A Cultural History of Advertising

"Born in 1818 in Lynn, Massachusetts, Lydia Estes was one of the most successful American businesswomen of the 19th century. As a young woman, she worked as a midwife, nurse, and schoolteacher and also became involved in the Female Anti-Slavery Society, the temperance movement, and the pseudoscience phrenology, which made character deductions about a person based on bone irregularities in the skull. In 1843, she married Isaac Pinkham, a wealthy real estate mogul.

In 1873, Pinkham founded the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company in order to market an herbal medicine, Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, that she had developed to treat the medical problems of her female friends and family members..."