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Nervous Women and Noble Savages: The Romanticized Other in Nineteenth-Century U. S. Patent Medicine Advertising
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Nervous Women and Noble Savages:
The Romanticized Other in Nineteenth-Century U. S. Patent Medicine Advertising
"Don't blame her. Women are often cross, irritable, hysteric, and declare they are driven to distraction at the slightest provocation."
Advertisement for Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, late 19th c.
"The Doctor...immediately went to his coach, taking therefrom various plants and roots, which he had learned from the Red Men of the forest as being good for all diseases...."
Advertisement for Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills, c. 1850
In the heyday of American patent medicine advertising in the late nineteenth century, references to hysterical, nervous women and American Indians who were untamed, yet wise in the healing ways of nature, appeared plentifully on medicine packaging, on the sides of barns, and in periodicals that advertised concoctions claiming to cure everything from cancer to consumption to "female weakness." Although some cure-alls had been advertised in Colonial papers as early as the 1720s (Larson 334), patent medicine advertising flourished in the late 1800s, thanks to the expansion of the penny press, the introduction of patent medicines to soldiers during the Civil War (Goodrum and Dalrymple, 24) and efforts on the part of advertisers to create a unique identity for their products. That identity often came through references to things remote, mystical and exotic (Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, 162) or else through identification with an understanding healer who could help whe
n doctors were not trusted (Stage 46-49 and 89 ff.). It was the perfect environment in which to promote the images of "red men of the forest" and a grandmotherly healer who knew how to help women with "female complaints."
This paper focuses on images of women and Native Americans in patent medicine advertising in the late nineteenth century. While images of other groups were used in advertising, those of women and Indians were particularly plentiful in ads from this industry, making it natural to ask what these two groups had in common in the nineteenth-century imagination. Drawing on Stuart Hall's work on the creation of "the Other," theories of "commodity racism" and employing historical research and textual analysis, I explore the context in which patent medicine advertising flourished and in which images of women and Native Americans were used. I argue that these two groups were exoticized and romanticized in ways that were similar to each other and different from other groups. An ironic correlation, and possible reason, may be that the lives of women and Native Americans were increasingly restricted in nineteenth-century society, while African Americans, freed by the Emancipation Proclamatio
n in 1863, brought up different anxieties for the dominant ideology. As examples, I offer as case studies of two patent medicines of this era: Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound and Dr. Morses's Indian Root Pills. Chosen because of their widespread marketing campaigns, they illustrate the way women and Native Americans were romanticized even while the lives of the people they portrayed were being restricted.
Patent Medicine in America--A Brief History
Although patent medicine advertising reached its zenith in the late nineteenth century, use of such medicines is actually rooted in Colonial times, when professional medical help was difficult to come by and colonists relied on elixirs imported from Europe or made from recipes handed down through the generations. One recipe, which came from a doctor in London, advised those who suffered "paines in ye Brest or Limmes" to "Weare a Wilde Catts skin on ye place grieved." A concoction made of black powder derived from "Toades" cremated in the month of March was believed to help "ye plague, small pox: purples, all sorts of feavers, Poyson." Mixed with vinegar, the same powdered toad could relieve "gangrene, or bite of anie Venemous beast" as well as "Cankers, Fistulas & old Ulcers and kings Evill" (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society vol. V, pp. 379 ff., cited in Larson 333-334).
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonists altered or augmented their own hand-me-down recipes, and some sought patents for their medical mixtures from the British crown; hence the origin of the term "patent medicine" (Larson 334). The American Revolution curtailed the sale of imported medicines, so people relied more on medicines made at home or locally (Applegate 76). Peddlars and shopkeepers began to sell both the medicines and herbal ingredients, and some began to advertise in early Colonial newspapers, expanding simple claims into wildly imaginative ones that prefigured patent medicine ads of the nineteenth century. For example, an early patent medicine advertisement for Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops that ran in Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette in 1736 promised to cure more than thirty illnesses, including "all Fluxes, Spitting of Blood, Consumptions, Small Pox, Measles, Colds, Coughs, and Pains in the Limbs or Joints" as well as "Agues, and the most viole
nt Feaver in the World." Moreover, the ad claimed that these drops were good for "bringing away Slime, Gravel, and oftentimes Stones of great bigness" and "Shortness of Breath, and Straitness of the Breast, rekindling the almost extinguished natural Heat in diseased Bodies," among others (Larson 335).
