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First Millionaire: Madam C. J. Walker

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by Katy Gehred

There seems to be a split between people who describe Madam C.J. Walker as America’s Madam C.J. Walkerfirst self-made female millionaire or as the first self-made African American female millionaire. As somebody with a background in feminist theory, I’m tempted to chalk this up to identity politics, which so frequently asks women of color to choose between race and gender as their primary identity. Madam C.J. Walker never felt the need to separate her racial activism with her womanhood. She made her million dollars not in spite of but because of her identity, creating hair products for African American women and taking advantage of a completely untapped market in late 19th century US. She’s both an inspiring and problematic figure in American history and she’s worthy of discussion.

Madam CJ Walker was born with the name Sarah Breedlove in 1867 in Delta, Louisiana. Both of her parents were recently freed slaves, and they passed away when she was just 7 years old. She was extremely poor, picking cotton with her sister and her sister’s “cruel” husband to get by. She married Moses McWilliams when she was 14 years old as a way to escape that life, and she had her daughter Lelia (later changed to A’Lelia) when she was 18. She was a widow at 20, and began work as a washerwoman.

Around 1890 in St. Louis she began to look for a more profitable way to live her life than washing “white folks’ dirty clothes”.  Her inspiration came from an unusual place, whilst looking for a cure for her hair loss due to alopecia she began to work for African American entrepreneur Annie Malone, selling Malone’s “Wonderful Hair Grower.” But after moving to Colorado and marrying Charles Joseph Walker, a promoter, she concocted her own hair product and began advertising it in the newspapers. She adopted the name “Madam CJ Walker” and began to tour with the “Walker Method” of hair growing, which was soon wildly successful.

Madam CJ WalkerFrom her hair product profits, Walker began to open factories and beauty schools. She trained teams of sales beauticians to travel around the country promoting Walker’s philosophy of “cleanliness and loveliness.” She pushed her way into the National Negro Business League convention in 1912 by writing letter after letter to Booker T. Washington and finally showing up uninvited. She interrupted Washington during a morning session to announce “I feel that I am in a business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race.”

The politics surrounding black hair spur on debate even today. While Walker’s beauty regimen involved hot combs for hair straightening she denied that her system was purely to straighten hair, rather, she argued, it was for growth. She told a reporter “Right here let me correct the erroneous impression held by some that I claim to straighten hair, I want the great masses of my people to take greater pride in their personal appearance and to give their hair proper attention.” However, as Walker’s legacy remains associated with hair straightening and the politics of respectability. Nandi Comer’s 2010 poem “Our Hair” includes a section entitled “What we learn from Madam CJ Walker” about young women using a heated comb, “the smoke sizzling out their greased curls/ until they could smooth and flatten the manes into ponytails.”

Walker used her money and influence to improve the lives of African Americans. She donated money to black universities, the “Colored Branch of the YMCA”, and historically black churches. She toured the country speaking out against lynchings, which were terrifyingly commonplace in the USA of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She and other prominent black entrepreneurs and activists actually traveled to Washington to meet Woodrow Wilson and present him with a petition to make lynching a federal crime. He sent his secretary to meet them.

Walker was a black woman who created a product that met the needs of black women of her time. Her company was large and successful, and she actively sought out black women to hire. She was a smart businesswoman, using strategies of competition and rewards to motivate her “Walker Agents” into creating more sales, and thus making profits and giving her the means to employ more black women. Madam C.J. Walker succeeded in what was most definitely a “white man’s world,” not by choosing any one aspect of her “identity” over any other, but by ingeniously embracing her experiences as a black woman in a way that translated to financial success.

Chicago History: Elizabeth Catlett in They Seek a City

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Elizabeth Catlett’s Sharecropper (1952) on display as part of They Seek a City

by Emilie Egger

“Art is only important to the extent that it aids in the liberation of our people.”–Elizabeth Catlett

The Art Institute of Chicago’s They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, 1910–1950 exhibit, currently on display, includes art created during and inspired by the era of the Great Migration in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. The exhibit prominently displays the lithographies of Mexican artist Elizabeth Catlett, known for her artistic work for social justice among issues of race, class, and sexism.

The works focus on African-American migration from the United-States South, the waves of immigration out of several European countries, as well as the thousands of immigrants who traveled from Mexico to the northern United States. The exhibit highlights the common experiences of these immigrants in urban Chicago. Reasons behind the migrations are varied; for some, religious persecution prompted their move, while for others, it was the hope of better working and living conditions in the industrial North.  Chicago became a community for all these immigrants, coming from different backgrounds with the common goal of overcoming the hardships of immigrant life.

