This is the second part of our biweekly series that focuses on black women who changed the world with their inventions.
Madam C.J Walker:
Sarah Breedlove, also known as Madam C.J Walker born on December 23, 1867. She was born on the same Delta, Louisiana plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, had been enslaved before the end of the Civil War.
She grew from the cotton fields of the South to the washtub, and from there, she was promoted to be the kitchen cook. From that position, she promoted herself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations, and soon enough, she built her factory on the ground.
Madam C.J invented her line of African American hair products that enabled her to become America’s first female self-made millionaire after suffering from a scalp ailment that resulted in her hair loss. She eventually established Madame C.J. Walker Laboratories to manufacture cosmetics and train sales beauticians by travelling around the country and giving lecture demonstrations.
As her hair care industry grew, Walker quickly immersed herself in the social and political culture of the Harlem Renaissance. She also founded philanthropies that included educational scholarships and donations to homes for the elderly, the NAACP, and the National Conference on Lynching, among other organizations, focused on improving the lives of African Americans.
Sarah Goode:Inventor and entrepreneur Sarah E. Goode was one of the first African American women to be granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to invent a folding cabinet bed in 1885.
She was born into slavery in 1850, and she received her freedom at the end of the Civil War; she moved to Chicago and became an entrepreneur. She and her husband, Archibald, a carpenter, owned a furniture store.
In trying to provide a solution to the fact that most of her customers lived in small apartments and so didn’t have space for furniture, Goode invented “cabinet beds”, which she called folding beds.
When the bed was not being used, it could be used as a roll-top desk, complete with compartments for stationery and other writing supplies. Goode also received a patent for her invention on July 14, 1885. She died in 1905.
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