As we near the end of this long national campaign (I’m sorry, non-USAians, someday this ridiculous campaign will end and it might even be November 9th), and the historic choice in front of us, it’s important to remember that while women in the US gained the right to vote in 1919, the movement championed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was at the expense of Women of Color. Black women fought their own fights, and this anthology, released a week before our current election, celebrates the stories of Black women who wrote, fought, argued, and marched for their own suffrage, often in spite of the men and white women who didn’t want them to have the right to vote, at least, not before those men and white women had secured their own franchise. Like with all of history, the history of suffrage is messy and complicated and full of messy, complicated people.

This anthology has four stories in it, by Kianna Alexander, Alyssa Cole, Lena Hart, and Piper Huguley. The heroines are teachers, bakers, dancers, and missionaries, and the heroes are ministers, soldiers, carpenters, and cooks.  The heroines all are committed to helping their sisters gain the vote in the face of intense opposition, sometimes from their heroes. The years range from just post-Civil War to 1917, from Nebraska to New York to North Carolina. It’s so fun to have different voices tackle history in such different ways.

“In The Morning Sun” by Lena Hart is about Maddie, a woman who lost her fiance in the Civil War, and ended up in Nebraska teaching freedmen how to read and write and how the government works and what that means for them. It turns out that her fiance, James, wasn’t all that dead, and when their paths cross, they need to figure out if the people they are now can form a life together, and if so, what that life might look like.

I liked this story a lot. It starts with a brutal assault on Maddie, which I didn’t love, but it’s handled well and everything to do with the assault is about her and her story, and not about how it affects James. And it deals with the practical application of governmental change:  sure, the 15th Amendment has been passed giving men of all races the right to vote, but how do you get people to understand what the means, on both sides of the ballot box?

“The Washerwoman’s War” by Piper Huguley is about the Atlanta Washerwoman’s Strike of 1881. I’d never heard about this, but Huguley draws the situation in clear lines from the point of view of the daughter of a well-known black suffragette who is in Atlanta to be a teacher and to NOT, I repeat NOT, marry a minister. Naturally, there’s a dude she met while in college, Gabriel, who is a minister. And while she’s learning about how the economy of black working women functions in Atlanta, he’s courting her. It is SUPER CUTE.

Kianna Alexander’s story, “A Radiant Soul,” is about Sarah, who returns home to North Carolina in 1881 for her mother’s birthday after working as a pastry chef in Wyoming. Her father has commissioned a gazebo to be built by the local hot carpenter, and not-so-secretly hopes that Sarah will settle down with Owen, as opposed to going back to Wyoming, far from her family.  Sarah has been writing and working as a suffragette, talking about her experience having the vote in Wyoming, and Owen has to go through the stages of, “Wait now, I don’t really have the vote, why should you?” before realizing that she is right. Because of course she is.

Both the Alexander and Huguley stories touch on the assassination of President Garfield in different ways, which was ALSO fascinating (and sent me down a wiki rabbit hole of “effects of the assassination of President Garfield on Civil Rights”).

My favorite story, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Alyssa Cole’s “Let Us Dream.” Bertha runs a nightclub in Harlem, and Amir, an Indian immigrant, takes a job there as a dishwasher. They intersect through dance (DANCE!). She uses traditional Indian dances in her performances, and Amir is able and willing to teach her more about them. I love how they grapple with the idea that dance can evolve and pick up bits and pieces, while also focusing on cultural appropriation and whether that’s what Bertha was doing.

I also loved that this story took place in 1917, so Bertha is instructing her workers, dancers, waitresses, and prostitutes, to go out and educate the men on whom they should be voting for to advance women’s suffrage. Bertha and Amir were SO complex with their racial and religious and immigration issues. I loved them both.

The thread that tied all of these stories together was the idea of civic education: that people need to be taught how the government works and what that means for them and WHY their vote is important. If there’s anything that we should have learned over the past 18 months, is that there’s a lot that people need to learn about how government is supposed to work and how we can make it function best for the people.

It’s also important to remember all the battles which were fought to gain everyone the right to vote, and it’s important to remember that not all those battle were fought equally. This lovely anthology is an excellent memorial to those Black Suffragettes. These authors also gave us Black women who are doing to work to improve their world, an deserve to be adored and cherished by men who work to make themselves worthy of them.

If you’re reading this on Election Day (and you are American and eligible), please go vote! It’s the most important thing we can do.