Kate Chilton’s chapter explores the unique experience of women in the District of Columbia and argues that Black women drew on women’s strong position in the urban economy to choose work that allowed them to help support their families and demand respect and reciprocal obligations from their husbands. The strategies practiced by African American women during and after emancipation reveal the continuities between the prewar and post–Civil War periods that made urban freedom in the District of Columbia different and distinct. Despite the dislocations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction and the attempts of agents of the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau to impose Republican ideals on Black women, emancipation ultimately served to reinforce prewar patterns of gendered behavior in former slave households. While Black men experienced great demand for their labor during the war, the resumption of a peacetime employment market meant that the majority of Black women would have to work in freedom.

Crystal Feimster examines the Black soldiers of the 4th Regiment of the Native Guard (also known as the Corps dAfrique) stationed at Fort Jackson, Louisiana, and the laundresses who served them and their white officers. Both Black soldiers and laundresses were formerly enslaved people who had seized their freedom by joining and aiding the Union cause. Over the course of six weeks, in December 1863 and January 1864, they engaged in open munity to protest racial and sexual violence inflicted by White Union officers. In so doing they made visible the violent terms of interracial interaction that informed the meaning of wartime freedom and Black labor (terms that were still very much rooted in the prisms and discourses of enslavement). More importantly, as free labor, Black women began to negotiate a deeply abusive racial and sexual terrain.

Felicia Jamison analyzes Black women in the Georgia Low Country during the Civil War who used the personal time afforded them after laboring on rice plantations to acquire property and pass on goods to their children. Using the testimonies of women in the records of the Southern Claims Commission, Jamison demonstrates how Black women secured property before the war, lost their valuable property as Union soldiers traversed the region and commandeered their goods, and petitioned the Commission for restitution to provide for themselves and their families after the war. Using the “politics of acquisition” as a framework, Jamison argues that women in Liberty County, Georgia, used property to enhance their lives and secure their freedom. She demonstrates that the loss of personal goods such as clothing, livestock, and bushels of agricultural products severely hampered Black women and their families transition into freedom.

Hilary Green examines this aspect of freedom by considering Emerson Normal School and institution-building in the postwar era and the important role of education in the lives of formerly enslaved women in Mobile, Alabama. Green posits that Emerson Normal was instrumental in permitting former slaves as well as the children born after the end of slavery to become teachers, administrators, and, most important, leaders within their communities. Emerson Normal represented the expansion and refinement of the educational partnership between Black Mobilians and the American Missionary Association after the creation of state-funded public schools. This partnership played a critical role in creating the corps of teachers required for the new public school system. Outside the classroom, graduates employed their preparation for middle-class leadership by actively participating in racial uplift organizations and campaigns. Never viewing their service as limited to the classroom, Emerson Normal graduates became an essential asset for Black Mobilians and their slow, arduous struggle for African American public education and racial equality in Mobile.

Karen Cook Bell interrogates how Black women in Louisiana and Georgia used Freedmen’s Bureau courts and their knowledge of the landscape to make their own freedom. In both regions, low wages and legal battles placed formerly enslaved women at a disadvantage; however, their labor aided their families and communities. Through the “contract labor system” in Louisiana and access to abandoned lands in Georgia, these women were able to improve their conditions in the short term. While some freedpeople derived marginal economic benefits from wage labor in the immediate aftermath of the war, in Louisiana these newly emancipated women were persistent in their demands for full and fair compensation from the Bureau of Free Labor, which adjudicated a significant number of cases in their favor.

Kelly Jones explores emancipation by illuminating the intersection of several processes in wartime and the postwar decades such as Black women’s social and family networks and their struggle to claim their rights in connection to the service of their men. Using the records connected to the 54th United States Colored Infantry (the other 54th—not the 54th Massachusetts of “Glory” fame), Jones reconstruct the geography of USCT women’s family, work, and society in the post–Civil War years, paying closest attention to the twenty-five years after the war. Emphasizing Black women’s political placemaking during and after the war’s refugee crisis, Jones argues that Black women provided support for their soldiers and the US Army presence overall, but they also constituted part of the occupation force of Arkansas’s capital. They formed the backbone of Unionist Little Rock and forged alliances with White progressive allies. They fought for rootedness, gaining unprecedented control over their domestic lives, and claimed privileges via their association with Black soldiers.

Kaisha Esty demonstrates that during the American Civil War, laboring African American women and girls in Union-occupied territory embarked on their own war over the use of their bodies. As fugitives, “contraband,” and refugees, displaced Black women and girls of liminal status confronted gender violence in conditions that often resembled the systemic sexual violence of slavery. As this chapter argues, central to this gender violence was the assumption that Black women were always willing to negotiate sex as part of their (nonsexual) labor. The introduction of wartime legislation protecting women from sexual assault was pivotal. In race-neutral terms, such legislation created a powerful avenue for refugee Black women and girls not only to seek sexual justice but also to challenge and redefine existing cultural and legal understandings of sexual consent. Analysis of testimonies to wartime sexual violence in Tennessee and South Carolina uncovers how formerly enslaved African American women and girls located their violation in relation to their sense of virtue, respectability, and sexual sovereignty.

