SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage

SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage By Susanna Rich

Softcover, 118 pages

Shout! Poetry for Suffrage is a collection of original poetry and dramatic dialogs written from the points of view of core suffragist figures ranging from the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention to the 1920 promulgation of the 19th Amendment, granting United States women the vote. In these pages, Elizabeth Cady Stanton strategizes with Susan B. Anthony, who, in turn, argues with Frederick Douglass over who should get the vote first: blacks or women. Matilda Joslyn Gage tells us how she became the model for the Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, imprisoned and on hunger strike, are tortured and force-fed for the cause. Defying attempts to exclude her, Ida B. Wells marches for suffrage among 6,000 white women in 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade. And key figures retell the passage of the amendment as it comes down to one dramatic vote in Tennessee. Forty courageous women, righteous men, and some staunch opposers populate Susanna’s first-person, present-tense narratives that bring us into four-dimensional, you-are-here experiences of the 72-year fight for women’s suffrage. As John F. Kennedy said at the inauguration of the Robert Frost Library, “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” With Shout! Poetry for Suffrage, Susanna Rich brings out the hose, the brush, and the bucket.