How Taylor Swift Became the Loudest Woman We’ve Ever Seen

When Time Magazine named Taylor Swift their Person of the Year, they weren’t just anointing a cultural hero who has the power to break and re-make the human heart with her art, move economies, and tell a fully-immersive, narcotically deep-veined story you wouldn’t leave even if you could. They were correctly identifying the woman whose life’s work embodies the famously difficult endeavor for a woman to own her own voice.

Almost in defiance of the cultural quicksand around her, Taylor Swift has become a juggernaut for women’s voices, first for her work articulating the inner lives of women, then for re-claiming the financial and cultural value of her own voice via “Taylor’s Version” remakes of her own songs, and finally, as a public figure who braved public censure to speak out on political and cultural issues. When tracking her deepening relationship with her own voice and the acknowledgement of her responsibility to speak, it’s important to remember that before orators like Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth swayed minds toward the vote for women and the abolitionist movement, they first had to fight for the fundamental right to speak in public as women. Words like “klaxon, shrill, yowling, shrieking” and “too much” used to describe women’s voices are the recent echoes of these first struggles for voice. That’s where we’re coming from. As a culture we still have mixed feelings about women who are too loud, too outspoken, who presume too much.

In the midst of all this, Swift’s evolution as an artist and a human includes a crucial and public exploration of what it means to speak and what it costs to stay silent. The documentary Miss Americana chronicles the debates she had with herself and among her inner circle about the choice to speak out. Increasingly, Swift has insisted on her voice instead of her lane.

There is the obvious fact of Swift’s career as a vocal performer. She cut her teeth on country ballads like “Tim McGraw” that marked her as a prodigy and a storyteller. It’s her voice that has become the soundtrack to countless lives, as we celebrate the ordinary and extraordinary and endure the soul-cracking hurts and fallow hours of any human life.

But Swift doesn’t only teach through her songs, but through her remarkably visible life. She saw decades of work wrested from her when Scott Borchetta sold Big Machine Records to Ithaca Holdings, effectively transferring control of six Swift albums to music executive Scooter Braun. It’s a story Swifties know well. Braun wasn’t a mere music manager, Swift characterizes him as an enemy, a history that stems in part from Braun’s alliance with her tormentor Kanye West. “With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion,” Swift told TIME. But instead of allowing an enemy to profit from her literal and figurative voice while she was sidelined, Swift took the advice of Kelly Clarkson and her family who advised her to re-record.

That’s exactly what she did, recording new versions of her old catalog with the tag “Taylor’s Version.” Taylor’s Versions eroded the value of her originals, created buzz, and highlighted Swift’s command of the narrative. Swift emphatically disallowed anyone else to own her voice. A business decision, to be sure, but one that was at least half metaphor. The move wouldn’t be lost on female artists (Kesha, Darlene Love, Big Mama Thornton) who were effectively muzzled and cheated by men in the music industry. To be sure, Swift had the resources and privilege to reclaim her voice, but the fact doesn’t diminish the courage it took or the precedent it could help set for other women in the industry.

Swift has insisted that together, her voice and lived experience have value. More than many artists, her work is a rendering of her inner world, the shifting topography of an inner universe that is uniquely her own. Her mastery of the autobiographical is a singular achievement. But her individual is also our universal. Fans across the globe – in particular girls and young women – see themselves in her music, and in that recognition, a validation of their lives, their feelings, and their secret selves at a crucial cultural moment. It seems an unlikely coincidence that Swift’s popularity has hit the stratosphere just as unprecedented numbers of teenaged girls report feelings of hopelessness. Writer Pam Houston put it this way on Instagram, “…They hate that she makes young women feel seen just at the moment the dominant culture really starts to fuck with them.” She’s not wrong.

In 2018, Swift spoke out for the first time on a polarizing topic. She posted her support of the Parkland High School students and revealed her donation to victims of gun violence, a first political statement. Later that year she made her first official endorsements in favor of Phil Bredesen, a Democratic candidate for Tennessee’s Senate. White nationalists urged her to stay in her lane. “I believe in the fight for LGBTQ rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG. I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening, and prevalent,” she has publicly stated. Since then, she has directly confronted former President Donald Trump on Twitter and declared herself to be pro-choice.

Swift is an indisputable standard bearer for women’s voices. Her courage to speak has helped clear the way for other marginalized voices who might never have been heard, who might have given in to despair. She took some of the body blows for us to model what it looks like when a life is lived out loud. To borrow Swift’s own words in Last Great American Dynasty: There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen.

Veronica Rueckert is the author of “Outspoken: Why Women’s Voices Get Silence and How to Set Them Free.” Her work has appeared on NPR and in The Washington Post.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.