Marjorie Stewart Joyner

Who She Was 

Marjorie Stewart Joyner was born in 1896 in Monterey, Virginia, and moved to Chicago as a teenager. In 1916, she became the first Black graduate of the A.B. Moler Beauty School there. She worked for Madam C.J. Walker and rose to become the national adviser overseeing about 200 Walker beauty schools, training an estimated 15,000 stylists. One day, watching a pot roast cook with thin pins pushed into it to speed up cooking, she wondered whether a set of rods could curl a whole head of hair at once. She designed a "permanent waving machine" that clipped heated rods onto sections of hair and received a U.S. patent for it in 1928, though because the patent belonged to the Walker company, she earned almost nothing from it. In 1945, she co-founded the United Beauty School Owners and Teachers Association with educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and at age 77, she earned a college degree from Bethune-Cookman College.

Why She Matters

Joyner's machine let stylists give a long-lasting wave to a whole head of hair in one sitting instead of curling it piece by piece, and she is remembered as one of the first Black women inventors to hold a patent. Her bigger legacy may be the thousands of stylists she trained and the higher standards for beauty education she fought for through the association she helped create. She lived to 98, and her story shows young people that inventors find ideas everywhere, even in a kitchen, and that teaching others can be as powerful as any invention.