In 1912, Madam C.J. Walker was living the “American Dream” at a time when that was a slim possibility for most women, Black or White. Walker was the wealthiest Black woman in America and the first self-made American woman millionaire, but took great pride in her meagre beginnings. She had promoted herself from the cotton fields of the South to the laundry wash-tub, from there to the cook kitchen, and eventually to her business of manufacturing hair treatments. She often emphasized that she, a poor, uneducated woman, was capable of taking matters into her own hands and creating her own enterprise. Shame and apology were always absent from Walker’s description of her rise from the lowest rung of society. She was not embarrassed to describe her past: she knew the desperation of poverty and thus understood perfectly the women she championed.

Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23rd, 1867 near Delta, Louisiana to sharecroppers Owen and Minerva Breedlove, Walker had five siblings, and was the first one born free. By age 7, Walker was an orphan, and lived with relatives until she married her first husband Moses McWilliams in 1882. In 1885, she gave birth to daughter A’Lelia, who would eventually grow up to help run the family beauty empire. Widowed in 1887, Walker re-married twice; first in 1894 to John Davis whom she left in 1903, and then in 1906 to Charles Joseph Walker, when she became known as Madam C.J. Walker. They were business partners, and Charles worked on advertising and publicity for the company. They divorced in 1912. From 1888 to 1910, Madam C.J. relocated many times from St. Louis to Denver to Pittsburgh, and eventually settled in Indianapolis where she built the headquarters of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, as well as a factory, salon, vocational school, and laboratory. At the encouragement of her daughter A’Lelia, Walker also opened an office and salon in Harlem, New York in 1913. A few years later, Madam C.J. joined A’Lelia in New York, and hired the first licensed Black architect in New York City, Vertner Tandy, to build her mansion, Villa Lewaro in Irvington, NY.

Walker was very passionate about uplifting Black women through her business, and she aimed to do this with both beauty products and opportunities to achieve economic independence. She knew from first-hand experience that the employment prospects for Black women in the twentieth century were bleak, and the vast majority of them suffered intense exploitation. Popular propaganda of the time defined women as a function of their roles in the home, and therefore vulnerable to abuse in the workplace, since they had dared to step out of their “natural sphere.” Walker challenged these notions by re-defining the public image of a working mother, and offering Black women financial independence through a career in the African American beauty industry. Women who gained training and employment from the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company made three to four times more than they could have as maids, and achieved a level of autonomy and respectability that they could not have aspired to as domestic workers. In the decade before Madam C.J. Walker opened her manufacturing company, ninety-one percent of Black women workers were employed as domestics. By 1916, the Walker Company had twenty thousand agents, most of whom were Black women.

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