Madam C.J. Walker

The Making of an American Icon

Erica L. Ball

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.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 176 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-4422-6038-2 • Hardback • February 2021 • $35.00 • (£23.95)

978-1-4422-6039-9 • eBook • February 2021 • $33.00 • (£22.95) (coming soon)

Series: Library of African American Biography

Subjects: History / African American, Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General, Biography & Autobiography / Political, Biography & Autobiography / Women

Madam C.J. Walker

The Making of an American Icon

Hardback

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.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 176 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-4422-6038-2 • Hardback • February 2021 • $35.00 • (£23.95)

978-1-4422-6039-9 • eBook • February 2021 • $33.00 • (£22.95) (coming soon)

Series: Library of African American Biography

Subjects: History / African American, Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General, Biography & Autobiography / Political, Biography & Autobiography / Women

Author

Erica L. Ball, associate professor of American Studies at California State Fullerton, is the author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class and coeditor with Kellie Carter Jackson. Reconsidering Roots: Observations on the Fortieth Anniversary of a TV Mini-Series that Changed the Way We Understood American Slavery.

Madam C.J. Walker

The Making of an American Icon

Erica L. Ball

Madam C.J. Walker

The Making of an American Icon

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