Books: Everybody’s Grandmother

LYDIA PINKHAM IS HER NAME (279 pp.)—Jean Burton—Farrar, Straus ($2.75).

When the panic of 1873 hit Lynn, Mass., Real Estate Agent Isaac Pinkham and his 54-year-old wife Lydia found themselves flat broke. Fumbling old Isaac was crushed, but his tough-willed Quaker wife rose to the occasion. As a girl, Lydia had been a fierce Abolitionist, and she had organized a society to debate slavery and female suffrage. Her response to the new challenge: bottling and selling a home medicine she had been using for years. Ingredients: a blend of herbs, including true-unicorn and pleurisy root, steeped and macerated in an 18% alcohol base (about as potent as sherry). Taste: mildly bitter.

Within a few years, “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound” was fabulously famous. Lydia’s iron smile had been plastered on barns and billboards across the U.S., and her name was in history with Betsy Ross, Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony. Her story, told in Jean Burton’s spry biography, makes the career of a Horatio Alger hero sound like a chronicle of indifferent success.

Keep Me Supplied. Things were hard at first. Lydia made the compound herself in her cellar kitchen; she and her three sons and one daughter bottled it in the evenings while father Isaac read aloud. In her spare time, Lydia wrote advertising circulars which her sons distributed door to door. But sales were precious few until son Dan invaded Brooklyn with 20,000 of his mother’s handbills. (“KEEP ME SUPPLIED WITH PAMPHLETS,” he wrote exuberantly.) Lydia, it turned out, had as much of a genius for advertising as she had for pounding herbs. She addressed herself directly to women, discussed their complaints with frankness but never with vulgarity, harped on their fears of ignorant and unhygienic doctors.

There was no hobbling modesty about her copy either. The compound was “The Greatest Medical Discovery Since the Dawn of History.” To U.S. women tortured by tight corsets and breath-killing clothes, she cooed: “That feeling of bearing down…is always permanently cured by its use.” The list of complaints which the compound was supposed to cure ran the gamut from dysmenorrhea to nymphomania. Derisively, some citizens suggested that only one claim remained to be made—”A Baby in Every Bottle.” As the Pinkham company grew, however, it dropped some of the more extravagant claims and emphasized the value of the compound as a pain killer. Here, as millions of women users apparently still believe, Lydia seems to have had something.

The most brilliant of all Pinkham advertising ideas was Dan’s proposal to put his mother’s face on every ad. The result was inspired to the last detail—”the neat black silk dress, the tortoise-shell comb, the white fichu fastened with a cameo brooch,” the perpetual smile, the sagacious and composed elderly features. Here was everybody’s grandmother.

Greenbacks & Compounds. In 1878, Dan, who had something of his mother’s radicalism in him, ran for the Massachusetts legislature as candidate of the Greenback and Workingmen’s Parties. When he spoke at a rally there were cheers for “the Pinkham Boys of Lynn,” and, for good measure, another for the compound. Lydia wrote Dan’s campaign literature, doggedly weaving puffs for her compound into Greenback propaganda. She urged votes for those who “fight against such an accursed financial system. Thousands of people who are paying for this mismanagement are today suffering from KIDNEY COMPLAINTS, DYSPEPSIA, INDIGESTION and could surely, speedily and permanently be cured by the use of LYDIA E. PINKHAM’S VEGETABLE COMPOUND.” The opposition had nothing to match this; Dan was elected.

All the while Lydia bore herself with the aplomb and dignity of one convinced that she had made a significant contribution to humanity. Never did she heed ridicule or doubt the efficacy of her home-brewed remedies—not even when they failed to save the consumptive Dan.

Much of her advice made good sense, particularly when she campaigned for elementary cleanliness (“Keep clean inside and out!”) and “attacked the widespread prejudice against fresh air.” She conducted a one-woman campaign for safety and sanitary regulations in industry at a time when factory girls had little protection. In such ways she became a force to be reckoned with in U.S. life. Long before she died (in 1883), her face and name had become part of the country’s folklore and humor. One standard story:

Young Lady: “Oh, I’ve smashed my bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s.”

Mother: “A Compound fracture!”

Fascinated undergraduates sang:

Elsie W. had no children,

There was nothing in her blouse.

So she took some Vegetable Compound;

Now they milk her with the cows.

The compound became known in every country, selling in China as “Smooth Sea’s Pregnancy Womb Birth-Giving Magical 100 Per Cent Effective Water.” Perhaps its crowning triumph came in 1944, when an Army chaplain took some snapshots of South Pacific natives just liberated from the Japanese. One picture showed a native woman in front of a thatched jungle hut, surrounded by her possessions—meager indeed, but among them one bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, the grandmotherly face on the label mild and benign as ever.