The art of Elizabeth Catlett encompasses several of these themes. Catlett is best known for her painting, sculpture, and lithography that focused on the political issues of her time. Born in Washington D.C. Catlett was a graduate of Howard University and the University of Iowa’s fine-arts program, where she studied under renowned American Gothic painter Grant Wood. Her first connections to Chicago came when her sculpture, Mother and Child won first prize at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940. She later began a ceramics residency at the Art Institute of Chicago, where much of her work remains.

Mother and Child 1939

Elizabeth Catlett’s Mother and Child (1939) won the American Negro Exposition first prize for sculpture in Chicago in 1940.

Themes of migration, color, and class permeate Catlett’s work. Catlett was the granddaughter of American slaves and was known to portray famous black activists, such as Harriet Tubman, Ralph Ellison, and Malcolm X in her work. However, the majority of her oeuvre focuses on the lives of more-ordinary working people, especially women. It is these works that currently make up a large part of the current Great Migration exhibit, highlighting both her artistic prowess and her political consciousness.

Some of Catlett’s most-famous works include Sharecropper (1952), which features an anonymous black woman worker from the 1950s American South and her 1946 series of prints titled “The Negro Woman.” She did not shy away from the most-controversial issues of race, including lynchings and police beatings of blacks. Her award-winning Mother and Child became the inspiration for several other sculptures revolving around themes of motherhood.

Catlett spent much of her later life in Mexico, eventually becoming a professor of sculpture at Mexico City’s University of Mexico’s School of Fine Art, before retiring in Cuernavaca. Soon after relocating, Catlett began work with the People’s Graphic Arts workshop in Mexico that called themselves a political/social art group.Together, they created pamphlets, posters, and textbook illustrations that highlighted various working-class causes in Mexico.

Catlett soon became a well-known activist for Mexican working women. She left the United States for good and became a Mexican citizen after being labeled an ‘undesirable’ US citizen following her arrest during a railroad-strike in Mexico City in 1949. She would remain in Mexico until her death.

Until the end of her life, Catlett remained concerned with the social aspects of her work, once saying, “I have always wanted my art to service my people — to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.” In many ways, her art is an extension of her activist identity. Catlett was a regular striker, picketer, who remained politically active well into her 90s.

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One of Catlett’s works on display as part of the Chicago Art Institute’s ‘They Seek a City’ exhibit

They Seek a City will remain on display at the Art Institute of Chicago until June 2, 2013.

You can see more of Catlett’s work here.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: The Life and Work of Amy Swerdlow

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Saturday, March 2, 2013 1PM

Blanche Wiesen Cook, Moderator

Blanche Wiesen Cook is the Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s Studies at bwcJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She earned her PhD from John Hopkins University. She is the author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volumes I&II and is currently completing the third volume. She is also the author of The Declassified Eisenhower and  Women and the World in the 1990s. She is the former Vice-President for Research of the American Historical Associa­tion, and former Vice-President and Chair of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA, Inc.) She was also Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Freedom of Information and Access Committee of the Organization of American Historians

Carole Artigiani

Carole Artigiana is an alumna of the women’s history graduate program at Sarah Lawrence college, where she also served as program administrator. She is the founder and president emerita of Global Kids, an organization dedicated to the success of urban youth. She is the 2006 and 2007 Purpose Prize Fellow and recipient of the Spirit of Anne Frank Award.

Melanie Gustafson

Melanie Gustafson earned her PhD from New York University and is an alumna of the women’s history graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Vermont, where she also teaches courses in women’s and gender studies. She is the author of ecoming a Historian: A Survival Manual for Women and Men and a co-editor of We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880-1960. 

Phyllis Vine

Phyllis Vine earned her PhD in history at the University of Michigan. She has taught Union College, Bard College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She is most recently the author of One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream and has also written Families in Pain and Household and Kin. 

PANEL: Uses of Space: Women’s Global and Local Resistance

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March 2, 2013 4:45 PM

This panel will be moderated by Dr. Rona Holub, chair of the women’s history department at Sarah Lawrence College. 

From Stella Wright to Stellar Homes: Black Women’s Activism and the Newark
Tenant Movement 1969-1974

Victoria McCall

This paper explores the meanings and significance of the landmark rent strike at the Stella Windsor Wright Homes in Newark, New Jersey, which took place between 1970 and 1973. Situating the strike within the context of space and resistance, she shows that housing and housing rights for Stella Wright tenants was about more than housing; it was about the creation of a fulfilling, free life. She answers questions such as: how were residents advocating for their own space? What were their demands? How
does the Newark Tenant Movement add to Newark’s Black Liberation historiography? And, importantly, what could be learned of poor women’s activism from the strike.

