This year’s Women’s History Month theme marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

It’s also known as the women’s suffrage amendment, but every time I describe it that way, I like to clarify that though the amendment was supposed to apply to women–as in all adult women–in reality, racial discrimination prevented most women of color from voting. Many early histories of the women’s suffrage movement sideline these racial issues, barely acknowledging the contributions, for example, of African American women in cultivating support for the amendment.

Historian Cathleen Cahill has a book coming out this fall called Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement. According to the book description: “It is a collective biography of six suffragists–Yankton Dakota Sioux author and activist Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša); Wisconsin Oneida writer Laura Cornelius Kellogg; Turtle Mountain Chippewa and French lawyer Marie Bottineau Baldwin; African American poet and clubwoman Carrie Williams Clifford; Mabel Ping Hau Lee, the first Chinese woman in the United States to earn her PhD ; and New Mexican Hispana politician and writer Nina Otero Warren–both before and after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.” This looks fascinating.

While you wait for Cahill’s book, consider picking up a copy of Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s classic African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920.

You’ll meet lots of great women in this book, too, and won’t soon forget them.