Christiana Carteaux Bannister was a business entrepreneur, hairdresser, and abolitionist in New England.
Background
Christiana Carteaux Bannister was born Christiana Babcock in 1819 in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. She was born to African American and Narragansett Indian parents. She was a descendant of enslaved Africans who worked the plantations of South County, Rhode Island, during the eighteenth century.
Career
She was known professionally as Madame Carteaux. As a young woman, she moved to Boston where she worked as a wigmaker and hairdresser. As a young woman, Christiana moved from Rhode Island to Boston where she began her career as a wigmaker.
She was professionally known as Madame Carteaux, Women"s Hairdresser and Wigmaker.
She was a successful business entrepreneur, and self-styled "hair doctress," generating income by hairdressing and selling her own hair products. From 1847 to 1871 Christiana Carteaux Bannister maintained several salons in Boston including Cambridge, Boston, and Winter Streets.
When Christiana Carteaux Bannister and Edward Bannister moved to Providence, she opened another salon in Providence. In Boston, the Bannisters lived and worked with Lewis Hayden and participated in the Boston Underground Railroad.
The Bannister hair salons became popular meeting places for African American and white abolitionists.
During the Civil War, Christiana Carteaux Bannister was an advocate for equal pay for Black soldiers. In November 1864, she organized a fair sponsored by the Boston Colored Ladies Sanitary Commission to benefit the African American regiments, the 54th and 55th Massachusetts and the 5th Massachusetts Calvary, who served for a year and a half without pay rather than accept less than the white soldiers were paid. In Providence, she founded the Home for Aged Colored Women when she learned about the struggles of African American women who worked as domestics but were too old to work and often became homeless.
The home moved from Transit Saint to Dodge Saint and was renamed Bannister House, Incorporated.
In 1901, Edward suffered a heart attack while and church and died. Bannister died in 1902 and is buried in Edward Bannister"s plot in the North Burial Ground.
A bronze bust of Bannister, based on a portrait of her painted by Edward Bannister, was dedicated at the Rhode Island State House in 2002.