Victoria McCall is currently pursuing her M.A. in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College. She received her B.A. from Temple University and her M.S. from Chestnut Hill College with a concentration in Secondary English and Special Education. She is currently working as a Kindergarten Instructional Assistant and has experience teaching special
education and high school English.

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Resistance Through Movement: South African Women Negotiate Space

Catherine Newton

This paper examines South African women’s experiences of resistance under the apartheid regime. In South Africa, the struggle between the oppressive white minority government and the black majority often took the form of spatial negotiation. Apartheid in South Africa was most strongly characterized by a desire of the white minority government to control, legislate, and monitor black people’s location in space. Evident in legislation, policing and prosecution records is the desire to control and supervise black women’s movement. In response, their resistance appropriately takes the form of purposeful movement. Women refused to carry passes as they moved in and out of cities illegally. Domestic servants decorated their back rooms and broke rules to shelter relatives and friends, excerpting control over their immediate environment. In the most extreme instances, women escaped prison and chose to live in exile to continue revolutionary work. In all of these ways and many more, women moved purposefully in and around their daily spaces and even across and out of the country despite the government’s concerted efforts to confine them.

Catherine Newton received her B.A. in Philosophy from Kalamazoo College in 2009, and it currently working towards her M.A. in women’s history from Sarah Lawrence College. In the summer of 2010 she worked for RADDHO, the African Assembly for the Defense of Human Rights, where she worked directly with abused Senegalese women.

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“What Could You Do With a Dollar?”: Italian American Women’s Wage Earning in
Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1929-1941

Emma Staffaroni

This paper uses oral history and local sources to explore the experiences of
young Italian American women during the decade after the Great Depression. When the Depression of 1929 struck Northeastern Pennsylvania, coal mining towns like Carbondale – and its large population of Italian-American residents – underwent significant industrial reorganization and transformation and transformation. As a result,
first- and second-generation Italian-American women experienced shifts in their identities. Where most had been confined to traditional roles, leaving the wage-earning to men, the 1930s marked the first time that these women acted as sole or primary breadwinners in their families. The extensive oral history of Joan Festa Staffaroni, native of Carbondale, lays the foundation for this research. The presentation will show that wage-earning – for Joan, her sisters, and many others in this context – created conditions in which a woman could claim personal and political space in strategic ways.

Emma Staffaroni is working on her M.A. in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College. She earned her B.A. from Boston College in English, Education, and Women’s Studies. She is the 2012 recipient of the Gerda Lerner Prize in Women’s History.

PANEL: Transnational Women’s Activism

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Saturday March 2, 2013  3:00PM

This panel will be moderated by Mallory Craig-Karim of Sarah Lawrence College.

Women’s Efforts for Peace in the U.S. and Great Britain: The First 100 years, 1815 –  1915

Wendy E. Chmielewski

Women on both sides of the Atlantic were members of the first peace societies and activists in the movements for peace, beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century. While they were kept in the general membership, rather than in leadership positions, women raised a significant portion of the finances which funded the movement and hundreds of women voiced their varied opinions on peace issues and specific events through publication of books, pamphlets, essays, stories, poems, and hymns. This paper will outline the types of peace activism in which women on both sides of the Atlantic participated throughout the century before the advent of the modern peace movement at the beginning of World War I.

Wendy E. Chmielewski earned her Ph.D. in Women’s History from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is currently the George R. Cooley Curator at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Her most recent publication is Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy, edited by Marilyn Fisher, Carol Nackenoff, and Wendy
Chmielewski. 

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North African Female Peace Activists: A Window of Opportunity. The Case of Amira
Yahyaoui

Habiba Boumlik is presenting a paper on a woman peace activist from Tunisia named Amira Yahyaoui. Yahyaoui has been very active since the early days of the Arab Spring. The paper will be based on sources written in Arabic, French, and English. Her research will trace Amira’s trajectory and active presence on the web.

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Historiography of the Chinese Women’s Movement During the Early 20th Century

Katrina Brown

This presentation will give an overview of where, how and why women
organized in China during the first decades of the 20th Century. The paper will compare of two book-length English language studies that have been done on the Chinese women’s movement. Tani Barlow’s book, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, is an intellectual history that focuses on the ideological nuances of the feminist debate in China. On a different note, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual
Histories, by Wang Zheng is a collection of oral histories of women who participated in the women’s movement in the early 20th century in China. Taken together, these books paint a picture of both the ideas that influenced the development of feminist thought in China, but also how the thought was translated into action and the numerous which ways it influenced Chinese women’s life experiences and opportunities. This historiography of feminist theory and activism in China illustrates how Chinese women’s history is an important contribution to any conversation about the history and nuances
of both global feminisms and women’s activism.

