Lydia Pinkham (1819-1883) was an inventor and marketer of an herbal-alcoholic "women's tonic."
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Wommanican was an entrepreneur who served the needs of women. Of all the commercial medicines of the 19th century, hers was perhaps the best known. She exuded calm on the printed ads for her company and her face became widely recognized in the United States. We’re talking about the one and only Lydia Pinkham.
Lydia Estes Pinkham was born in Lynn, Massachusetts on February 9, 1819. She was the tenth of twelve children in a Quaker family. Her parents, William and Rebecca Estes, encouraged all of their children to be free thinkers. Rebecca Estes introduced the family to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish man who had one foot in the world of rigorous physical science as a scientist and another in deep faith as a theologian. He even claimed to have contact with the spiritual world. Lydia would also try to communicate with the departed throughout her life.
Followers of Swedenborgianism were vegetarians, abolitionists, and nondrinkers. As strong abolitionists, the Estes family opened their home to reformers and friends like Frederick Douglass. They even broke with the Quakers over the issue of slavery in the 1830s. It’s no surprise Lydia joined social movements at a young age. She joined the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society at 16 and was an advocate for women’s rights.
In 1843, after teaching for a few years, Lydia married Isaac Pinkham. Isaac had an entrepreneurial spirit. He was always pursuing a new venture or trying a new occupation. As a result, the state of their family fortune was unreliable. Lydia and Isaac had five children together, though one of their sons died in infancy.
Like many women of the time, Lydia brewed her own herbal remedies and had a notebook with various recipes. There was one compound she developed over many years that she said helped ease female ailments. It was a blend of ground herbs and roots that grew wildly in North America. Some of the ingredients, like black cohosh, were discovered and are used by Native Americans as medicinal herbs.
In 1873 Isaac wound up in a financial crisis and was no longer able to work. Years later, when the family was nearly penniless, some women came by the house and offered to buy some of Lydia’s homemade remedy. Lydia’s second son, Daniel, saw a business opportunity for the whole family.
Soon, Daniel and the eldest son, William, were helping their mother brew medicine in the cellar. Daniel peddled it, and the other two children gathered herbs and alcohol for distillation. Isaac sat in his rocking chair and folded pamphlets for what would become known as “Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.”
The family launched the business during a time marked by public dissatisfaction with doctors and concern with what they called “women’s weaknesses”. Lydia’s vegetable compound, which was touted as a cure for many women’s complaints, came at the perfect time. She wrote most of the advertising copy for the company, and it urged women to write to her. Questions and testimonials began pouring in. Lydia wrote back with forthright discussions on women’s health, diet, and issues during a time when these topics were taboo. She gave common-sense advice and urged these women to be wary of doctors, and instead rely on her compound.
Though Lydia’s medicine may have been a preferable alternative to dubious gynecology, sales started out slow. Then one day on his way back from collecting money from a wholesaler, William popped into the Boston Herald. He used most of the money he had just collected to have the Lydia Pinkham pamphlet printed on the front page of the newspaper. This daring move paid off.
Lydia knew that sensational ads brought in more money, so the familybegan printing ads that read like dramatic news headlines. One began, “In the midst of one of the most brilliant social functions of the season, a noted society woman started suddenly from her chair with a scream of agony and fell insensible to the floor.” And ended, “[...] Fortunately, a friend advised her to try Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.”
In 1879, Daniel had an idea that would elevate his mother to the status of a cultural icon. Lydia posed for a portrait. She wore a black silk dress and her hair up in a bun. Her soft smile and grandmotherly countenance exuded calm and trust. This portrait became the company’s symbol and appeared on all its bottles and pamphlets. Her face was all over the papers at a time when it was rare to see a woman in a daily publication. Heads turned and business doubled. Supposedly, when editors lacked a photo for notable women, such as Queen Victoria, they simply printed Lydia’s.
Like any other public figure, Lydia was subject to teasing, especially since she dealt with women’s issues. Rugby boys parodied her advertising copy into crude drinking songs. This attention simply made her product more popular. One particularly popular song was called, “The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham.” Almost 100 years later, in 1968, a group from Liverpool called The Scaffold would update the song into a sanitized commercial hit. Well-known contributors included Graham Nash, Paul McCartney’s younger brother Mike McGear, and Reg Dwight before he became Elton John. Their song, “Lily the Pink” became their only U.K. chart-topper.
Just a few years after the success of Lydia’s portrait, both of her older sons died. Harking back to her Swedenborgian influences, she frequently tried to communicate with them across realms. In 1882 she suffered a stroke and died in 1883, at the age of 64. She was buried next to her sons. In 1922, Lydia’s daughter founded the Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic in Salem, Massachusetts, to provide health services to young mothers and their children.
Lydia Pinkham was a self-proclaimed “savior of her sex,” a national sensation, and a shrewd entrepreneur.
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