Social Reformer, Patents-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...