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Essay on Women Inventors: Madame C. J. Walker
In 1905 Sarah Breedlove developed a conditioning treatment for straightening hair. Starting with door-to-door sales of her cosmetics, Madame C.J. Walker amassed a fortune. In 1910 she built a factory in Indianapolis to manufacture her line of cosmetics. Before her death in 1919 she was a millionaire, one of the most successful business executives in the early half of the twentieth century.
Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker, better known as Madame CJ Walker or Madame Walker, and Marjore Joyner revolutionized the hair care and cosmetics industry early in the 20th century.
Madame CJ Walker was born in 1867 in poverty-stricken rural Louisiana (Otha, Jim, 2001). The daughter of former slaves, she was orphaned at the age of seven, then Walker and her older sister survived by working in the cotton fields of Delta and Vicksburg, Mississippi. She married at age fourteen and her only daughter was born in 1885. After her husband's death two years later, she traveled to St. Louis to join her four brothers who had established themselves as barbers. Working as a laundrywoman, she managed to save enough money to educate her daughter, and became involved in activities with the National Association of Colored Women (Hattie, 1977).
During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose some of her hair. Embarrassed by her appearance, she experimented with a variety of home-made remedies and products made by another black woman entrepreneur, Annie Malone (Hattie, 1977). In 1905 Sarah became a sales agent for Malone and moved to Denver, where she married Charles Joseph Walker.
One night Sarah had a dream. As she told the story many years later, in her dream "a black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp....
