This Week in Women’s Business History

December 29 – January 4

Dec. 29, 1943
After 51 years with Detroit Edison Company, Sarah M. Sheridan, vice president of sales, retires.

Dec. 30, 1972
Lucrezia Kemper dies. Kemper was an executive in the San Francisco office of the advertising agency Albert Frank – Guenther Law, Inc. which specialized in financial communication. She was named vice president in 1952 and senior vice president 1963.

Dec. 31, 1881
Elizabeth Arden Graham is born. She built a beauty business with international distribution—Elizabeth Arden—from a small New York City salon that she and a partner opened in 1909.

Jan. 1, 1933
Dorothy M. Armbruster becomes assistant cashier of New York City’s Fifth Avenue Bank.

Jan. 2, 1895
Marion E. Wong is born. An actor, screenwriter, and producer, she started the Mandarin Film Co. in 1916.

Jan. 3, 2010
Eunice W. Johnson dies. Johnson was an executive of Johnson Publishing Co., which she and her husband, John H., created to publish Ebony magazine. Eunice Johnson also founded and directed the Ebony Fashion Fair, an annual fashion tour that raised thousands of dollars for charity and highlighted couture for Black women from the world’s top designers.

Jan. 4, 1969
Alice Weel Bigart dies. She was a television producer and writer for CBS’s news division. Her work covered political conventions, the Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954, NASA’s rocket launches from Cape Kennedy, and segments for CBS 60 Minutes.

Last week in women’s business history

Dec. 23, 1867
Sarah “Madam C.J.” Walker is born. She created the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Co. which quickly grew into one of the largest Black-owned business in the country.

Dec. 24, 1994
Marjorie Stewart Joyner dies. The granddaughter of slaves, Joyner was a pioneer in black beauty culture. She opened a hair salon in 1916 and soon after became an agent and follower of Madam C.J. Walker. After Walker’s death, Joyner became supervisor of the 200 Walker Beauty Schools around the country. Joyner received a patent in 1928 for a permanent wave machine.

Dec. 25, 1961
Nellie B. Allen dies. After completing her studies at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture and touring gardens in England and Italy, Allen opened a practice in New York City in 1921 where she designed residential gardens until the late 1940s.

Dec. 26, 1877
Grace K. Hiscox is born. She was the proprietor of The Westholm hotel in the Catskill Mountains.

Dec. 27, 1952
Mary Engle Pennington dies. Pennington did pioneering research on refrigeration and its use for keeping food safe. In 1905 she was hired as a chemist at the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Research Laboratory (a precursor to the Food and Drug Administration). Three years later she headed the lab, the first woman to hold that position. Among the many projects on food safety undertaken by Pennington’s lab, she and her staff rode trains across the country testing the safety of refrigerated railroad cars. In 1922, Pennington started her own consulting business, working with clients on the transportation, storage, and handling of perishable food. She earned her PhD in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1895.

Dec. 28, 1887
Edna “Patricia” Murphey Albert Winter is born. She built a company around the deodorant her father created, Odorono, then sold it. Years later, she built a business selling herbs from her gardens.