Katrina Brown is a current student in the Sarah Lawrence College Women’s History Graduate program with a special interest in Chinese women’s history

 

PANEL: Taking up Space: Empowerment through Community Building and Peaceful Protest

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Saturday, March 2, 2013 at 4:45 PM

This panel will be moderated by Maureen Lahey, who earned a master’s in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College. 

Taking Up Space: Empowerment through Community Building and Peaceful Protest

Samantha Daley, Nicole Elinoff, Emily Vrotsos

Administrators of the Seminole County public middle schools near Orlando, Florida are attempting to end bullying among their students. Currently, there are no ways for students to participate in this anti-bullying campaign. The Young Women Leaders Program examines bullying perceptions and experiences of 7th graders through mentoring and encourages students to become involved in anti-bullying activism. This presentation will discuss the importance of community building in the Young Women Leaders Program and how Leading Out Loud, a mentoring workshop has accomplished this.

Nicole Elinoff is currently earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida. She serves as a mentor in the Young Women Leaders Program and is the current president of the National Organization for Women at University of Central Florida. 

Emiliy Vrotsos holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida, where she now works as the program coordinator for the Young Women Leaders Program. She is also the founder of the Young Men’s Leadership Program. She will begin work on a master’s degree in non-profit management at University of Central Florida in Fall 2013. 

Samantha Daley is currently earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida. She serves as a facilitator in the Young Women Leaders Program, where she previously served as mentor.She is also currently a Student Correspondent for Choice USA.  

PANEL: Education and Activism

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Saturday March 2, 2013 10:00 AM

This panel will be moderated by Dr. Kathryn Hearst of Sarah Lawrence College. 

Feminist Pacifism and Gendered Nonviolence in the Age of New Media

Amy Schneidhorst

The Sixties anti-nuclear and anti-war group, Women Strike for Peace was known for its media savvy. Their creative direct action attracted broad media attention and created a space for moral and ethical critiques of realpolitik policy during the Cold War. This paper analyzes the legacy of WSP on the rhetoric and tactics of post-Cold War era, feminist-pacifist CODEPINK and maternal nonviolence proponent Kathy Kelly. This paper
finds, in an era where citizen journalists have a great latitude to craft their own brand, that Kelly and CODEPINK both perpetuate maternalism to justify female participation in international debates about war and militarism while at the same time they utilize post-modernist and feminist critiques of international relations in their criticism of U.S. economic sanctions and drone warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Amy Schneidhorst received her Ph.D. in History with a concentration in Gender and Women’s studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds an MA in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford, England, has completed M. Ed. coursework at University of Illinois at Chicago, and holds a BA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her most recent publication, from which she draws material for this presentation, is Building a Just and Secure World: Popular Front Women’s Struggle for Peace and Justice in Chicago during the 1960s.

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For the Public Good: Connecting Women’s History and Public Education Advocacy 

Jessie B. Ramey

Public education is a public good. That’s the rallying cry of a new grassroots
movement in the United States opposed to a substantial wave of education “reformers” interested in privatizing public education. These reformers promote the fairly radical belief that public education – an institution widely regarded as a cornerstone of American democracy – has failed. Using the language of choice, competition, accountability, and data-driven decision-making, they argue that public education ought to be subjected to the business techniques of market capitalism. Ironically, those who promote these corporate-style reforms and privatization plans do so in the name of civil rights, equity, and racial justice. Yet privatization efforts of public education have actually harmed our poorest students. To understand how and why local communities are rejecting these corporate-style reforms, this presentation takes Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a case study, situating the struggle for public education in historical and political context.

Jessie B. Ramey, Ph.D., earned her MA in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002. She is a historian of working families and U.S. social policy and an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in Women’s Studies and history at the University of Pittsburgh. Her new book, Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages won the Lerner-Scott Prize in women’s history from the Organization of American Historians, the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and the John Heinz Award from the National
Academy of Social Insurance.

