Tara Morton, MWS Project Coordinator
Our blog in July outlined how, through Coventry Creates, historian Professor Sarah Richardson (Warwick University) had organised a collaboration with the musician and songwriter Verity Pabla and local musical trio the Pips to explore suffrage history through music, inspired by the Mapping Women’s Suffrage, 1911 project.
Mapping Women’s Suffrage is thrilled to announce that the inspirational song ‘Deeds’ is now available for you to listen to and share.
Coventry women’s suffrage campaigners revealed by the Mapping Women’s Suffrage project helped inspire musician Verity Pabla and the fantastic Pips to produce the song which connects the suffrage past with the present by exploring issues as relevant today as they were in 1911.
Verity, working with the Pips through her music company I’m Not a Machine, was thrilled to be paired with the Mapping Women’s Suffrage project and with researchers Sarah Richardson and Tara Morton. Verity said,
"it was clear we would be well suited – they offered enthusiasm and an equal sense of willingness to explore."
Similarly inspired by the collaboration, Sarah Richardson noted that ‘creativity and passion are not always at the forefront of historical research which requires many hours pouring over manuscripts and archives…working with Verity and the Pips has allowed us to bring creativity and passion back to the centre of our research’.
‘One of the areas we explored was the legacy of the women’s suffrage movement and its resonance for women and citizenship issues today, so I was delighted to hear this sentiment captured in the song with the lyrics ‘our daughters hereafter will carry us through’’.
Verity added ‘I think the collaboration was a great success…We hope that everyone enjoys the song and is inspired to discover the many and varied stories of people from the Suffrage Movement’.
The video below has been produced independently of Coventry Creates by volunteers at Mapping Women’s Suffrage, to illustrate The Pips song as well as to highlight some of the wonderful images of the Votes for Women movement accessible from fantastic digital repositories such as the Women’s Library Collection.
We hope you enjoy this wonderfully moving and soulful song, performed by the Pips - Cat Mctigue, Shanade Morrow, and Rio Hellyer - encouraging us all to reflect upon struggles for equality, past and present.
About Coventry Creates
You can see and hear more about the musical collaboration between Mapping Women's Suffrage, Verity Pabla and The Pips, via the Coventry Creates digital exhibition at www.coventrycreates.co.uk/project/mapping-womens-suffrage/
Through a digital exhibition, Coventry Creates shows the work of 18 local artists who worked in collaboration with researchers from Coventry University and the University of Warwick, as part of a commissioned project funded by the two institutions. The public can view these works at www.coventrycreates.co.uk