In the early nineteenth century, of course, the penny press made newspapers more affordable as journalists sought to free themselves from partisan sponsorship by relying more heavily on advertising,[1] and much of that advertising was for patent medicines. Just before the Civil War, about half of all advertising in periodicals was for drugs (Goodrum and Dalrymple, 24), and in the 1870s, patent medicine advertising comprised more than a quarter of the work done by the N.W. Ayer's advertising agency (Schudson, Advertising, 162). Patent medicine advertising, then, went hand-in-hand with the expansion of the newspaper industry in America and was important in the advertising industry as well.
In addition to increased advertising, growing distrust of orthodox medicine helped patent medicine use become even more widespread during the nineteenth century. One critic of the time dubbed the nineteenth "the poisoning century" (Stage 45) because of doctors' aggressive use of strong medicine to combat disease. Doctors of the period saw the sickroom as a "battlefield" where the physician pitted his arsenal of medicines against disease, often disregarding nature. They wanted to systematize medicine as Newton had systematized mechanics and astronomy (Stage 47). A standard therapy for a number of illnesses was bloodletting, either with a lancet or leeches. In another practice, called blistering, doctors used irritants to create second-degree burns on the skin; they believed this practice drew infection out of the system. A third common therapy was Calomel, a drug that caused mercurial poison but was believed to cure many diseases. "Heavy doses produced a violent laxative effect fo
llowed by profuse salivation as the body attempted to throw off the drug. Continued doses destroyed the mucous tissues of the mouth, softened the gums, and led to the loss of teeth" as well as the rotting of the jawbone (Stage 49). Satirical balladeers even made up a song about the drug:
The man in death begins to groan,
The fatal job for him is done;
He dies, alas! but sure to tell,
A sacrifice to Calomel... (Stage 49-50).
Doctors, nevertheless "declared the drug 'safe and gentle'" (Stage 49). In this climate, reliance on botanicals grew, even though regular physicians looked down on those who prescribed them as "rash 'empirics' and untrained charlatans" (Stage 51).
Of course, neither increased advertising nor distrust of doctors explains why Native Americans, on the one hand, and women plagued with "hysteria," on the other hand, would have been so prevalent in the imagery that advertisers employed to sell patent medicines to the predominantly white reading public. Exploring possible explanations requires understanding not only the social position of women and Native Americans in nineteenth-century American culture, but the way a culture constructs "otherness" in order to enforce a dominant ideology.
Theoretical Framework: The "Other" in Cultural Meaning-Making
In a chapter titled "The Spectacle of the 'Other'" in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Stuart Hall summarizes several theories that attempt to explain how those dominant in a culture use "otherness" to name themselves and maintain power. These theories include linguistic perspectives on the role of difference and binary opposition in the process of definition; classification and its use in culture; and psychoanalytic theories about the mirror of the "other" in identity formation.
First, difference is necessary to meaning-making; without difference, as French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted, we could not make meaning because things can only be defined in terms of what they are not. However, difference leads to binary oppositions, and as Jacques Derrida pointed out, binaries are rarely neutral; one pole of the binary is usually dominant. We can see this in a number of examples: men dominate women, whites dominate blacks, the upper class dominates the lower class (Hall 234-235). In signifying difference, then, we also signify power relations.
