At a time when most companies wouldn’t even hire a female secretary, women were running catalogs and other direct marketing enterprises.

Consider Lydia Estes Pinkham, who in 64 years rarely left her hometown of Lynn, MA. In 1873, driven by financial need (her husband had gone bankrupt), she went into business, selling a remedy for women from home.

The product was Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, an herbal concoction with an 18% alcohol content. Selling for $1 a bottle, it was guaranteed do ease women through the “Change of Life,” to dissolve and expel tumors from the uterus, and to “cure entirely all Ovarian troubles, Inflammation and Ulceration.”

<!--end paragraph--><!--begin paragraph-->

Obviously, the claims were overstated. But the potion did relieve some distress (as the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged in 1938), which was more than most doctors were able to do.” Only a woman can understand a woman’s ills,” Lydia wrote.

<!--end paragraph--><!--begin paragraph-->

Her contributions to the advertising and brand-building arts were even more memorable. Her “mild Quaker face” appeared not only on bottles of the compound, but in all circulars and newspaper ads.

<!--end paragraph--><!--begin paragraph-->

“Many small newspaper offices possessed no cut of a woman’s face except that of Lydia’s maternal countenance, which occasionally was shifted from an advertising to a news column to do double duty as Queen Victoria,” wrote historian James Harvey Young.

<!--end image--><!--begin paragraph-->

She also was a pioneer in what is now called relationship marketing. Every ad she ran invited readers to “Write to Mrs. Pinkham at Lynn, Mass., and she will advise you.” Thanks to the avalanche of letters she got, the Pinkham company became “a potent factor in altering both the hygienic habits and social mores of the nation at large,” according to author Jean Burton.

<!--end paragraph--><!--begin paragraph-->

Pinkham kept the million letters she accumulated under lock and key, refusing to rent them to list brokers. She also insisted that every letter was “opened by a woman, read by a woman, seen only by a woman.” Sadly, Lydia ran the firm for only 10 years. She died in 1883 (a fact revealed years later when a reporter found her grave), but the business was continued by her daughter-in-law and lasted well into the 20th century.

<!--end paragraph--><!--begin paragraph-->

Another pioneer was Madame Yale, inventor of the Yale Remedies, a line of beauty products. At first, her mail order operation was a byproduct of her physical culture lectures, but then, as she tired of the lecture circuit, it became her primary business. In five years, she spent $2 million on advertising, a giant media budget in those years. “A mail order business is very desirable for women, but if I were beginning again I should choose a necessity and I would not try to educate the people as I have done,” she told Mail Order Journal in 1903. “It isn’t necessary.”

<!--end paragraph--><!--begin paragraph-->

We’re sorry to report that these 19th century women are missing from our Hall of Fame. And it’s too bad, because they were true role models, shining examples of the American entrepreneurial spirit.

http://directmag.com