Martha Mathilda Harper -The Queen of the Beauty Franchises by Jo-Ann Roberts

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s I can hardly remember going to a hair salon to get my hair cut. While my mother would cut my hair and give me a Toni Home Permanent, my Uncle Ben would line up his three boys and my younger brother and provide them with buzz cuts. I can still picture my cousins on the back porch perched on a kitchen stool with a white sheet draped around their shoulders and their chins resting on their chests as Uncle Ben gave them a military-style haircut.

Aside from getting an updo complete with curls (think Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's) for prom, no one I knew went to a hair salon until we went to college. Once I married, had children, and went to work, I went every four to six weeks. A habit I continue to this day.

But I digress...some years ago, I watched a PBS special called "They Made America" on Martha Mathilda Harper, an innovator who got her start in Rochester, New York, at the same time Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were beginning their campaign for women's rights.

Martha was born into a working-class family in Ontario, Canada in 1857. At seven years old, her father bound her out into service as a domestic servant. Like another beauty entrepreneur, Sarah Breedlove Walker, Harper would toil at menial work for years before striking out on her own.

A lack of means or formal education did not inhibit her, however. When she was 25, she went to work for a wealthy family, using a product to dress her employer's hair that would launch her career--known as Moscano Tonique. She claimed that his formula was given to her by a German-born physician before he died. However, Martha felt the chemicals in hair shampoo and other products were more harmful than good. She developed her own hair tonic in her spare time and eventually saved enough to open her Harper Method Shop in 1888, using her own floor-length hair as an advertisement for her beauty method. 

Martha invented the first reclining shampoo chair and initiated the concept of the professional "salon". Before this, hairdressers had visited customers privately in their homes or had maids attending them. 

Martha's greatest achievement was developing a franchise system in 1891. She created a network of salons that had duplicated services and products. Each salon was run by a woman trained in the regimented "Harper Method" of beauty--but the franchisees owned their own salon. She inspected the franchises, provided training and group insurance, and supported the women with advertising campaigns.

 

 At the height of their success, the Harper salons numbered more than 500, along with a chain of training schools. Harper Method's popularity was confirmed by an illustrious clientele that included Woodrow Wilson, Susan B. Anthony, Calvin and Grace Coolidge, and Jacqueline Kennedy. 

Martha also recruited employees from among Rochester's domestic workers. She became the first female member of the city's chamber of commerce; offered childcare during appointments and held evening hours to accommodate working women.

Martha married Robert McBain, a man 24 years her junior in 1920, and they ran the business together for fifteen years until she retired and passed control to him. By the time she died in 1950, her salons had dwindled somewhat in number, but her reputation as a beauty expert and businesswoman remained strong.

So, the next time your hairdresser picks up a pair of shears or tilts you back in the reclining chair to shampoo your hair, thank the foresighted entrepreneur, Martha Mathilda Harper.