| Madam C.J. Walker: The Making of an American Icon Contributor(s): Ball, Erica L. (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: 1442260386 ISBN-13: 9781442260382 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers OUR PRICE: $36.63 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: January 2021 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | African American - Biography & Autobiography | Political - Biography & Autobiography | Women |
| Dewey: B |
| Series: Library of African American Biography |
| Physical Information: 0.5" H x 6" W x 9" (0.91 lbs) 166 pages |
| Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - African American - Topical - Black History - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |