Join the Topsfield Town Library, in partnership with other libraries across the state, as we welcome author Caitlin Cass discussing her book, Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the U.S. Part graphic novel, part map of the suffrage movement, this book tells the story of the fight for the right to vote by women from the very beginning.

ABOUT THE BOOK: In Suffrage Song, Cass takes a critical, intersectional approach to the movement’s history — celebrating the pivotal, hard-fought battles for voting rights while also laying bare the racist compromises suffrage leaders made along the way. She explores the multigenerational arc of the movement, humanizing key historical figures from the early days of the suffrage fight (Susan B. Anthony, Frances Watkins Harper), to the dawn of the “New Women” (Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell), to the Civil Rights era (Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker). Additionally, this book sheds light on less chronicled figures such as Zitkala-Ša and Mabel Ping Hua-Lee, whose stories reveal the complex racial dynamics that haunt this history.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Caitlin Cass makes comics, cartoons and art installations about failing systems and irrational hope.  Story by story she is building her own canon in a doomed effort to understand the dismal state of the world. For the past 12 years Caitlin has published a bimonthly comic periodical under the moniker The “Great” Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent. Her cartoons and comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Lily and The Nib. 

Caitlin was a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction. Her 2020 solo exhibition Women’s Work was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Caitlin’s graphic history Suffrage Song will come out with Fantagraphics Books in June 2024. Originally from River Forest, IL, Caitlin spent 11 years in Buffalo, NY and recently moved west to teach as Assistant Professor of Studio Art, Illustration and Time-Based Media at the University of Nebraska Omaha.