columbus and James Caan got The Godfather; decisions that shaped some of the most celebrated films in American history. Yet the credit for those films almost always goes to the directors and the men on screen, rarely to the woman who saw the talent first. Her career is a reminder of how many women’s contributions to the arts happen just off camera, unnamed in the history books even as their fingerprints are everywhere.
Between them, these four women cover every corner of this year’s theme: the ones who built the rooms, the ones who refused to shrink to fit into someone else’s, the ones who wouldn’t be boxed in, and the ones whose work shaped the art we celebrate even when their names got left off the credits.
As Womenfest attendees spend this week honoring the artists, poets, and performers history nearly forgot, there’s room to also honor four women who, each in her own way, made sure they wouldn’t be forgotten either. Rest in power, Gloria, Cassandra, Dolly, and Andrea. The rooms you opened, and the voices you refused to lose, are still filling up.
