Lydia E. Pinkham

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Lydia E. Pinkham, illustration from an early 20th-century pamphlet.

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Lydia E. Pinkhamwas a successful American patent-medicine proprietor who claimed that her Vegetable Compound could cure any “female complaint” from nervous prostration to a prolapsed uterus.

Lydia Estes grew up in a Quaker family and attended Lynn Academy. For several years she taught school, and she was an ardent member of many reform groups for abolition, Swedenborgianism, phrenology, temperance, women’s rights, and other causes. In 1843 she married a young widower, Isaac Pinkham. She devoted herself to domestic life for the next 30 years. The Panic of 1873 left the family in financial straits, and it was at the suggestion of one of her sons that she thought to exploit her local reputation for an herbal medicine she had been concocting for years. Pinkham had first begun making her medicine as a home remedy, which she freely shared with neighbours. The compound was a blend of ground herbs such as true unicorn root (Aletris farinosa) and pleurisy root (Asclepias tuberosa), with an alcoholic content of 18 percent. The label explained that the alcohol was “used solely as a solvent and preservative.”

Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound made its commercial appearance in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1875 for $1 a bottle. She wrote handbills for her sons to distribute with slogans such as “Only a woman can understand a woman’s ills.” It was her son Daniel who, in 1879, had the idea of using his mother’s picture in newspaper advertisements to emphasize the homemade quality of the compound. His strategy succeeded, and continued heavy advertising made the face of the “savior of her sex,” as the ads described her, one of the best known in the country. Although medical proof was never found to substantiate the claimed therapeutic effects of the compound, it quickly gained acceptance with women, many of whom were hesitant to consult male physicians about “female problems.” During Pinkham’s life, the business expanded from a cellar kitchen, in which she mixed the formula herself, to a laboratory that brewed, bottled, and shipped enough compound to gross just under $300,000 a year.

In pamphlets and ads, Pinkham invited women to write to her for advice, which they did in increasing numbers. She established a Department of Advice with an all-female staff to respond to the hundred letters a day that she reported receiving. She generally prescribed exercise, cleanliness, good diet, and her compound, in which she had complete confidence. Her advertised claims for it gradually grew bolder, and it was eventually recommended for men as well as women. Prompted by the ignorance of many who wrote to her, Pinkham also wrote and printed a facts-of-life manual for women. In it she described the female reproductive system from puberty through childbearing and menopause. The book was issued under various titles and distributed free.

Not until the 1920s, when faced with increasing federal regulation of drugs and advertising, did the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Co. reduce both its claims for the compound and the alcoholic content of the product. Nevertheless, it appears to have soothed the psyches, if not the bodies, of its millions of purchasers for two generations. The legions of satisfied users who volunteered testimonials included many prominent temperance leaders.

Jean Burton, Lydia Pinkham Is Her Name (1949), is a biography. Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine (1979), focuses on Pinkham’s business.