Madame Cj Walker Essay Example

run by Madam Walker's daughter, A'Lelia, taught their students what became known as the Walker Method. After their schooling, most of the graduates were employed by Walker herself. She and her company employed over 3,000 people at one point. By early 1910, she had settled in Indianapolis, then the nation's largest inland manufacturing center, where she built a factory, hair and manicure salon and another training school. This way she helped so many black women at that time to stand on their own feet.

One of the reason for her success as a businesswoman was her self-confidence, she was poor but that didn’t stop her to become the first female millionaire. No single accomplishment or personal trait captures the essence of Madam C. J. Walker's legacy. Rather, her life is best summed up as being a Pioneering entrepreneur. Madam C. J. Walker was clearly a pioneer of the modern cosmetics industry. Tenacity and perseverance, faith in her and in God, quality products and "honest business dealings" were the elements and strategies she prescribed for aspiring entrepreneurs who requested the secret to her rags-to-riches ascent.

Along the way, she provided educational opportunities and lucrative incomes for thousands of African American women who otherwise would have been consigned to jobs as farm laborers, washerwomen and maids. Pioneering philanthropist Madam Walker was also a pioneering philanthropist, initiating the philosophy of charitable giving in the black community with her unprecedented contributions to the YMCA, the NAACP, the Tuskegee Institute, and Bethune-Cookman College. As a pioneering political activist, Madam C. J. Walker organized her sales agents to use their economic clout to protest lynching and racial injustice.

She made it her goal to create

a safe and comfortable place in which black women could be "pampered," believing that this kind of attention would boost their self-confidence and alleviate the daily stress that black women suffered from. In addition to feeling physical beauty, she wanted women to, "combine these qualities with a beautiful mind and soul. "   As much as any woman of the twentieth century, Madam C. J. Walker paved the way for the profound social changes that altered women's place in American society.