Women Business

Women Business 

The face of the kindly matron beamed forms the pages of newspapers and magazines across the country. The advertising copy promised relief from “falling of the womb and all female weaknesses,” touting the product as “the greatest remedy in the world.” The year 1879, and the product was unproven home remedy called Lydia E. Pinkham’s vegetable compound. Lydia Pinkham, the woman whose countenance graced the periodical pages, developed the advertising campaign the traded on her benign image.

Pinkham brought to her marketing effort the passionate social activism characteristic of many women of her era. Convinced that she offered more than a mere product, she used her advertising to Campion women’s rights, temperance, and fiscal reform. One of the cleverest marketing techniques was department of advice. Encouraging women to bypass male physicians to seek guidance from another woman, she dispensed practical suggestion about diet, exercise, and hygiene, along with endorsements for  her own medicine yet Pinkham did not hesitate to exploit traditional feminine fears- and feminine stereotypes- to market her product. She printed testimonials from women reporting cures not only for range of physical symptoms, but also for infertility, “nervousness,” “hysteria,” and even marital discord. According to one early newspaper ad, the murder of a Connecticut clergyman by his wife, whose insanity was” brought on by 16 years of suffering with female complaints.” Could have been prevented by timely administration of the compound to the affiliated women.

As a result of such bold marketing the company that Pinkham had founded with her sons earned $200000 in 1881. Lydia Pinkham herself becomes something of a folk heroine- the subject of popular songs, Jokes, and bawdy verse.

Pinkham’s introduction of feminine packaging to capitalist enterprise earned her a special place in the annals of American business as well as women’s history. It also set pattern for women entrepreneurs in the following century. The handful of women who emulated Pinkham’s success likewise followed her in importing traditional feminine roles into the masculine world of commerce. When feminine ideals collided with the realities of the marketplace, however, the businesswoman often bested the lady.

Like Pinkham. Her successor consciously exploited their images as women to promote their products. In some case the image at that of glamorous socialite: arch-rivals Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Atden competed not only selling cosmetics but also in luring publicity by their marriages to European aristocrats. More often the image cultivated was that of mother or grandmother: following Pinkham in this mold, for example, where Margaret Rudkin, founder of Pepperidge farm, Inc., And Jennie Grossinger, who ran a resort hotel upstate New York renewed for its food and entertainment. Grossinger managed to remain the solicitous Jewish grandmother the eyes of her customers long after she had hired a public relations man and Grossinger’s hotel began serving 15000 guests a year. Women’s businesses tended to grow out of traditional women’s skills and careered mainly to women. Lydia Pinkham and collected and administered folk remedies to her family for year before the collapse of their husband’s real estate business led her to began marketing herbal preparations for “female complaints.” Margaret Rudkin, faced with comparable need supplement her husband’s income, also looked close to home. She reportedly baked her first loaf of additive- free whole wheat bread as part of a special diet for a asthmatic son, and secured her first order from her neighborhood grocer in 1973.

To transform a home cart into a thriving business, these female capitalists joined a canny sense of women’s tastes with the audacity of a bumbler in creating and marketing innovations designed to shape those tastes. In 1909 Elizabeth Arden introduces her first line of makeup, not then widely considered respectable, as facial treatments.” As the beauty market began to expand in the 1920’s she kept several steps ahead of demand: introducing, for example, such exotic and vaguely medicinal concoctions as sensation salve, Arden gland cream, and the Vienna youth mask. Applications of the youth mask, constructed of papier-mâché and tinfoil, required the costumer to be hooked up to a diathermy machine, which applied heat via electric current. Arden assured the women who submitted to the treatment- and paid dearly for the privilege-that were restoring dust skin tissue.

In addition to skin care cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden salons eventually added hairstyling, readymade and custom clothes, and advice to nutrition and exercise. Adren herself practiced and advocated yoga, adapting the exercise for the women who frequented her salons and main health spa. Competition salon proprietor Helena Rubinstein published a book expounding the benefits of eating raw food and sold consumer on the diet. In promoting the idea that a beauty salon could provide women with means to “remake” themselves, inside and out both women manifested the conviction of American businesswomen from Lydia Pinkham on that they were providing other women with something more that a product.

Through they aimed to serve as well as to sell, however these businesswomen frequently put profit ahead of altruism. Their advertising claims were often extravagant, ever misleading. And when regulatory agencies such as the FDA and FTC began to crack down on questionable business practices, female entrepreneurs were as likely to be cited as their male counterparts. Helena Rubenstein, for instance was force by the FDA to withdraw some of the medicinal claims she make for her products.

The latent conflict between the profit motive and the social service ethic of female entrepreneurs is perhaps best exemplified once again by Lydia Pinkham: a passionate temperance advocate who had no qualms about selling a product that contained sufficient alcohol to make it 40 proof.” grandma,” backed by the women’s Christian temperance union, was selling bronze