Moreover, classification is necessary to meaning-making. In order to make sense of them, people, objects, and ideas are put into categories. As Hall writes, "Stable cultures require things to stay in their appointed place" (236). When things fail to fit any established category, or float between categories, cultural order is disturbed. Citing Julia Kristeva, Hall argues that when that happens, cultures tend to fortify their boundaries in a process of purification that is really about self-definition. "Making 'difference' leads us, symbolically, to close ranks, shore up culture and to stigmatize and expel anything which is defined as impure, abnormal. However, paradoxically, it also makes 'difference' powerful, strangely attractive precisely because it is forbidden, taboo, threatening to cultural order" (Hall 237).
While the above overview gives a theoretical basis for looking at the role of difference in meaning-making and self-identity, it does not explain the powerful role of stereotyping. As Hall writes, "Stereotyping reduces people to a few, simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by Nature" (257). Its role is not merely to make meaning, but to exclude and expel that which is perceived as different:
Stereotyping, in other words, is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic
order. It sets up a symbolic frontier between the 'normal' and the 'deviant,' the
'normal' and the 'pathological,' the 'acceptable' and the 'unacceptable,' what
'belongs' and what does not or is 'Other," between 'insiders' and 'outsiders,' Us
and Them. It facilitates the 'binding' or bonding together of all of Us who are
'normal' into one 'imagined community'; and it send into symbolic exile all of Them--the 'Others'--who are in some way different-- 'beyond the pale' (258).
Stereotyping occurs "where there are gross inequalities of power" and that "[p]ower is usually directed against the subordinate or excluded group" (258). One way that power is wielded is through a constructed "knowledge" or discourse centering on the dominated group, as in Edward Said's Orientalism, which details how Europeans constructed a stereotypical knowledge of the "Orient" that had little to do with the subjectivity of people in Asia and everything to do with Europeans' social construction of themselves as a superior people mirrored by, and contrasted to, their concept of the Orient (Hall 259). In this example and others, stereotyping involves the splitting of the "good" and the "bad," with the anxiety of the dominant group projected onto the "Other." As Said writes, "The Orient was almost a European invention.... In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience" (Said 1-2). Stereotyping, then, is an extension of the meaning-making function of "otherness" but one which goes beyond mere self-definition to conflate self-identity with power.
It is not a long leap from the conceptual understanding of stereotyping to the concept of branding in advertisements. Brands, after all, are also all about naming, identity, difference. In fact, Anthony J. Cortese defines branding as "the process of differentiation" that "seeks to nullify or compensate for the fact that products are otherwise fundamentally interchangeable"--to blur the fact that all shampoos are essentially alike (4). Branding, like stereotyping, de-emphasizes sameness not only to create identity but to conflate identity with power. When stereotypes of racial or ethnic groups are used as part of a brand, the result is what Stuart Hall and others call "commodity racism." For example, as Anne McClintock points out, African Americans were used in nineteenth-century advertisements for soap not only to sell the soap but to "preserve, through fetish ritual, the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity in a social order felt to be threatened by the fetid
effluvia of the slums, the belching smoke of industry, social agitation, economic upheaval, imperial competition and anticolonial resistance. Soap offered the promise of spiritual salvation and regeneration through commodity consumption, a regime of domestic hygiene that could restore the threatened potency of the imperial body politic and the race" (281) As one 1899 Pears' Soap advertisement that put it, "The first step toward lightening THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. PEARS' SOAP is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances..." (McClintock, 280-81, capitalization original). In commodity racism, Hall argues, stereotyping and branding are combined not only to sell products but to create and maintain identity and power of the dominant group-- or in the case of Pears' Soap, to maintain the hegemony of British imperialists (240). It stands to reason that one might also coin the term "commodity sexis
m" to describe the same process using images of women. Stereotypes and branding move into the realm of fetish when driven by fear and fantasy. According to Hall, a fetish substitutes for what cannot be shown because it is dangerous or forbidden. Rather than authentically representing a group, a fetish objectifies them (266).
