A Denver entrepreneur who was the country’s first self-made female millionaire now has her own Barbie doll.
Madam C.J. Walker has joined the likes of Ida B. Wells and Jane Goodall as part of Barbie’s Inspiring Women Collection that pays tribute to courageous women who took risks, changed rules, and paved the way for generations of girls to dream bigger than ever before, according to Mattel, Inc.
Walker was born in Louisiana in 1867 under the name Sarah Breedlove. Her parents were sharecroppers who had been formerly enslaved.
Though she would later build a beauty empire, her early life was rough. Her parents died when she was seven. She escaped an abusive brother-in-law by marrying at 14, only to be widowed and left a single parent by 21. She and her daughter then moved to St. Louis to be closer to her brothers who worked as barbers near a church.
“It was the women of the church who reached out to Sarah Breedlove, a young widow with a young child, and began to give her a vision of herself as something other than an illiterate washerwoman,” said A’Lelia Bundles, Walker’s great great granddaughter and biographer. “But she was a washerwoman until she was 38.”
In 1905 Walker moved to Denver, changed her name, and launched her own hair care line, made specifically for Black women. Bundles said that’s where she really found her stride.
“The Denver statesman is a Black newspaper that was published in the early part of the century. And there in the social columns [it] says, ‘Madam C.J. Walker was in Fort Collins demonstrating her product,’” Bundles said.
Walker hired and trained women to sell beauty products door to door. Her beauty empire grew, and eventually, she employed thousands of women to sell her products around the country, the Caribbean and Central America.
Barbie reached out to Bundles to work on the design of the doll.
Bundles chose the colors believed to be Madam Walker’s favorites, turquoise and purple, for the doll’s clothing. The skin color, Bundles said, was very important to her.
“The way that African Americans have been portrayed, sometimes the skin color is lighter than the person actually is. And I wanted to make sure her skin was brown because she was a brown woman,” Bundles said.
The doll’s hair combines a straighter style in the front and a more natural textured style in the back, modeled in part from an iconic Addison Scurlock photo of Walker.
Bundles said the doll draws inspiration from Madam C.J. Walker’s early life when she was just starting out in Denver.
“I love the fact that we are looking at Madam Walker when she's still just starting her business. So she's hungry. She's out there pitching her stories, pitching her products.”
The doll, of course, comes with a miniature tin of Madam C.J. Walker’s signature Wonderful Hair Grower.
If you’re looking to get your hands on a Madam C.J. Walker Barbie you’ll have to wait as the doll all but flew off the shelves. Amazon, Walmart, Target and Mattel Creations are all currently out of stock in the US.
