Young Sarah Breedlove worked with her older sister Louvenia in the cotton fields of Delta, Louisiana and Vicksburg, Mississippi. Per the Madam C.J. Walker website, she received little formal education; in fact, by the time Sarah was old enough to attend school, Louisiana's white legislators refused to provide money for the education of the state's Black children. When she was just 14, she married a man named Moses McWilliams in order to escape from the abuse of her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. Sarah gave birth to her daughter Lelia in 1885 when she was still a child herself at 17 years old.
When Moses died two years later, the 20-year-old widow took her daughter and moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where four of her brothers lived and worked as barbers. After working as a laundress and cook, per the Women's History Museum, in 1904 she started using the hair products developed by Annie Turbo Malone and joined Malone's team of Black saleswomen. A year later, she married Charles Joseph Walker, who worked in advertising. After creating her own hair tonic, she renamed herself Madam C.J. Walker and launched her own line with $1.25; her husband helped her with advertising and with setting up a mail-order business. The rest is cosmetic and entrepreneurial history. In Walker's own words, "I got my start by giving myself a start."