Nineteenth-Century America: Women and Native Americans
How, then, were commodity racism and sexism used in relation to Native Americans and women in patent medicine ads in Victorian America? How were these two groups socially constructed, even fetishized, during this period? What realities in the lives of these two groups were being masked by that social construction?
In Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine, Sarah Stage argues that it was the gradual "constriction of women's sphere" beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth that led to the latter century's obsession with female weakness and "emphasis on the morbid and the melodramatic--fallen wombs, hysteria, venereal excess" (64-65). While Colonial women had been a hardy lot whose labor contributed to the survival and well-being of the society, nineteenth-century women were deemed increasingly superfluous, much of their work (such as soap, cloth and candle-making) taken over by industrialization and their children educated outside the home. "It would be wrong to imply that all middle-class women were idle in the home, although women's domestic occupations came to be confused with leisure. Industrialization redefined the concept of work. Increasingly men worked for wages in a system geared to time-oriented, not task-oriented wo
rk. In contrast women worked without pay in tasks like family care and household management which defied time orientation" (65). A woman's domestic work was laborious enough to deplete her energies, but it no longer "counted" in the new industrial definition of "work." Human attributes became bifurcated; women became, increasingly, "other" in contrast to men's attempt to define themselves as rugged individualists, survivors, "self-made men." Age-old ideas about gender roles became exaggerated, even surreal. As Stage puts it, "Where men were weighted down with demands, women became weighted down with restrictions. Determined to be all strength, men saw in women all weakness. The result was a strange and forced symbiosis" of gender roles (67).
Meanwhile, attitudes about women's bodies changed. Linda Gordon, in Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America, writes that it was during the nineteenth century that "women learned to hate their bodies" (23). Doctors, whose elitist position within the culture had burgeoned in the eighteenth century,[2] became increasingly focused on women's bodies even as ideas about gender and sex underwent radical change. The phrase "the opposite sex" was used for the first time during this period (Riddle 215), and women were truly seen as different from men ontologically as well as sociologically. Thomas Laqueur, author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, writes that prior to Enlightenment thinking, there was a "one-sex" model of humanity in which
what we call sex and gender were...explicity bound up in a circle of meanings
from which escape to a supposed biological substrate--the strategy of the Enlightenment--was impossible. In the world of one sex, it was precisely when
talk seemed to be most directly about the biology of the two sexes that it was
most embedded in the politics of gender, in culture. To be a man or a woman
was to hold a social rank, a place in society, to assume or cultural role, not to be organically one or the other of two incommensurable sexes (Laqueur 8, his italics).
Those in the medical field became obsessed with sex. Science was "the new faith of the century" even though "Much that passed for science remained subjective judgment decked out in pseudoscientific jargon" (Stage 68). In this climate, Stage writes, doctors were prolific in their production of medical texts and treatises on sex. "The constriction of woman's sphere apparent on the social level was paralleled in medical writing by a constriction in the field of vision which led doctors to focus, with obsessive concern, on woman's organs of reproduction" (Stage 68). One British physician, Henry Maudsley, described woman as a sort of "mutilated man." He wrote that "While woman preserves her sex, she will necessarily be feebler than man, and, having her special bodily and mental characters, will have, to a certain extent her own sphere of activity" (cited in Stage 68).
