Hidden Figures: Marjorie Stewart Joyner #BlackHERstoryMonth 13/28 (Patreon)

Hidden Figures: Marjorie Stewart Joyner #BlackHERstoryMonth 13/28

Marjorie Stewart was born in 1896 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to parents who were descended from slaves. When she was a teenager the family joined the Great Migration, moving to Chicago in 1912, and shortly thereafter, she began studying cosmetology. She graduated A.B. Molar Beauty School in Chicago in 1916, becoming the first Black American to achieve this.That year, at the age of 20, she married podiatrist Robert E. Joyner and opened her salon. Wishing to improve her technique on the Marcel wave, a flat, ribbony crimp style made famous by jazz singer Josephine Baker, Joyner attended a class taught by Madame CJ Walker on working with black people’s hair. When Walker observed Joyner demonstrating some of her work using the Marcel wave, she offered a Joyner a job, and in 1919 Joyner became part of her demonstration team that traveled the country teaching hair techniques. Joyner went to work for her and oversaw 200 of Madame Walker's beauty schools as the vice president and national adviser of the salon division. Eventually she was picked for a seat on the board of directors. Joyner taught some 15,000 stylists over her fifty-year career. She was also a leader in developing new products, such as her permanent wave machine. Joyner’s personal experience in a salon—working with the Marcel wave in particular–led to her recognizing a problem that need to be solved: Anything involving the hair iron was a time-intensive task. Whether heating to straighten or heating to curl the hair, it could only be done one curling iron and one section of hair at a time. Joyner was fixing pot roast one day and was thinking about the long thin rods that were inserted into the pot roast to hold the meat together, which also served the purpose of heating the meat from the inside. Joyner began to experiment. She hooked 16 pencil-shaped pot roast rods to an old-fashioned hair dryer hood and then joined them together with a single electrical cord and began to examine how they could be designed to function simultaneously. By 1928, she had perfected her invention and applied for and received her patent for a device that could set an entire head of curls at the same time. Though Marjorie Joyner was often honored for her invention, she never derived income from it. Joyner was an employee of Madame C. J. Walker’s company at the time the invention was created and patented, and therefore, ownership of the patents belonged to the Walker Company. She helped write the first cosmetology laws for the state of Illinois, and in 1945, Joyner and her friend, Mary McLeod Bethune, president of Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona, Florida, co-founded an association for beauty school owners and teachers (now known as Alpha Chi Pi Omega). Joyner helped found the National Council of Negro Women. She was an advisor to the Democratic National Committee in the 1940s, and advised several New Deal agencies trying to reach out to black women. Joyner was highly visible in the Chicago black community, as head of the Chicago Defender Charity network, and fundraiser for various schools. In 1987 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington opened an exhibit featuring Joyner's permanent wave machine and a replica of her original salon. Marjorie Stewart Joyner died of heart failure at her South Side Chicago home on December 27, 1994, at the age of ninety-eight. #MarjorieStewartJoyner #HiddenFigures ****************** Merchandise! MAKE SURE U GETTA SHIRT!! https://www.teepublic.com/user/sssseren Follow me on social media! Instagram: @sensei_aishitemasu Personal Tumblr: http://sensei-aishitemasu.tumblr.com Tumblr for my work: https://sssseren.tumblr.com Snapchat: sssseren GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/tc5wh7q Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seren_sensei ****************** Did you know I wrote a book? ☺️ 'So, About That... A Year of Contemporary Essays on Race and Pop Culture' Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/About-That-Contemporary-Essays-Culture-ebook/dp/B013V0CHK6 Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013V0CHK6 Digital download (e-book): https://gumroad.com/l/IkUa ****************** Links: Marjorie Joyner: https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/marjorie-joyner Marjorie Stewart Joyner: http://americanhistory.si.edu/american-enterprise-exhibition/new-perspectives/black-main-street/marjorie-stewart-joyner Marjorie Joyner: https://www.thoughtco.com/marjorie-joyner-inventor-4076417 Joyner, Marjorie Stewart 1896–1994: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/joyner-marjorie-stewart-1896-1994 Marjorie Joyner: http://blackinventor.com/marjorie-joyner/ Marjorie Stewart Joyner (1896-1994): Inventor of a Permanent Hair-Wave Machine: https://americacomesalive.com/2014/02/17/marjorie-stewart-joyner-1896-1994-inventor-permanent-hair-wave-machine/ Marjorie Joyner (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Joyner