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Jeremy Siegel: You're listening to GBH's Morning Edition.
Grammy winning songwriter Aoife O’Donovan’s new album “All My Friends” traces the history of women's rights in America. It travels back to the early 1900s using archival documents and oratory — line for line — and the lyrics to celebrate the women who fought for the right to vote. And as O'Donovan tells me, to bring this story to life, she focused on one pivotal figure in the movement named Carrie Chapman Catt.
Aoife O’Donovan: Carrie Chapman Catt is one of many of the women who fought tirelessly to grant modern women the right to vote. It was obviously a movement that started way before 1919. It started in the 1800s. People were kind of constantly aware, a small amount of people at first, and then the movement obviously grew and grew that it just simply wasn't fair that women were members of society and expected to contribute to society in certain ways but weren't granted the right to cast their ballot.
And I think that this is something that we really, sadly, are still seeing in the modern age, in the 21st century, that there are certain things that women are expected to do and not really given their equal right: equal pay, positions of power, representation. It's just, it's kind of wild to be in 2024 and reading text and reading these archival documents in these speeches from more than 100 years ago and be thinking, well, that — that really could be totally applied to today. So I think when I was sort of getting into writing these songs, really, I came at it from that perspective, from the perspective of a songwriter, of a writer, and not of a historian or an activist.
Siegel: So you're taking these pieces of history and these archival documents, but as you mentioned, you're writing folk narratives around them. In one song, you bring us on a journey from Iowa to San Francisco with Chapman Catt. How do you get into the mind of someone a century ago?
O’Donovan: I feel like I've always been really drawn to these old fashioned narratives and these old fashioned ideas, and that song that you bring up, called "The Right Time," I did want to kind of get into the mind of Carrie Chapman Catt, of coming from the town of Charles City, Iowa, as you know, being obviously brilliant, a brilliant mind, but having to to get past so much. And in that song I kind of imagine what it must've been like to be a woman, a young girl going to school in these big skirts that they had to wear and how they may have been laughed at by the boys.
You know, really having to follow their dreams feels like a cheesy and trite way to say it, but they really did have to believe in themselves to really overcome the idea that the only job they could possibly have was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, and that there was nothing beyond that for them. So that song is really kind of about that: When is it going to be the right time for her? When was it the right time for her? And when is it gonna be the right time for all of us, really?
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Siegel: This album is different from what you usually do, not just because of the orchestral collaborations, but because you're not a political artist. But this album in many ways is political. What changed for you?
O’Donovan: I would argue that this record is actually not political, because it is my firm belief that voting and participation in democracy is not political, it is your civic duty. I mean, nobody says doing jury duty is political. Nobody says stopping at a red light is political. These are things that I believe that as American citizens, we owe it to ourselves and to our neighbors to actually be active participants in the society in which we live.
And you're right that it is a very intense time to be a woman in America. And it's shocking to me, especially as the mother of a daughter that, you know, every morning — even today — I turn on the news and you see just more stories of these rights that we did feel were sort of solidified, being taken away from us. But I think I would just urge people to educate themselves, to vote, to participate, to really go outside — get away from our computers, get away from the internet — and actually make a change, be the change that we want to see.
Siegel: Aoife O’Donovan on her new album All My Friends, which comes out next Friday. This is GBH News.
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