Review by Kevin Brown
Suffrage Song, Caitlin Cass’s Eisner-winning graphic history, delves into voting rights in the U.S., as her subtitle indicates. The reference to that past being haunted comes from two places. First, history has ignored many of the women in this book — effectively turning them into ghosts — and, second, the women most readers will have heard of made significant compromises in order to enable white women to get the right to vote.
The book highlights women (and a few men) most people are unfamiliar with, such as Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (a Chinese American woman who fought for the right to vote, even though she wasn’t allowed to be a citizen), Frances Watkins Harper (she essentially advocated for what we would now call intersectional feminism), and Sue White (best known for burning President Wilson in effigy at the White House Gates), to name a few. Cass resurrects these ghosts to remind readers of how wide and diverse the suffragist movement actually was.
However, she also points out the contradictions and hypocrisy of many of the leaders of the movement, as white women and men quite often turned their backs on those who worked with them in the abolitionist and suffragist movement, almost always over the question of race. Leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt were willing to trade away the pursuit of universal suffrage for the less ambitious goal of the right to vote for white women. Cass, though, also includes those activists who weren’t willing to make that trade, again reminding readers of the diversity of thought within the movement.
Cass ends with an epilogue that brings voting rights to the present day, pointing out that there are still a variety of approaches some politicians use to try to disenfranchise voters. She draws strength from the women of the past and is optimistic about the future, as she refuses to give into hopelessness, even as she knows there’s still work to be done. Some might view such an outlook as naïve, but her faith in historical progress thought continued activism might be what we need right now.
Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the U.S. by Caitlin Cass. Fantagraphics, June 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
