BLACK WOMEN, BLACK LOVE

A professor of religion and African American studies offers a compelling look at Black women’s love relationships through a historical lens.

As Stewart notes, 70% of Black American women are unmarried, largely due to circumstance rather than by choice. The author examines the social, economic, and cultural conditions for heterosexual Black women who want to fall in love and get married but have few prospects as a result of historical, systemic problems that have plagued their love relationships and marriage outcomes since slavery. Love, coupling, and marriage among enslaved people were burdened by “expectations of fracture” due to the sale of a loved one or other separations. In painstaking and painful detail, Stewart chronicles how even after Emancipation, the likelihood of domestic terror in the form of lynchings, torture, and the wholesale massacre of thriving Black communities “haunted Black couples and families well into the twentieth century.” Those who did survive bore the burdens and restrictions inherent in the systems of patriarchal marriage and unrelenting poverty. Further, abusive federal and state “man-in-the-house” policies targeted Black women, stripping their families of public assistance benefits if boyfriends or husbands were present in the home. Such policies essentially punished Black women for seeking companionship and romantic love, denying them vital sources of “financial and emotional support.” Not surprisingly, Black marriage rates declined significantly in the 1960s and ’70s. But the most pernicious impact on Black love and marriage has been wrought by mass incarceration. More than twice as many Black men were under correctional control in 2013 than were enslaved in 1850. Stewart interweaves such eye-opening statistics with engrossing personal narratives of contemporary and enslaved women whose lives (and deaths) are a testament to the complexity of Black women’s quests for love and a celebration of their resilience in the face of daunting odds.

A beautiful, strikingly original work that is both scholarly and deeply moving.