20 Women Who Built Fortunes When The Odds Were Stacked Against Them

In 1945, Ruth Handler established the toy company Mattel with her husband, Elliot Handler. As an exec at Mattel, Ruth developed a new form of advertising by sponsoring The Mickey Mouse Club on television in 1955 and by selling toys directly to children. In March 1959, she launched Barbie, against the protests of other executives. They weren’t exactly betting on Barbie. However, Barbie’s success helped push Mattel to go public in 1960.

Coco Chanel launched her iconic Chanel No. 5 perfume in 1921. In 1924, she sold a 90% stake in the perfume business to businessman Pierre Wertheimer, keeping only a minority share. In 1947, however, she renegotiated that deal to receive a 2% royalty on each and every bottle sold globally. Two percent sounds tiny until it’s attached to every bottle of Chanel No. 5. The deal brought her millions of dollars a year until she died in 1971.

Madam C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove) invented hair and scalp products for Black women and started selling them around 1905. Instead of opening a store, she set up a network of salespeople who went door to door. When she died in 1919, she personally had $600,000 to $700,000 in cash; the company (including its real estate) was valued at more than $1 million. She is widely regarded as America’s pioneering Black female self-made millionaire.

Helena Rubinstein emigrated to Australia in 1902, building a worldwide beauty business based on a skin care cream called Valaze. She sold the American branch of her company to the Lehman Brothers bank in 1928 for $7.3 million. But when the stock market collapsed in 1929, Rubinstein acquired the stock in her own business for less than a million dollars. Sell high and buy low, indeed. Her fortune was worth more than $100 million at the time of her death in 1965.

Hetty Green inherited about $5 million in 1865 from her father and aunt. She made her money in real estate mortgages, government-backed bonds, and short-term lending. She even provided emergency loans to New York City and major banks during the Panic of 1907, a major financial crisis that caused banks and businesses to fail across the country. The famous tale that she refused to pay for treatment, leading to her son’s leg being amputated, is a fabrication of the press. She died in 1916 with an estate estimated to be worth $100 million to $200 million.

When Nicole-Barbe Clicquot-Ponsardin’s husband died in 1805, she assumed control of his wine business (which would eventually become known as Veuve Clicquot). She shipped more than 10,000 bottles of her champagne into Russia during the Napoleonic Wars by running naval blockades in 1814; her Russian clients included the Tsar’s court. Getting champagne through a naval blockade is certainly one way to reach your customers! She is credited with inventing the riddling table (angled racks for moving sediment to the bottom of champagne bottles) around 1816. By the time of her death in 1866, she had established an international export business.

Mary Ellen Pleasant came to San Francisco in 1852 during the Gold Rush and invested her earnings in boarding houses, real estate, mining stock, and area banks. Through a partnership with a white financier named Thomas Bell, she helped manage an investment portfolio worth as much as $30 million, representing the pair’s combined portfolio, not just Pleasant’s money. She used the money to fund abolitionist and civil rights causes before dying in 1904.

Elizabeth Arden (born Florence Nightingale Graham) founded her first Red Door salon on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1910. She turned the company into a global brand through its scientific approach to cosmetics, makeovers, and department store agreements. She built the company almost entirely under her own control, never bringing in outside partners to run the business. It was generating tens of millions of dollars annually when she died in 1966.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney was only 16 when she took charge of her family’s three South Carolina plantations while her father was away. In 1744, she made the successful decision to grow indigo, which can be used to create a blue dye, and played a role in making indigo a highly valuable export; by the 1770s, South Carolina exported more than 1 million pounds of indigo annually. Although Pinckney developed this plan for profit, enslaved individuals did all of the hard labor of farming and manufacturing on her plantations.

Olive Ann Beech co-founded the Beech Aircraft Corporation with her husband, Walter Beech, in 1932. When he died, she took over in 1950 as president and ran the company’s financial operations and strategic plans. Beech Aircraft grew into a major military and commercial airplane manufacturer, generating more than $100 million in sales during her tenure.

In 1938, Beatrice Fox Auerbach assumed control of Hartford’s G. Fox & Co. department store following her father’s death. She revolutionized the business, creating new inventory management procedures, offering phone orders and regional deliveries, and growing the business into an 11-story department store. In 1965, she sold the business to May Department Stores for $40 million in stock.

Margaret Hardenbroeck came to New Amsterdam (later New York) in 1659 as a debt collector and established a transatlantic trading empire, buying furs and transporting them home on her ship, the King Charles. Dutch usus contracts, which protected a wife’s right to separate property, enabled her to maintain full control of her business affairs after her first husband died and she remarried, even after England’s takeover in 1664 introduced English common law. In other words, the particular marriage contract she had mattered enormously. She was the richest person in the colony when she died in 1691.

Annie Turnbo Malone, a contemporary of Madam C.J. Walker, formulated hair products for Black women in the early 1900s and filed patents for a metal pressing comb and her Wonderful Hair Grower products. She established Poro College in St. Louis in 1918, a facility that served as a factory, beauty school and corporate headquarters. It trained and supplied tens of thousands of sales agents at home and abroad until her passing in 1957.

Enriqueta Rylands inherited ownership of Rylands & Sons, Britain’s biggest cotton-manufacturing enterprise, on the death of her husband in 1888. She managed its real-estate portfolio and corporate funds, and went on to spend more than £1 million (about £100 million today) constructing and establishing the John Rylands Library in Manchester. She died in 1908.

In 1825, Rebecca Lukens assumed management of the Brandywine Iron Works in Pennsylvania following the death of her husband. She upgraded its water-powered rolling works to make iron boiler plates for steamships and locomotives. She guided the firm through the Panic of 1837, a severe financial crisis and economic depression, and managed it until her death in 1854. It eventually became Lukens Steel.

In 1903, Maggie L. Walker chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Va., and became the first Black woman to lead a chartered U.S. bank. It offered mortgages and business loans to Black entrepreneurs. The bank was later absorbed into the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, which existed for about 100 years. Walker died in 1934.

In 1876, Mary Ann Magnin opened a small shop in San Francisco that would evolve into the I. Magnin department store chain. She saw an opportunity with California’s rich and famous and began importing high-end designer clothing from Parisian fashion houses such as Lanvin. She kept running things right into her nineties, until she passed away in 1943. Retirement clearly wasn’t high on the agenda.

When Louise Pommery became a widow in 1858, she ran the Pommery & Greno champagne house. At a time when sweet wines were preferred, she created Pommery Nature in 1874, the first commercially successful Brut champagne. She acquired ancient Roman chalk mines below Reims and turned some 18 kilometers (11 miles) of tunnels into cellars for aging, which is a rather impressive amount of basement space. She ran the business until her death in 1890.

Following the death of her husband in 1906, Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans ran the Whitehead Bottling Company, which built many Coca-Cola bottling plants throughout the Southern United States. In 1934, she joined the board of directors of The Coca-Cola Company as its first female director, a role she maintained until her passing in 1953.

Following the financial devastation that the Panic of 1873 brought to her family’s finances, Lydia Pinkham began selling Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound in 1875. The herbal concoction was about 18 percent alcohol, and she branded it by putting her own face on the label. No anonymous branding here: Pinkham quite literally made herself the face of the product. To build credibility, she also wrote advice columns, an early example of direct-to-consumer marketing. Though the compound was far from a proven cure-all, Pinkham’s business continued to generate millions of dollars annually at the time of her death in 1883.

This content was created with the help of AI.