Marjorie Stewart Joyner, was the inventor of the permanent wave machine, a beautician, salon owner, instructor, and an executive for the Madam C. J. Walker Co. Born Marjorie Stewart on October 24, 1896, in Monterey, Virginia, she was the granddaughter of an enslaved Black woman and White slave owner. She grew up very poor and after her parent’s divorce, she joined her mother in Chicago in 1912 at age sixteen where she enrolled in A.B. Molar Beauty School. Four years later, she was the first Black student to graduate from the A.B. Moler Beauty and Culture School in Chicago. After graduating in 1916 at the age of 20, she followed a path of entrepreneurship and opened her own beauty shop.
Shortly after graduating from beauty school, Marjorie married Robert E. Joyner, and the couple had two daughters. In 1916, Marjorie Joyner opened a beauty salon in Chicago and soon met Madam C.J. Walker. In the 1920s, trends were shifting in terms of how most American women styled their hair. Previously, it was most common for women to style their own hair at home. But with the increasing popularity of styles like Marcel waves, more women began to visit salons like Joyner’s. Her first attempt to do her mother-in-law’s hair proved to be a debacle, since she was only trained in styling European textured hair. While Joyner served a broad array of customers at her beauty shop, she found that her training had not adequately prepared her to work with a wide enough variety of hair textures.
At her mother-in-law’s encouragement, Joyner attended a lecture taught by hair-care mogul Madame C.J. Walker and later enrolled in the Walker Beauty School in Chicago. There she learned to use hair oil and a hot comb to straighten hair. While building upon her own expertise and clientele, Joyner also shared her own unique skills, even teaching Walker how to set hair into the Marcel waves that were so fashionable at the time. It was this experience that eventually led to Joyner to become one of the leading figures in Black beauty culture, Black women’s political and social uplift, and education. Joyner quickly became Walker’s protegé, working as her agent until Walker’s death in 1919 and became the director of its nearly 200 beauty schools.
Establishing beauty industry standards, in 1924 Joyner helped write Illinois’ first cosmetology laws. Marjorie was an inventor. A dilemma existed for Black women in the 1920’s. In order to straighten tightly-curled hair, they could do so only by using a stove-heated curling iron. This was very time-consuming and frustrating as only one iron could be used at a time. Frustrated with the time-consuming method of curling or straightening hair one iron at a time, in 1926 she created a machine with multiple curling irons, heated by electricity, to style entire sections of hair. The machine had 16 pot roast rods attached to a hood. A woman’s hair was wound around the rods and then heated all at once to set the wave. A client would sit in the hood for a certain period, to set in the curls.
After two years Joyner completed her invention. Later, she also invented a scalp protector to make the process less painful. The inspiration for this more efficient method came to Joyner in a surprising way. While she was cooking a pot roast, Joyner looked at the long thin rods that held the roast together and heated it from the inside. It occurred to her that she might be able to adapt these rods for use as rollers that could essentially ”cook” permanent waves into hair. Thus, she sought a solution to not only straighten but also provide a curl in a convenient manner. It performed even better than anticipated as the curl that it added would often stay in place for several days, whereas curls from standard curling iron would generally last only one day.
Not realizing she should patent her unique device, Joyner used it for a few years before filing for one. She submitted a petition and drawings on May 16, 1928. Although popular, the process could be painful as well, so Marjorie Joyner also secured a second patent for her permanent wave machine by filing a petition for her scalp protector invention. Despite her accomplishments and success, Marjorie received none of the proceeds of her inventions as the patents were created within the scope of her employment with Madame Walker’s company, which therefore received all patent rights and royalties. Her invention of the permanent waving machine became popular with both White and Black women.
Joyner was able to use her considerable business acumen to take part in the long Civil Rights Movement. She befriended Eleanor Roosevelt and worked closely with her to help improve race relations in the United States. In the 1930s, Roosevelt named Joyner to a women’s leadership position on the Democratic National Committee. She advised several New Deal Agencies reaching out to Black women. She later went on to become, in 1935, one of the founding members of Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women. With her close friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune, Marjorie provided financial support to Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, where a campus residence hall has since been named for her.
Marjorie Joyner supported by the Alpha Chi Pi Omega Sorority and Fraternity, the Black Greek Letter Association founded in 1945 by Joyner for Black beauty culture professionals. A year later, in 1946, she founded the United Beauty School Owners and Teacher’s Association (UBSOTA). While her philanthropic, educational and beauty culture business interests took her around the country and the world, Joyner remained active in Chicago cultural and civic life. She became the director of the Chicago Defender’s charities overseeing food and clothing drives and fundraisers across the city of Chicago.
In 1973, she fulfilled a lifelong dream, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida at the age of 77. Along with her work with the Defender, Joyner was a founding member of Chicago’s Cosmopolitan Community Church and on the board of numerous clubs and associations throughout her life. Politically, she was a major figure in the Democratic Party, and a close associate of Congressman William Dawson, and Mayors Edward Kelly, Richard J. Daley, and Harold Washington. Marjorie Stewart Joyner passed away at the age of 95, in December 1994, in the South Side Chicago home she shared with her family for over sixty years.