| Focusing on the controversial advertising figure of Lydia E. Pinkham and her product, a patent medicine for women, this dissertation examines the impact of brand-name consumer goods on American culture between 1880 and 1940. Long after Lydia Pinkham died in 1883, her face continued to serve as the trademark and central advertising image for her family's firm. An examination of this figure and the conflicting responses it provoked from doctors, druggists, humorists, and ordinary citizens reveals that Pinkham served as a lightning rod for broader debates about cultural authority, consumer freedom, and the emergence of a national consumer culture based on brand-name goods.; Chapter One analyzes the transformation of Lydia Pinkham's grandmotherly face into a “branded personality” that distinguished the product from its competitors and, when linked to consumer testimonials, forged a commercialized advice network connecting women to the company and to each other. Chapter Two explores the disruptive influence of Pinkham's Vegetable Compound and other packaged, secret remedies on the retail drug trade and how their increased use in the 1890s opened the door for unethical practices including price-cutting, substitution, imitation, and counterfeiting. Chapter Three argues that Pinkham's most vocal sustained critic, the American Medical Association, successfully challenged the firm's advice network only by accepting the laity as medical consumers and treating them as partners in preventive health. The fourth chapter analyzes Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley jokes and songs about brand-name goods, arguing that humor about Lydia Pinkham was more widespread, vicious, and damaging than that about other brands. The final chapter focuses on the critical decade of the 1930s, tracing the combined impact of consumers, retailers, comics, and physicians on the Pinkham advice network, fracturing it and branding Lydia Pinkham as a joke/nostalgia figure. Conflicting responses to Lydia Pinkham demonstrate how brand-name images circulate through society as contested figures that both reflect and shape cultural attitudes. |
