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Madam C.J. Walker : the making of an American icon / Erica L. Ball.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Ball, Erica L., 1971- author.
- Series:
- Library of African-American biography
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Walker, C. J., Madam, 1867-1919.
- Walker, C. J.
- African American women executives--Biography.
- African American women executives.
- Women executives--United States--Biography.
- Women executives.
- Cosmetics industry.
- History.
- Women millionaires.
- United States.
- Women millionaires--United States--Biography.
- Millionaires--United States--Biography.
- Millionaires.
- Cosmetics industry--United States--History.
- Genre:
- Biographies.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource.
- Place of Publication:
- Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, [2021]
- System Details:
- text file
- Summary:
- 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.
- Notes:
- Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI Available via World Wide Web.
- Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 03, 2021).
- Other Format:
- Print version:
- ISBN:
- 1442260394
- 9781442260399
- Publisher Number:
- 40030397558
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
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