Lydia Estes Pinkham
In 1875, after her husband went bankrupt, Lydia Estes Pinkham started the first widely successful business run by a woman in America. Her product was a medicine for “all those painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population,” meaning mostly menstruation. Even though Mrs. Pinkham had been in the temperance movement, almost 20 percent of her concoction was alcohol. She defended this by saying “alcohol acted as a solvent and preservative,” and was used widely in medicines as the active ingredient. It was often the only way respectable women were able to enjoy the intoxicant. Interesting to note that during the banning of alcoholic beverages in America during the 1920s, the Pinkham “medicine” enjoyed its greatest success.
Source cited: www.MUM.org
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I got a real kick out of this story! See you all tomorrow for DAY 13 of Women’s History Month, where you’ll meet women inventors, women who have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and some female directors, to name a few.
To The Dance!
