SUFFRAGE SONGS, IN THIS OUR WORLD & OTHER VERSES: A Poetry Collection

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This eBook edition of "Suffrage Songs, in This Our World & Other Verses" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. Table of Contents: Then This Arrears How Doth The Hat Thanksgiving Thanksong Love Steps Child Labor His Crutches Get Your Work Done A Central Sun, a song Locked Inside Here is the Earth The "Anti" and The Fly Two Prayers Before Warm February Winds Little Leafy Brothers A Walk Walk Walk Ode to A Fool The Sands Water-Lure Aunt Eliza The Cripple When Thou Gainest Happiness For Fear His Agony Brain Service The Kingdom Heaven Forbid! The Puritan The Malingerer May Leaves The Room at The Top A Bawling WORLD O Faithful Clay! We Eat At Home The Earth's Entail Alas! "The Outer Reef!" To-Morrow Night The Waiting-Room Only Mine A Question In How Little Time The Socialist and The Suffragist Worship The Little White Animals Many Windows In A Much Love's Highest

• Language: English
• Publisher: Musaicum Books
• Release date: Oct 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9788027217915

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an American author, feminist, and social reformer. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gilman was raised by her mother after her father abandoned his family to poverty. A single mother, Mary Perkins struggled to provide for her son and daughter, frequently enlisting the help of her estranged husband’s aunts, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These early experiences shaped Charlotte’s outlook on gender and society, inspiring numerous written works and a lifetime of activism. Gilman excelled in school as a youth and went on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design where, in 1879, she met a woman named Martha Luther. The two were involved romantically for the next few years until Luther married in 1881. Distraught, Gilman eventually married Charles Walter Stetson, a painter, in 1884, with whom she had one daughter. After Katharine’s birth, Gilman suffered an intense case of post-partum depression, an experience which inspired her landmark story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1890). Gilman and Stetson divorced in 1894, after which Charlotte moved to California and became active in social reform. Gilman was a pioneer of the American feminist movement and an early advocate for women’s suffrage, divorce, and euthanasia. Her radical beliefs and controversial views on race—Gilman was known to support white supremacist ideologies—nearly consigned her work to history; at the time of her death none of her works remained in print. In the 1970s, however, the rise of second-wave feminism and its influence on literary scholarship revived her reputation, bringing her work back into publication.

Book preview

Then This

Table of Contents

The news-stands bloom with magazines,

They flame, they blaze indeed;

So bright the cover-colors glow,

So clear the startling stories show,

So vivid their pictorial scenes,

That he who runs may read.

Then This: It strives in prose and verse,

Thought, fancy, fact and fun,

To tell the things we ought to know,

To point the way we ought to go,

So audibly to bless and curse,

That he who reads may run.

Arrears

Table of Contents

Our gratitude goes up in smoke,

In incense smoke of prayer;

We thank the Underlying Love,

The Overarching Care—

We do not thank the living men

Who make our lives so fair.

For long insolvent centuries

We have been clothed and fed,

By the spared captive, spared for once,

By inches slain instead;

He gave his service and is gone;

Unthanked, unpaid, and dead.

His labor built the world we love;

Our highest flights to-day

Rest on the service of the past,

Which we can never pay;

A long repudiated debt

Blackens our upward way.

Our fingers owed his fathers dead—

Disgrace beyond repair!

No late remorse, no new-found shame

Can save our honor there:

But we can now begin to pay

The starved and stunted heir!

We thank the Power above for all—

Gladly we do, and should.

But might we not save out a part

Of our large gratitude,

And give it to the power on earth—

Where it will do some good?

How Doth The Hat

Table of Contents

How doth the hat loom large upon her head!

Furred like a busby; plumed as hearses are;

Armed with eye-spearing quills; bewebbed and hung

With lacy, silky, downy draperies;

With spread, wide-waggling feathers fronded high

In bosky thickets of Cimmerian gloom.

How doth the hat with colors dare the eye!

Arrest—attract—allure—affront—appall!

Vivid and varied as are paroquets;

Dove-dull; one mass of white; all solid red;

Black with the blackness of a mourning world—

Compounded type of Chaos and Old Night!

How doth the hat expand: wax wide, and swell!

Such is its size that none can predicate

Or hair, or head, or shoulders of the frame

Below thIs bulk, this beauty-burying bulk;

Trespassing rude on all who walk beside,

Brutally blinding all who sit behind.

How doth the hat's mere mass more monstrous grow

Into a riot of repugnant shapes!

Shapes ignominious, extreme, bizarre,

Bulbous, distorted, unsymmetrical—