Pinkham, Lydia Estes (1819-1883)

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Lydia Estes Pinkham (1819-1883)

Social reformer, patent-medicine entrepreneur

A Household Name. Over the late nineteenth century, in the booming patent medicine industry, the most popular brand was “Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.” Her name and likeness integral parts of the product’s packaging, Pinkham became a household name and one of the best-known women of the period. And yet, she entered the business world late in her life, after spending thirty years as a housewife and mother, in a desperate effort to save her family from poverty.

Background. Pinkham’s father was a shoemaker in Lynn, Massachusetts, where she lived virtually all her life. She went to school at the local academy and after graduating became a schoolteacher. In the decades before the Civil War she joined a number of the reform movements that emerged in northern antebellum middle-class circles, including abolitionism, temperance, Swedenborgianism, and women’s rights. In 1843, at the age of twenty-four, she married Isaac Pinkham and settled into the traditional Victorian roles of wife and mother, rearing five children. She may well have remained in these roles all her life, but in 1873 her husband’s real estate speculations collapsed amid the general financial panic, throwing the Pinkhams onto hard times.

Remedies. It was at this point that Lydia Pinkham made herself into an entrepreneur and her family into a business, when she began bottling and selling the home remedies she had been concocting for years and dispensing to neighbors and kin. Made principally from unicorn root and pleurisy root, with a healthy dose of alcohol (a “solvent and preservative”), they were popular in Lynn because they were thought to treat “female complaints” that many women were reluctant to discuss with their male doctors. The family put it on the market in 1875, starting in Lynn and beginning to widen their customer base. Business got off to a slow start, but the famly worked assiduously at promotion: Pinkham dispatched her sons through the area, and eventually across New England and New York to drum up sales. The family printed handbills and pamphlets, and solicited testimonials from customers and druggists. In 1876 the product began to circulate more widely when New York’s major patent medicine broker, Charles N. Crittenden, took his first cash order. Newspaper advertisements in the Boston Herald cultivated the Boston market at around the same time. By her death in 1883, Lydia Pinkham’s medicine was grossing $300,000 a year, and sales were still growing. The product remained popular well into the twentieth century, in part because the company continued to spend heavily on advertising.

“Homemade” in the Mass Marketplace. What ultimately put “Mrs. Pinkham’s” across was the image the company built around their product. At the suggestion of Daniel, who had a good feel for the market, they began using Mrs. Pinkham’s image on labels in 1879. They also adopted a general pitch that Daniel first suggested while traveling in New York and Brooklyn, trying to persuade druggists to sell the product. “If we should hitch on to the medicine somehow ’The Great New England Remedy,’” he predicted, “and then after awhile have our Trade Mark picture some New England Scenery with a humble cottage, these ‘golds’ would consider it homemade and rush for it, as they seem to be all tore out on homemade goods.” It was a shrewd assessment, and a telling insight into Americans’ ambivalence over the economic transformations happening all around them. Even if they were going to be mass-produced and distributed, it would be those goods that managed to create an aura of being “homemade” would attract customers in the new marketplace.