Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the United States of America

This uneven chronicle of American suffrage from New Yorker cartoonist Cass (Humans in Peril) strives to capture the movement’s scope beyond the typical lens of white women’s voting access. Beginning in the 1800s and continuing through to the 1960s, Cass catalogs the struggle for enfranchisement through a loosely organized, interlinked series of overlapping character portraits. Her subjects include Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony but also lesser-known, more diverse figures, such as Ella Baker, Mary Church Terrell, and Indigenous advocate Zitkala-sa. While refreshingly comprehensive and brightly told in a rustic caricature art style, the analysis can be reductive. Cass takes pains to elucidate how Stanton, Anthony, and others campaigned against racially inclusive voting legislation, worked with racist colleagues if it advanced the women’s cause, and employed dehumanizing stereotypes to suit their political goals. Though Cass makes clear that Anthony “never acknowledged” her own racist acts, the narrative grants Anthony an interiority that seems overly generous, a “silent haunting” (surrounded by bobbing ghosts) where the activist “likely felt what she couldn’t admit.” While the approach is more nuanced than standard potrayals of this history, progressive readers will bring a skeptical eye to Cass’s incomplete reckoning. (June)