Actors channel words from women’s movement activists, past and present.

There is music in words: rhythm, inflection, volume and articulation, preludes, codas, beginnings and endings. A great speech is like a great piece of music. It can move us to tears, to joy or to action.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, director Suzanne Sturn and Santa Cruz’s Willing Suspension Armchair Theater will show the audience at Carl Cherry Center the power of words as they were applied to women’s suffrage.

They’ve put together How Women Won the Vote, made up of speeches by several women’s rights activists, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Sturn is drawn to their endurance and their alliance. “What interested me was the friendship of these two women,” she says. “They were two very different personalities who united on this front.”

The program includes speeches by former slaves-turned-abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. One from Truth dates to 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, mocking her dual subjugation as a black woman: “That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”

Modern-day Pakistani activist Malala Youssafzai was shot by the Taliban for attending school. An excerpt this evening comes from her acceptance speech for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. “She’s a beautiful young voice that continues a struggle in our very own time,” Sturn says.

There is a one-act that will be inserted into the program from women in the British Theater called A Chat with Mrs. Chicky, which is a dialogue between an aristocrat and her cleaning woman.

All these persuasive words will be delivered by Sturn and four actors from Willing Suspension. Some come from Susan B. Anthony after she illegally registered to vote in 1872 in Rochester, New York, was brought to trial and denied a jury of her peers.

Judge: The prisoner will stand up. Has the prisoner anything to say?

Miss Anthony: I have a great many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, and now my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so called, form of government.

HOW WOMEN WON THE VOTE 7:30pm Friday at Carl Cherry Center, Fourth and Guadalupe, Carmel. Free (donations welcome). 624-7491, www.CarlCherry.org.