Despite the increased medical focus on their bodies, women found the practical care they needed hard to come by. Reproductive freedom became more restricted. France had outlawed abortion, ironically, during the French Revolution. Britain followed suit in 1803 and individual states in the U.S. did so in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, beginning with Connecticut in 1821 (Riddle 208-210). Information about birth control became harder to get, as well (Riddle 212). At the same time, women's supposed "nervousness" was attributed to gynecological causes even as gynecologists themselves became suspect due to their "poking and prodding." Doctors averted their eyes while examining female patients, who were fully clothed to prevent breaches of Victorian modesty. Despite the resulting likelihood of misdiagnosis, doctors zealously removed female organs, especially the ovaries, which were seen as "the troublesome seat of disease" (Stage 75-80). In summary, nineteenth-century w
omen found their social position more and more restricted at the same time as they found their bodies--especially their reproductive organs--increasingly the focus of medical attention. So much focus was placed on the female reproductive system as the site or cause of disease that one could almost say that femaleness itself was seen as a sickness.[3]
Meanwhile, the lives of Native Americans, too, were increasingly restricted. It is significant to note that after his 1831 visit to the United States, French statesman and author Alexis de Tocqueville used similar language to describe women and Native Americans. Of women, he said, "[T]he inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes woman within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties, and forbids her to step beyond it" (cited in Stage 65). Of Native Americans, he wrote, "The Europeans continued to surround [Native Americans] on every side, and to confine them within narrow limits...and the Indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of sustaining. They were isolated in their own country, and their race only constituted a little colony of troublesome strangers in the midst of a numerous and dominant people" (cited in Native American, United States Policy). Both groups were circumscribed and dominated, defined and overpowered by con
structed knowledge in much the same way as the "Orientals" described by Said. Both groups were "known" and objectified in a way that furthered their domination. The difference, however, is that while woman's circumscription took place while she lived within the physical vicinity and social milieu of her oppressor, Native Americans were pushed into areas farther away geographically as their lands were taken from them. Woman's circumscription was intimate; Native Americans' circumscription was remote.
Judging from the language used in a 1787 declaration of U.S. policy found in the Northwest Ordinance, it would seem that the coming nineteenth century held promise for Native Americans' relations to whites. That policy reads in part, "The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed..." (cited in Native American, United States Policy). But looking at what happened to one tribe, the Cherokee, it becomes apparent that what actually happened in the nineteenth century was very different from what was promised in the 1787 policy. Increasingly, white settlers wanted Native land, and federal policy changed to accommodate their wishes. In her autobiography, the former chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, calls the federal policies that culminated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, "systematic genoci
de, property theft, and total subjugation" (Mankiller 51). During the winter of 1838-39, thousands of Cherokee were forced to walk from their native homes in the present-day southeastern United States to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, along what they called "Nunna daul Tsunyi," or the "Trail of Tears." Mankiller writes, "Old ones and small ones were placed in wagons, but many of the Cherokee made that trek by foot or were herded onto boats. Some were in shackles. Thousands perished or were forever scarred in body, mind, and soul" (47). Fifty years later, the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 "had as its primary aim the assimilation of all native people into white society by bringing them under federal jurisdiction and teaching them farming techniques and the values of private ownership" (Mankiller 134). Lands previously held in common by native people were divided into parcels, with heads of households receiving 160 acres and single people receiving eighty. Dividing the land th
is way resulted in leftover land, which was open to white settlement (Mankiller 134-5). Due to federal policies such as this, as well as "massacres" and "duplicitous treaties," writes Jerry Mander, "Between 1776 and the late 1800s, Indian land holdings were reduced by about 95 percent, from about three million square miles to 200,000" (Mander 69).
Native Americans were subjugated not only geographically, but culturally. Mankiller writes that throughout the nineteenth century, white Christian missionaries "all anxious to 'save the savages' ... moved into our homeland. They built churches and mission schools were, in most instances, academic lessons were supplemented with an abundance of hymn singing, public prayers, and Scripture readings" (80). In 1819, Congress authorized $10,000 annually to the War Department to "civilize" the Indians. The money was used to build mission schools, and the curriculum included Bible study as well as academics. A typical tract of the era, Mankiller writes, was titled A Discourse or Lecture on the subject of Civilizing the Indians, in which is exhibited a New Plan to Effect their Civilization and to Meliorate their Condition by the Rev. J. Darneille of Virginia and published in 1826 in Washington, D.C. "Darneille and other sanctimonious do-gooders of that period did not have the slightest clue about the workings of the Native American culture and belief system,"
Mankiller writes, characterizing his "sympathy" as "patronizing concern for what he considered to be our 'plight'" (80-81). Later, and well into the twentieth century, children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools. Zitkala-Sa, a Native American girl[4] whose boarding school experiences were published in the January-February-March 1900 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, described the lack of cultural understanding in a passage where she learns of the white people's plans to cut her hair: "Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!" When her hair was actually cut, the girl wrote, "I lost my spirit" (Zitkala-Sa).
