The Servant Girl Who Left a Legacy

If You Aren’t Adding Value to Other People’s Lives, You Need to Think Bigger

I could have chosen an Internet billionaire to illustrate Emerson’s dictum about greatness. Pierre Omidyar of eBay, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google are living proof that successful people create benefits for others.

It would make sense to write about these remarkable men. But it’s time to set the record straight.

I’ll forgive Emerson for his use of sexist language: He lived in an age when writers made no attempt to be gender-sensitive. But as the life of Martha Matilda Harper demonstrates, “he” is very often “she.”

At the age of 31, Martha was working as a live-in maid in Rochester, New York. She had served others since she was seven years old, when her father bound her out as a domestic servant. Her dream was to be financially independent by running her own skin care and hair-dressing salon. She perfected her secret formulas and saved money.

Business was slow at first; wealthy women expected hair-dressers to go to their homes. Then a music teacher rented the room next to Martha’s salon. By offering him the use of her salon as a waiting room for mothers of students, she created the opportunity she had been waiting for. The business started to grow.

What she did next was unprecedented. Out-of-town customers had urged Martha to open a salon in their cities. Beginning in 1891, the 34-year-old Harper started the first retail franchise network in the United States.

Working-class women owned their salons as long as they followed the Harper Method and used Martha’s products. Franchise owners benefited from Harper’s promotional campaigns and advertising. There were 500 salons in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Central America.

Did the Harper Method work? A look at some of Harper’s better-known patrons answers that question: Jacqueline Kennedy, Helen Hayes, and Lady Bird Johnson, to name just three. Men went to Harper salons too: Woodrow Wilson and Danny Kaye were loyal customers.

The former servant girl became rich by creating benefits for others. She could have been richer: She invented the reclining shampoo chair, but didn’t bother to patent her invention.

Martha’s bottom line was different from the one that most business people care about. As she wrote in one of her personal messages to salon owners, “The Great Achievement of the Harper Method is the women it has made.”

The only remaining Harper salon is in Rochester. But Martha Matilda Harper’s legacy is everlasting: If you want to be successful, ask how you can make other people’s lives better.

She is great who confers the most benefits...

I’ve decided to rephrase Emerson’s dictum. I’m not sure he would have been happy with my unauthorized version.

But anyone who knows the story behind the Harper Method will understand.