African American women were far from passive in their response to discrimination; they showed initiative and agency in response to racist beauty standards. Gale Primary Sources is an indispensable tool in dissertation research, with its objective to uncover the untold stories of African American women’s strength and resistance.

Madam C.J. Walker. Bush Presidential Records: Staff And Office Files, Public Liaison, Joe Watkins Files: Black Business Council-Business 2/3/89 [2] [OA/ID 03144]. 3 Feb. 1989. Archives Unbound

A 1989 source found in Gale’s Archives Unbound collection describes Madam C.J. Walker as a “[businesswoman], philanthropist, inventor,” and “confidence builder”. Madam Walker is best known for developing and marketing a line of beauty and hair care products specifically designed for Black women. At a time when ‘beauty’ was exclusively the domain of white women by the standards disseminated by the dominantly white media, Walker’s curation of products and advertisements that centered around Black women was revolutionary.

“Mulsified.” The Designer and the Woman’s Magazine, vol. 59, no. 5, Apr. 1924, p. 48. Nineteenth Century Collections Online

This advertisement reflects the racially coded ‘beauty’ that was encouraged by the media in nineteenth and twentieth century America. Found in the Nineteenth Century Collections Online archive, the source is a 1924 advertisement that featured in New York’s The Designer and the Woman’s Magazine. As this advertisement attests, the media deployed imagery of white women to represent the beauty standard. Black women were excluded from visions of ‘beauty’ disseminated by the dominant media in this period.

Moreover, the language used by this advertisement – “soft, silky, wavy” – to describe “beautiful hair” further asserts ‘beauty’ as exclusively the domain of the white woman. The eulogization of ‘soft’ and ‘shiny’ hair that takes place in this 1924 advert persists in hair adverts today, (see Pantene advert below). Hair products are promoted through the promise of ‘shiny’ and ‘soft’ hair; a hair of this texture is positioned as the ideal to be sought after.

Pantene advert (2007), which promises its products will leave “hair feeling soft, shiny and silky-smooth” “Pantene.” Style. Sunday Times, 29 July 2007. The Sunday Times Historical Archive

Excluded from this ‘ideal’ is the Afro and tightly coiled hair texture of many Black women.¹ Since light reflects more like a mirror on a flat surface, white, straight hair appears ‘shiny’.² Contrastingly, on an uneven surface, light tends to scatter.³ Therefore, the different curls and angles of each Afro hair strand means that Black women’s hair does not ‘shine’ in the same way that straighter, white hair does.⁴ As is perpetuated in beauty media today, the ‘beauty’ normed by dominant media in nineteenth and twentieth century was positioned in opposition to the physiology of the Black woman.

In contrast to the contemporary media, which excluded the Black woman from representations of ‘beauty’, Madam Walker’s beauty company disseminated adverts and packaging that centered around the Black woman.

This Walker product is Madam C.J. Walker’s Vegetable Shampoo found in an advertisement in Archives of Sexuality and Gender. As this source demonstrates, Madam Walker often used herself to model as the face of her products.⁵

Walker’s products still sought to change the Black woman’s appearance to reflect a closer proximity to the white beauty standard. For instance, the hugely successful product, Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, aimed to make Black women’s hair appear longer, like the flowing locks of the white women asserted as ‘beautiful’ by the contemporary dominant media. However, by using her own face to represent her brand, Walker subverted the hegemony white women possessed over ‘beauty’ in this period.

Walker’s beauty products were created with the African American woman in mind; the dominant media’s exclusion of the Black woman from the beauty realm was subverted by Walker. By showcasing how her products worked on her own body, Walker’s beauty media constructed a beauty standard that was accessible to, and representative of, the Black woman.

Madam C.J. Walker taking the wheel of her Model T Ford autocar, similarly to how she took the wheel of the American beauty industry in the nineteenth century. Walker, C. J. “Black Women Post Cards.” Common Woman, 25 May 1984, p. 13. Archives of Sexuality and Gender

Due to her success as a businesswoman, Walker became the first self-made Black female millionaire in America and is seen here driving her Model T Ford in 1912. Despite coming “from the cotton fields of the South”, Madam Walker’s intelligence, fierce determination, and entrepreneurial initiative propelled her to become one of the most successful and influential African American entrepreneurs of her time, revolutionizing the beauty industry and empowering countless women along the way.

Madam Walker was also the driving force of many other Black women’s financial enhancement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over her lifetime, it is estimated that she employed 100,000 African American women as sales agents and beauticians of the Walker company.⁶ Far more than simply featuring Black women on the packaging of her beauty products, Walker bestowed upon them a legacy of confidence, economic prosperity, inspiration, and social mobility, transforming lives, and reshaping societal norms.

1. Ebuni Ajiduah, ‘Afro Answers: why you don’t need to shine or define your curls and how microlinks work’, gal-dem, (2020), https://gal-dem.com/afro-answers-hair-column-define-curls-microlinks-afro-hair/, (Last Accessed 30/4/24). 
2. Ibid. 
3. Ibid. 
4. Ibid. 
5. Catherine Davenport, ‘African American Women and the Building of Beauty Culture in South Carolina’, Scholar Commons, (2017), https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4201/?utm_source=scholarcommons.sc.edu%2Fetd%2F4201&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages, (Last Accessed 30/4/24), pp. 9-10. 
6. Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women, Rutgers University Press,(1996), p. 18.