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Who Needs Feminism? Feminist Pedagogy and Public Engagement in a Digital World

Rachel F. Seidman

As a final project in my class at Duke on Women and the Public Sphere: History,
Theory and Practice, the students created a poster campaign called Who Needs Feminism. In this campaign, individuals from a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and gender identities held up signs completing the sentence “I need feminism because…” When the students posted these pictures online, they instantly “went viral.” Today Who Needs Feminism has received over 23,000 “likes” on Facebook, thousands of submissions of new posters from around the world, and the attention of media giants. The students
continue to organize and expand on the campaign, and to use it as a springboard for activism. Faculty on other campuses are using the campaign as the basis for lesson plans in their classrooms. I hope to use our experience to open up a dialogue on how these shifts affect the powerful connections between feminist pedagogy, civic activism, and what we might call public scholarship.

Rachel F. Seidman received her B.A. in History and Classics from Oberlin college, and her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Yale University. She is the Associate director of the Southern Oral History Program at the Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill. Her most recent publication is “After Todd Akin, Why Women – And Men – Still Need Feminism” for The Christian Science Monitor.

PANEL: Motherhood and the Body

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Saturday, March 2, 2013 at 10:00 AM

This panel will be moderated by current SLC women’s history student, Tiffany-Latrice Williams. 

Finding Wilhelmina Geipel: An Immigrant Midwife in Queens, 1884-1914

Jennifer Garvey

Immigrant midwives played a large role in helping other immigrant women assimilate into the American Dream, creating a more comfortable and familiar space than a foreign American hospital. German-American midwife Wilhelmina Geipel was one such midwife; she delivered babies for many years in Queens. This project explores why Geipel continued her midwifery practice after her family was financially stable and she was not required to work,, sometimes traveling as far as eight miles to deliver babies.
Jennifer Garvey is a current MA candidate in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Pace University. 

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Seeing Red: Mother Bloor’s Crusade for Justice in Industrial America

Maureen Sherrard Thompson

Labor activist Ella Reeve Bloor was perhaps one of the most radical of the late-19th and early 20th century women reformers, yet remains relatively unknown. From early on, Bloor had a passion for the underprivileged. She spent much of her life with the poor, getting to know them in their homes and organizing for them in the face of much opposition, including several arrests. She later became an advocate for the imprisoned, especially for conscientious objectors to world War I. Throughout her life of activism, Bloor traveled the country several times, gaining support and raising funds for her many causes. When she became disenfranchised within the Socialist party when the party agreed not to strike in World War I, Bloor became a charter member of the American Communist Party, for which she campaigned until her death in 1951.


Maureen Sherrard Thompson earned a master’s degree in history from Temple University, where she also received bachelor’s degrees in women’s studies and history. Her master’s thesis is titled, “Rural Solutions in the Industrial age: Joseph Fels, the Single Tax, and Land Reform.”

PANEL: Textile Activism, Shopping, Dress Reform and Justice

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Saturday, March 2, 2013 at 3:00 PM

This panel will be moderated by Gayle Fischer of Salem State College.

Outerwear to Underwear: The Dress Reform Movement in the Nineteenth Century

Traci L. Gott

Women’s clothing in the 19th century was restrictive and unhealthy across all social classes. Women wore tight-laced corsets, multiple petticoats, restrictive garters, among other uncomfortable and often-harmful garments. The dress-reform movement, carried out by members of the women’s-rights movement, utopian communities, and health reformers, aimed to design women’s clothing that was less limiting. Although unassociated with men’s clothing, each group produced a variation of a women’s trouser. Intense public outcry about the ‘gender’ of clothing, particularly the ‘male’ trouser,  prompted many of these reforms underground. However, the health reformers kept the movement going in the public eye, but shifted their focus from outerwear to undergarments in order to avoid public criticism. Their reforms led to many of the fashion trends seen in the coming decades, namely the 1920s, when women’s clothing was significantly modified for the first time since the Middle Ages.

Traci L. Gott is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Buffalo, where she also teaches American Studies. She earned bachelor’s degrees from Northeastern State University and master’s degrees from the University of Oklahoma. 

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Solidarity through Shopping: Depression-Era Activism for Worker Justice

Beth Robinson 

The League of Women Shoppers (LWS) was founded in 1935 as a response to a New York department-store strike. Using the slogan “Use your buying power for justice,” the LWS conducted investigations into labor disputes, produced propaganda, and developed campaigns around local and national labor issues. The LWS  were committed to direct action and focused on campaigns that included letter-writing , boycotts, walking picket lines, and non-violent civil disobedience. This paper argues that the LWS carried on the ideals of the New Deal, which set a clear standard of what working conditions should be in a democratic country.

Beth Robinson earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is currently a lecturer in women’s studies. She has published two pieces for the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, 2nd Edition, and will soon publish a piece in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 titled “How did the League of Women Shoppers Use Their Privilege to act in Solidarity with Workers?.”