Lydia Pinkham

Lydia Pinkham was one of the most remarkable businesswomen of the 19th and early 20th centuries. A staunch champion of women's rights, as well as racial rights, Pinkham operated as a businesswoman in a "man's world." She regularly bucked opposition, persuading thousands upon thousands of women to purchase her Vegetable Compound. Designed for so-called female weaknesses and other more serious illnesses, this product served as the vehicle for her ascent as one of the greatest female entrepreneurs in 19th-century America. In Lydia Pinkham: The Face That Launched a Thousand Ads, historian Sam Danna offers the first book-length biography devoted exclusively to this remarkable American historical figure. Throughout Danna explores how Lydia Pinkham and her associates masterfully used-and sometimes even reinvented-then contemporary tools of marketing, from newspaper advertising to testimonials to trade cards, for the promotion of her Vegetable Compound in an era when the sale of elixirs and snake oil-like medications infested the nascent pharmacological landscape. Students and scholars in the fields of women's studies, American culture, history of medicine, and business history will find this remarkable story an illuminating tour de force of how one woman championed the roles and rights of women and minorities in the United States before, during, and after the turn of the century.