CHRISTIANA
CARTEAUX BANNISTER (c. 1819-1902)
Hairdresser and Wigmaker
In the early 1850s Christiana Carteaux opened the
first of at least four successive hairdressing salons
on Boston's Washington Street. In 1855, she
opened a second salon in Providence, Rhode Island
while continuing to operate her Boston salon. In 1857
she operated two salons in Boston, one on Washington
Street, the other on West Street. In her Liberator
advertisements, Madame Carteaux announced that she
would “attend to Cutting and Dressing Ladies'
and Children's Hair, Dyeing and Shampooing,”
that she had “a Hair Restorative, which cannot
be excelled, as it produces new hair where baldness
has taken place,” and that she could create
“all kinds of Hair Work made to order.”
In 1856, the “Hair Doctress” announced
that “Having recently removed from 284 to 365
Washington Street, where she has a superior suite
of rooms, she now advertises a separate room for Hair
Drying.” Even after moving to Providence in
1869, Madame Carteaux continued to maintain a Boston
salon through 1872 and a salon in Providence until
1900.
Christiana Babcock Carteaux was born in North Kingstown,
Rhode Island to Narragansett and African American
parents. When she moved to open her hairdressing and
wig-making salon in Boston, she joined abolitionist
and artistic activities in black Boston. In 1853,
she hired a young barber and aspiring artist, Edward
M. Bannister, whom she married in 1857 in Boston's
Temple Street Episcopal Church. By 1858, Bannister
was no longer listed as a barber, but as an artist,
in the Boston Directories. Christiana Carteaux Bannister's
entrepreneurial success enabled Bannister to become
an accomplished full-time artist. Bannister himself
recognized her contributions to his career, “I
would have made out very poorly had it not been for
her, and my greatest successes have come through her,
either through her criticism of my pictures or the
advice she would give me in the matter of placing
them in public.”
Throughout her life, Christiana Carteaux Bannister
was a community activist and philanthropist. As president
of the Colored Ladies Relief Society, she presented
the state flag to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the
54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment in 1863. Following
the regiment's courageous attack on Fort Wagner,
she organized a fair to raise funds to aid the widows
and children of soldiers killed in battle. She served
as president of the Colored Ladies Sanitation Commission
in Boston in the 1860s and co-founded the Home for
Aged Colored Women in Providence in the 1890s. |
