Unchronicled, overlooked, belittled: it’s time we honoured history’s legendary female entrepreneurs

It’s disappointing and dispiriting that Tycoons, our new collection of original obituaries of 50 pioneers of business, does not contain one woman.

Yes, that’s right: all the entries are male. From Cornelius Vanderbilt and Alfred Nobel through to John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford, there’s not a female among them, even though the collection spans almost two hundred years from the 1750s to the 1940s. I say again: it’s a travesty and one I take as a personal failure, even though we are utterly reliant on what was deemed fit to publish at the time.

It is not because Blue Magpie researchers didn’t try to find original obituaries of female business pioneers - they spent many long hours searching archives of 18th, 19th and early 20th century newspapers in various countries, but found just one - sadly, after we had gone to print.

The reality is, as I pointed out when we published Maestros, our collection of original obituaries of 101 of the world’s greatest composers, that women’s contributions in all areas of life - be it in music, politics or business - were held back, ignored and belittled by men for centuries. Those who did have success - achieved against the odds, often in the face of discriminatory laws - were simply airbrushed from history, their lives deemed by male editors as not to be worth chronicling.

The New York Times has recently begun running retrospective obituaries of such women - and others - in a new section of its website, called Overlooked, in an attempt to try to right that wrong. Its mea culpa reads: “Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now, we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people.”

In fact, the Times did run at least one contemporary obituary of a businesswoman: the one we discovered only after Tycoons went to print. It was of Madame C. J. Walker (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919), a remarkable and pioneering African-American woman who was the daughter of slaves and whose real name was Sarah Breedlove. The obituary was published on May 26, 1919, under a headline that reflected the racial attitudes of the time, “Wealthiest Negress Dead”. It read:

Mrs. C. J. Walker, known as New York's wealthiest negress, having accumulated a fortune from the sale of so-called anti-kink hair tonic and from real estate investments in the last fourteen years, died yesterday morning at her country estate at Irvington-on-Hudson. She was proprietor of the Madame Walker hairdressing parlors at 108 West 136th Street and other places in the city. Her death recalled the unusual story of how she rose in twelve years from a washerwoman making only $1.50 a day to a position of wealth and influence among members of her race.

Estimates of Mrs. Walker's fortune had run up to $1,000,000. She said herself two years ago that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time, not that she wanted the money for herself, but for the good she could do with it. She spent $10,000 every year for the education of young negro men and women in Southern colleges and sent six youths to Tuskegee Institute every year. She recently gave $5,000 to the National Conference on Lynching.

Born fifty-one years ago, she was married at 14, and was left a widow at 20 with a little girl to support. She worked as a cook, washerwoman, and the like until she had reached the age of about 37. One morning while bending over her wash she suddenly realized that there was no prospect on her meager wage of laying away anything for old age.

She had often said that one night shortly afterward she had a dream and something told her to start a hair tonic business, which she did, in Denver, Col., on a capital of $1.25.

In a few years she had accumulated a large sum, and invested in real estate in the West and South and in New York State, nearly all the property greatly increasing in value. She then owned a $50,000 home in the northern part of this city, which some years ago she gave to her daughter, Mrs. Lelia Walker Robinson, associated with her in business.

In 1917 Madame Walker completed at Irvington, on the banks of the Hudson, a mansion which cost $250,000, and since then had made her home there. The house, which is one of the show places in the vicinity, is three stories high and consists of thirty or more rooms. She had installed in this home an $8,000 organ with furnishings, including bronze and marble statuary, cut glass candelabra, tapestries, and paintings, said to be of intrinsic beauty and value.

In the spirit of honouring amazing women like Madame Walker and trying to redress the gender imbalance of Tycoons (which is available in paperback for £8.99 or £4.99 as an ebook here), I’ll dedicate another blog next week to some other legendary female entrepreneurs who didn’t get obituaries in the newspapers, but did make significant contributions to the world. Oh, and we will also include Madame Walker’s obit from The New York Times in Tycoons immediately, with our first female entrepreneur proudly taking her place between Henry Heinz and Andrew Carnegie.