| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.4

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

On Her Own Ground The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker

By A'Lelia Bundles

(New York: Scribner, 2001. Pp. 415. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index. $30.00.)

Her Dream of Dreams The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker

By Beverly Lowry

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Pp. 481. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index. $27.50.)

Madam C. J. Walker, the celebrated Indianapolis-based beauty culturist, is one of the more intriguing figures of the twentieth century. Born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana in 1867, the daughter of impoverished sharecroppers, she was an orphan at seven, a wife at fourteen, a mother at eighteen, and a widow at twenty. As a laundress with only three months of formal education she was able to accumulate a fortune and to carve out for herself a role as a prominent race leader on the national stage. At the time of her death in 1919 at the age of fifty-one (fifteen short years after she had abandoned the washtub), Madam Walker had amassed an estate valued at close to $600,000—the equivalent of $6 million in today's dollars—and was universally esteemed, not only as the "foremost business woman of her race" and an exemplar of black achievement, but also as a philanthropist and political activist. That she was able to rise from poverty and obscurity to become one of the first women of color (and one of the few women of any hue) to achieve wealth and influence through her own efforts is a testament to her will, ambition, and keen intelligence.

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