Yet even as Native Americans were subjugated and circumscribed, they were romanticized--just as the Victorian woman was. As Debra Merskin writes in an article on media portrayal of Native Americans, "Indians were seen as the Noble Red Men or Children of Nature" (334). Even Thomas Jefferson, who elsewhere called them "wretches," referred in 1785 to "proofs of genius given by the Indians of North America" (Mankiller 53).
Native Americans and women share much in the process by which they were socially constructed as "other" in relation to ruling-class white men; this process seems different from the way commodity racism was used against African Americans. As de Toqueville noted, in the passages cited earlier, both women and Native Americans were increasingly relegated to "narrow" social confines. This confinement grew as the century progressed. African Americans, on the other hand, began the century as slaves and were all were freed by 1863. Although obviously still very much oppressed, they were never romanticized the way that women and Native Americans were. It was arguably their end-of-century freedom from slavery that created the anxiety depicted in, say, the soap fetish described by McClintock. While African American images were also found on ads for such items as stove polish and black thread, they were not used for medicine. Women and Native Americans, however, were put on proverbial pedes
tals, revered in the public imagination even as they were scorned in reality. It is for this reason, I would argue, that both found themselves depicted in such medicines as Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills and Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, products that are the focus for the case studies below. For even while their relegation to otherness affirmed the white ruling-class male's hegemonic dominance, their romanticized images provided an alternative to that hegemony in a century called, as noted earlier, "the poisoning century" because of white ruling-class doctors' questionable practices.
Two Case Studies: Women and Native Americans in Patent Medicine Advertisements
A number of books and articles have detailed Lydia Pinkham's life story[5] and it is not my intention to repeat it at length here. Briefly, she was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1819, to Quaker parents whom one biographer described as socially conscious people who had "very positive personalities, to put it mildly" (Burton 9). Exposed early to the ideas of the Transcendentalists and nearby Abolitionist leaders, Lydia joined the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society at sixteen and "consistently backed the radical faction which put woman's rights on a par with abolition" (Stage 23-24). As a young woman she organized a group called the Freemen's Institute to rival the local Debating Society, which allowed only white males to debate. Frederick Douglass, a family friend, was its first president (Burton 23). In 1843, she married Isaac Pinkham, a man who "lived on great expectations" and whose "fortunes continued to zig-zag" (Stage 25). She raised three sons and a daughter, supplementing their schooling with Latin and poetry (Stage 29). Among other practices, she kept a notebook full of folk remedies, among them a cure for "female complaints" that she may have gotten from a Lynn machinist, George Todd
, who defaulted on a loan that Isaac Pinkham co-signed (Stage 27). Lydia Pinkham made the potion on the stove, shared it with her friends, and sometimes sold it. When a group of women drove from Salem to Lynn one day in 1875 to buy half a dozen bottles, her son, Dan, is said to have blurted out, "Mother, if those ladies will come all the way from Salem to get that medicine, why can it not be sold to other people--why can't we go into the business of making and selling it, same as any other medicine?" (Stage 31).
The Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company was officially organized in 1876, with son Will Pinkham as the official proprietor because he was the only male in the family not in debt. But Lydia Pinkham made the medicine.[6] She also answered letters, wrote advertising copy, and wrote a four-page "Guide for Women." Pamphlets were distributed on son Dan's route as a mail carrier. Later Dan moved to Brooklyn and began distributing pamphlets there, dropping small cards in public parks that said, "Try Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. I know it will cure you, it's the best thing for Uterine complaints there is. From Your Cousin, Mary. P.S. You can get it at P. Jackson's on Fulton Street" (Stage 34). The family couldn't afford his plan to run a Lydia E. Pinkham poster the entire length of the Brooklyn Bridge, but they could afford to buy space on the front page of the Boston Herald. Agents called, and the Lydia E. Pinkham newspaper campaign was born (Stage 37).