Brandi Brimmer follows the story of Fanny Whitney, an enslaved woman, who belonged to a community of men and women that was bound together by extended ties of kinship and other connections in Union-occupied areas of eastern North Carolina. Brimmer’s chapter pieces together the historical trajectory of widowhood for Black women in post–Civil War America. Using the case files of Fanny Whitney and other southern Black women who applied for survivors’ benefits after 1866, the year the federal government recognized “slave marriage” in pension law, this chapter asks what happened to the women and children Black soldiers depended on, left behind in freedmen’s camps, and reunited with after the war. Black women who were widows, she contends, pieced together their existence on a daily basis. Evidence from the pension files of Black Union widows in eastern North Carolina deepens our understanding of Black women’s lives and labors and sheds light on the ways they struggled to define widowhood for themselves. Brimmer expands the discourse regarding widowed Black women who used community and kinship networks to shape freedom.

This chapter examines Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Black couples. Important clinical considerations (e.g., racial realities of anti-Blackness) are provided that must be integrated within the EFT therapy model to provide an appropriate adaptation that is culturally responsive couples therapy. EFT and attachment theory will need to be significantly modified to be a culturally responsive therapy to meet the needs of Black couples. Adult attachment needs to be conceptualized from a network approach (e.g., multiple relationships/collectivism) instead of only a dyadic perspective. In addition, acculturation (i.e., racial identity), race/ethnicity, institutional decimation and Black sex ratios, marriage, anti-Black racism, internalized stereotypes (anti-Blackness), Strong Black Woman/Superwoman Schema, John Henryism, and religion and spirituality are all important factors to consider in providing culturally responsive care and clinical interventions that strengthen treatment approaches with Black couples.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the unique characteristics, strengths, and challenges for creating and sustaining healthy marital relationships between heterosexual men and women of African ancestry. The approach to this work is grounded within the emerging field of African-centered psychology that privileges the lived experiences of African Americans and summarizes a marriage empowerment program, Conversations in Marriage© (CIM), which uses African proverbs to promote situational learning. A definition of culture is developed to conceptualize healthy marriages, and challenges affecting Black marriage are discussed. Key foundations, practices, and processes of a cycle of healthy marriages are presented and implications for building stronger marriages are discussed. Each of these elements are discussed from a perspective that centers sustainable marriage within a framework of community growth, empowerment, and sustainability.

This research investigated patterns of African American couples’ positive and negative stereotyping and perceptions of couple adjustment and examined the relationship between demographic variables and African American couples’ positive/negative stereotyping of each other and couple adjustment. Respondents (n = 142; 101 females, 41 males) were 18 years or older, second-generation African Americans in a heterosexual relationship. The significant findings in this study were as follows: (a) older age is correlated with negative stereotypes of Black females and of Black males; (b) women who had a higher education endorsed more stereotypes of negative Black females than those who did not complete high school; (c) females had higher negative stereotypes of Black women and Black men than males; and (d) both being in a committed relationship and holding positive stereotypes related highly to overall adjustment in this sample of African Americans. Implications for further research and clinical work with African American couples are discussed.

Black Women’s Spiritual and Religious Coping discusses the role of religion and spirituality in Black women’s lives and mental health. We remind therapists of the centrality of Black women’s spiritual and religious orientation. The discussion includes how Black women might connect stress, suffering, and psychological distress to religious and spiritual narratives. Next, we discuss Black women’s use of spirituality and religiosity to cope with life’s difficulties. We also examine how spiritual and religious involvement can increase Black women’s experiences of oppression, self-loathing, and self-silencing. Finally, we offer suggestions for working with Black women on religious and spiritual issues from a culturally skilled perspective.

Appearance Prejudice and Discrimination against Black Women discusses Black women’s substantive experiences of discrimination based on their appearance. Black women experience biases around body features, skin color, hair, personal grooming choices, and other appearance-related variables. Black women also receive constant messages about how they do not meet mainstream beauty standards. These messages may cause women to internalize negative self-images. We offer therapists strategies to support Black women to deconstruct beauty stereotypes and foster cultural beauty ideals to help manage and reject societal invalidations.

Given their intersecting, historically oppressed identities, Black women are more likely to be exposed to traumatic experiences than other racial groups. In this chapter we review the historical, systemic and institutional, and individual trauma that impacts the mental health of Black women. We provide a framework for treating trauma with Black women that is based on intersectionality and Black feminist theory. Further, we share the key components of providing trauma-informed care and best practices clinicians can use when supporting Black women in healing from trauma.