Madam C. J. Walker—reputed to be America’s first self-made
woman millionaire—has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches
story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the
aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at
twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress,
laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor
and working-class African American women. By the time of her death
in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the
most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and
president of a hair-care empire and a philanthropist wealthy enough
to own a country estate near the Rockefellers in the prestigious
New York town of Irvington-on-Hudson. In this biography, Erica Ball
places this remarkable and largely forgotten life story in the
context of Walker’s times. Ball analyzes Walker’s remarkable
acts of self-fashioning, and explores the ways that Walker (and the
Walker brand) enabled a new generation of African Americans to
bridge the gap between a nineteenth-century agrarian past and a
twentieth-century future as urban-dwelling consumers.
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