It wasn't until 1879 that Lydia E. Pinkham's face became famous. Dan wanted a picture of a "healthy woman" in the ads, and it occurred to him one day that his mother was the perfect model. "At sixty Mrs. Pinkham was a dignified, handsome woman who possessed a benign motherly countenance....The picture conveyed the whole Pinkham message. At a glance it inspired confidence. The attractive woman, sagacious and composed in her best black silk and white lace fichu, appealed to her audience as an idealized grandmother, sympathetic and compassionate.... Lydia Pinkham not only identified her product, she came to embody it." As soon as her picture appeared, sales boomed. The family was soon offered $100,000 for the business and the trademarked photo, but refused to sell (Stage 40-41).
In those days, according to Stage, a woman's face in the press was rare. In fact, editors had so few photos of women that they sometimes borrowed Lydia's face when they needed a picture of, say, Queen Victoria (Stage 41). Her face became omnipresent, ubiquitous. Undergraduate men even made up a song about it:
Ah! She knows not how I suffer!
Her's is now a world-wide fame,
But 'til death that face shall greet me.
Lydia Pinkham is her name (Stage 41).
But if Lydia Pinkham's kindly face embodied the "healthy woman," perhaps it attracted so much attention--even covert ridicule in the form of the song--because images of healthy women were so rare in the late nineteenth century. Many Pinkham ads, and ads for other patent medicines, capitalized on the images of women who were "worn out," "not well enough to work," hysterical or even insane. One Pinkham ad was made up to look like a newspaper story, with stacks of headlines: A FEARFUL TRAGEDY/A Clergyman of Stratford, Conn.,/Killed by His Own Wife./Insanity Brought on by 16 Years/of Suffering With/Female Complaints/the Cause./Lydia E. Pinkham's/Vegetable Compound,.The Sure Cure for These Complaints/Would Have Prevented the Dire Deed. (Stage 146)
It is important to remember that advertising agents, not Lydia Pinkham herself, made up these ads. So while we may laud Pinkham on feminist grounds for wanting to save other women from unnecessary hysterectomies and Calomel, we have to remember that the people who made up the ads capitalized on social stereotypes, just as advertisers now do. The truth is, many Pinkham ads show incapacitated women. One woman reclines on a couch, her feather duster lying beside her. "I'm Simply all Worn Out," the copy reads. Another shows a woman peering in a mirror sadly, with an inset of Lydia looking on kindly. "How old I look, and not yet thirty!" the woman seems to say to herself. The copy promises, "The roses will return to your cheeks, sallow looks depart, spirits brighten" (Stage 147).
The copy in the longer ads is particularly telling, as is the fact that all of these ads seem
to be aimed at white women, particularly "society women" or women who hold jobs.[7] For example, one ad shows a woman who has apparently fainted. "Social Tragedy" reads the headline, and the copy tells of "Women Who Brave Death for Social Honors." It continues, "In the midst of one of the most brilliant social functions of the season, a noted society woman started suddenly from her chair with a scream of agony and fell insensible to the floor. A few hours later the distinguished physician told her anxious husband that she was suffering from an acute case of nervous prostration brought on by female trouble, and hinted at an operation. Fortunately, a friend advised her to try Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. The result was that she escaped the surgeon's knife and to-day is a well woman. The derangement of the delicate female organism sets every nerve in the body quivering with pain. Headaches, backaches, torturing bearing down pains and dragging sensations make women nervous
and hysterical" (Stage 148).
