The Life And Times Of Lydia E Pinkham

Lydia Pinkham was one of the 19th century’s most remarkable businesswomen, her influence spreading beyond the late 1800s and her native New England. A champion of equal rights for women and blacks at a time when such causes lacked widespread support, Pinkham was ahead of her time on other issues. Chief among them was the well-being of women struggling with serious health issues related to their menstrual cycles and other so-called “women weaknesses.” But as the teetotaling Pinkham and her namesake company soared to entrepreneurial heights by selling her patient relief in the guise of an alcohol-laced potion known as the Vegetable Compound, generations that followed have been left to wonder: Was she worthy of her female customers’ trust or just an opportunist? In Lydia Pinkham: The Face That Launched a Thousand Ads, historian Sammy R. Danna offers the latest book-length biography that explores all sides of the Lydia Pinkham phenomena. Danna illustrates how remarkable an American historical figure she was, who with associates masterfully used and reinvented the marketing tools of her day, while battling the misogyny of the medical establishment. But Danna also asks whether she was just a grandmotherly version of the pitchmen who roamed from town to town with their snake oil elixirs. Students and scholars in the fields of women’s studies, American culture, and the histories of medicine, advertising, and business will see Lydia Pinkham in a new light.

The most comprehensive reference book of its kind, with more than 60 new entries in this third edition.

This volume is the most comprehensive bibliography of purely biographical material written by Americans. It covers every possible field of life but, by design, excludes autobiographies, diaries, and journals.

The enthusiastic response to the Dictionary has prompted this second substantially enlarged, revised and updated edition. It now contains essential details of the lives of over 2000 women from all periods, cultures and walks of life - from queens to cooks, engineers to entertainers, pilots to poisoners. The new entries include women who have hit the headlines in the past five years - from Cory Aquino to Madonna - but the historical coverage has also been broadened in response to new research and a special new feature is the extended treatment of women from Third World countries. With subsections for further reading, comprehensive subject index and bibliographical survey, the Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography is an invaluable reference source - and a fascinating bed-time read.

This volume takes up rhetorical approaches to our primarily linguistic understanding of how names work, considering how theories of materiality in rhetoric enrich conceptions of the name as word or symbol and help explain the processes of name bestowal, accumulation, loss, and theft. Contributors theorize the formation, modification, and recontexualization of names as a result of technological and cultural change, and consider the ways in which naming influences identity and affects/grants power.