Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past, a Smithsonian initiative exploring the history and legacy of race and racism in the United States and globally, partnered with the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative to share stories of women whose work centered wellness. Wellness is one of the six pillars for Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past. An equitable future is one where people of all races can not only live but live well.

Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser graduated Syracuse University College of Medicine in 1876. She educated Black midwives, integrating modern medical knowledge into traditional routines. Attending Syracuse in the years following the end of slavery, she became the 4th African American woman doctor in the US and was one of the first women to specialize in obstetrics and pediatrics. SUNY Upstate named a street after her, Sarah Loguen Place, and established the Dr. Sarah Loguen Child Care Center.

Born in 1899, Dr. Gladys Tantaquidgeon (r.) was a Mohegan medicine woman and anthropologist. At the age of 20 she was invited to study at U. Penn, at the time a male-dominated institution. To preserve her tribe's threatened culture and practices she cofounded the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum in Uncasville, Connecticut, in 1931; the oldest museum in the US owned and operated by Native Americans. In 1994, she provided critical research that helped her tribe receive federal recognition.

Founded in 1974 in NYC, the Salsa Soul Sisters Third World Gay Women Inc. was the 1st known Black lesbian organization in the US. Welcoming Black and/or Latinx women, the group included Asian American and Indigenous women indentifying as LGBTQ+. They created a space for women of color to gather and share experiences facing sexism, racism, and discrimination. Through retreats, protests, and meetings, they empowered each other. Groups like the ASTRAEA Foundation continue the legacy.

In the early 1970s, poet and playwright Ntozake Shange began developing a play rooted in the experiences of contemporary Black women. Referred to by Shange as a "choreo-poem," the 1975 work, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, follows seven Black women who share poetic monologues of love, abuse, and sisterhood accompanied by dance and music. When it reached Broadway in 1976, it was hailed for its powerful and passionate storytelling.