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Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream: How One Woman Changed the Face of Modern Business. By Jane R. Plitt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 224 pp. Photographs. Cloth, $26.95. ISBN 0-815-60638-9.
Reviewed by Elysa Engelman
When Martha Matilda Harper emigrated to the United States from Canada in 1882, the twenty-five-year-old servant carried with her sixty silver dollars, a jug of hair tonic, and dreams of escaping a life of drudgery. Six years later, she was luring Rochester's elite ladies out of their homes for a professional head massage, scalp cleaning, and hair dressing at her own salon. Her enterprise eventually grew to include 400 salons in cities around the world, five training centers for Harper operators, and an entire line of hair and skin-care products. Today Harper's story is all but forgotten while her contemporaries, women like Madam C. J. Walker and Elizabeth Arden, are applauded as beauty-industry entrepreneurs.
In the first book-length biography of this remarkable woman, Jane Plitt seeks to reclaim Harper's position in history as "the mother of American retail franchising" (p. 62). Although not trained as a scholar, Plitt brings to her project a solid background in business, labor arbitration, and social justice, all of which fueled her long fascination with Martha Matilda Harper. Plitt crafts a compelling account of one woman's rags-to-riches ascent, as Harper transformed herself from a neglected child, bound into service at age seven, into a confident businesswoman who welcomed presidents' wives and movie stars to her salons for two-hour pampering sessions.
Drawing on newspaper clippings, family documents, company newsletters, and oral histories of former Harper operators,...