Lydia E. Pinkham

Lydia E. Pinkham
Lydia E. Pinkham (from a 1904 pamphlet)
Born	Lydia Estes February 9, 1819 Lynn, Massachusetts
Died	May 17, 1883(1883-05-17) (aged 64)

Lydia Estes Pinkham (February 9, 1819 – May 17, 1883) was an iconic concocter and shrewd marketer of a commercially successful herbal-alcoholic "women's tonic" meant to relieve menstrual and menopausal pains. Although Pinkham's Vegetable Compound sold well to the general public, it was regarded by health experts as quackery.

Lydia Pinkham was born in the manufacturing city of Lynn, Massachusetts, the tenth of the twelve children of William and Rebecca Estes. The Estes were an old Quaker family tracing their ancestry to one William Estes, a Quaker who migrated to America in 1676, and through him to the thirteenth-century Italian House of Este. William Estes was originally a shoemaker but by the time Lydia was born in 1819, he had become wealthy through dealing in real estate and had risen to the status of "gentleman farmer". Lydia was educated at Lynn Academy and worked as a schoolteacher before her marriage in September 1843.

The Esteses were a strongly abolitionist and anti-segregation family. The fugitive slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was a neighbor and a family friend. The Estes' household was a gathering place for local and visiting abolitionist leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison. The Esteses broke from the Quakers over the slavery issue in the 1830s. Lydia joined the Lynn Female Anti-slavery Society when she was sixteen. In the controversies which divided the abolitionist movement during the 1840s, Lydia would support the feminist and moral persuasion positions of Nathaniel P. Rogers. Her children would continue in the anti-slavery tradition.

Isaac Pinkham was a 29-year-old shoe manufacturer when he married Lydia in 1843. He would try various businesses without much success. Lydia gave birth to their first child, Charles Hacker Pinkham, in 1844. She lost their second child to gastroenteritis, but gave birth to their second surviving child, Daniel Rogers Pinkham, in 1848. A third son, William Pinkham, was born in 1852, and a daughter, Aroline Chase Pinkham, in 1857. All the Pinkham children would eventually be involved in the Pinkham medicine business.