Black women often played a crucial role in the survival of their households through their income which supplemented that of their husbands’. Unlike white women who had the option of choosing not to work, many African women, in particular, relied heavily on domestic work such as caring for the wealthy's homes, working in boarding houses, and serving as laundresses. Steady employment was often hard to find for the majority of Black people in Boston. In Antebellum Boston, having lighter skin was considered advantageous and frequently evidenced by the greater employment for mixed-race Bostonians. However, they also accounted for  52% of the most skilled.³ For instance, in the the1850s, biracial people accounted for  18% of the Black workforce. This proportion increased in the 1860s when they made up 34% of the Black workforce. In addition to colorism, Black people experienced competition for employment and housing opportunities with immigrants such as those from Ireland who arrived in Boston in the 1850s.⁴ Black men were often disadvantaged when facing white competitors for the same jobs and faced resistance or objections from them. Moreover, the seasonal nature of Black men's work made it challenging to find reliable employment, making it nearly impossible for a Black household to be supported by a solitary bread earner. Additionally, immigrants often moved into the low-income neighborhoods that were also home to Black people. As a result, Black populations were sometimes gradually ‘forced’ out of some of these areas due to the inherent competition for space they faced from immigrants.

The rise of this ideology can be linked to the working-class struggle for a family wage (one wage that supports an entire family). The working class recognized that wages were lower when the supply of labor outstripped the demand for labor. While pursuing a family wage established a greater standard of living, the idea that every male worker was entitled to a wage that could support a family reinforced the idea that a woman’s work life was confined to the house's four walls–thus providing more impetus to the ideologies associated with the cult of domesticity. The focus on the family wage created  stigmas for  women who did work because it implied their husbands could not support them.⁵

Many of the repercussions of this ideology greatly affected women who had to work. Women mainly worked out of necessity. The cult of domesticity led to the denial of access to skilled jobs, lower wages, and more subordinate positions in the workforce. This mainly affected Black women, who were greatly impacted by the job segregation promoted by the Cult of Domesticity that relegated women to the least skilled and most poorly paid  jobs.

Consequently, the necessity of work for black women inherently denied them participation in the Cult of Domesticity. “The limitations under which all blacks labored brought poverty that made it impossible for black women to be ‘true women’ in the full nineteenth-century sense of that term.”⁸ Not only was it  the ideal of womanhood that black women were denied, but it was also the economic security and possibility of upward mobility that white people were provided that reinstated the idea of colorism within 19th-century Boston. “The limitations imposed on women combined with those on blacks  people t made the achievements of outliers like Chloe Russell and other successful businesswomen and property owners all the more significant.⁹

Information on Russell and her book is limited to Eric Gardner’s text. Still, details regarding her significant upward mobility, work as a fortune teller, and successful businesswoman can be contextualized by examining other women who experienced similar successes.

Wilson began her career as early as 1861 after her son's death a year earlier.). She first appeared in the Banner of Light, a prominent Boston spiritualist weekly newspaper in mid-1867, in which the paper described her as “the earned and eloquent colored trance medium” and detailed her participation in a spiritualist convention where she spoke in a trance about labor reform and child education.¹³ Wilson’s growing status in the spiritualist movement was evident in 1868 when she was elected to the Finance Committee for the Third Annual Convention of the Massachusetts Spiritual Association –  where she took charge of the convention’s monetary state of affairs.¹⁴ It is also reported that she volunteered to lecture for the Association free of cost.This is a notable distinction from Russell, who did turn fortune-telling into a successful business venture. Wilson's volunteer activity was a component of her networking activities and a means of getting accepted into a white-led group.

Wilson's trance work was impacted by other, more sensational forms of spiritualism, such as test mediums, that were becoming more prominent at the time.¹⁵ In response to this shift, Wilson’s claims grew more ambitious. She went from advertising herself as a “Lecturer and the Unconscious Trance Physician” to claiming she could treat chronic diseases with great success.¹⁶ This activity later waned. As she decided not to compete with the test mediums, her profits also decreased. In 1881 she described her private sessions as “an old-fashioned healing and developing circle.”¹⁷ Embracing the rise in interest in test mediums would have been difficult for her because her race made her status in the Spiritualist Movement more vulnerable.