Word: pinkhams
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...