Another ad shows a fearful young woman telling her male boss, "I am not Well enough to Work." In this ad, the woman is shown head down, hands clasped, in an expression of submission. The male boss, who is not only larger and older but shown in the foreground, has his hand held out in front of her in a gesture that might be read as, "Stop!" The young woman's fear and the male boss's power are both obvious. The copy reads, "How often these significant words are spoken in our great mills, shops, and factories by the poor girl who has worked herself to the point where nature can endure no more and demands a rest! The poor sufferer, broken in health, must stand aside and make room for another. The foreman says, 'If you are not well enough to work you must leave, for we must put someone in your place.' (Stage 147).
Although these ads promise relief with a dose of Lydia Pinkham's medicine, they also convey a number of negative messages about women. Not only are women inclined to be sickly, and not only is it the "delicate female organism" that is the cause, but it is women who claim power--society women on one hand and working women on the other--who are likely to be plagued by "nervous prostration," "dragging sensations" or "some deranged condition of her organic system". Each of these ads suggests that the woman brought her illness onto herself, either by working too hard in the first place or for being a woman who would "brave death for social honors."
One ad even goes so far as to spell this out. "Who climbs too high, goes to fall," the headline reads. The copy continues: "This applies to women, regardless of caste or color. The ambitious girl striving for school honors; the shop girl, anxious, eager, worried, for she must keep her place; the society woman: all climb too high. What follows? Nervous prostration, excitability, fainting spells, most likely organic diseases of the uterus or womb, and many other distressing female troubles. Oh, women! If you must bring upon yourselves these troubles, remember that Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound has done more to relieve such suffering than any other remedy known" (Hechtlinger 77).
While the overt message in these ads is to buy a bottle of Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, the covert message is to stay at home. As noted earlier, Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville observed that nineteenth-century women were circumscribed "within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties" and forbidden "to step beyond it" (Stage 65). For all the good intentions of Lydia Pinkham herself, her advertising agents affirmed society's message. Independent women were pathologized--relegated to the realm of the "other" by being told they were sick. Moreover, they were told it was their own fault.
The stereotypical Indian, it seems, was as ubiquitous in patent medicine ads as Lydia Pinkham's face. Cedric Larson, writing in 1937, observed that, "No sooner had James Fenimore Cooper romanticized the Indian in the American imagination in his novels than patent-medicine manufacturers, quick to sense and take advantage of this new enthusiasm, used the red man as symbol and token for a variety of wares" (338). Similarly, James Harvey Young wrote in a 1961 history of patent medicines that, "From the 1820's onward the Indian strode nobly through the American patent-medicine wilderness"(Harvey, cited in Shaw 11). Jeffrey Steele, however, notes that the greatest number of ads featuring Native Americans appeared between 1870 and 1910, the years when warfare and legislation "effectively contained American Indian cultures on the margins of U.S. society" (Steele 109). The point here is that even as their lands were being taken and their children sent to boarding schools, their images and
identities were co-opted, thus assuring members of the dominant culture that "the only true Indian [was] a past one" (Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., cited in Steele 110). As Steele notes of Wild West shows, another form of popular culture that exploited Native Americans, using Indians in this way reassured the white audience that Indians were part of a vanished culture "that posed little threat to the hegemony of white civilization" (110).More examples noted by Larson include Dr. Freeman's Indian Specific, popular in the 1830s and 1840s, and Wright's Indian Vegetable Pills, "of which a million boxes were said to have been sold in 1848" (338). Adelaide Hechtlinger, in The Great Patent Medicine Era OR Without Benefit of Doctor, includes ads for "The Indian Doctor's Dispensatory" and for Kickapoo Indian Remedies, which features a drawing of an Indian wearing the stereotypical feathers atop his head (41-43).
One of the largest manufacturers of patent medicines marketed as "Indian" was the W.H. Comstock factory in upstate New York, makers of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills. The Comstock story is useful as an example of how geographically and culturally remote from Native American reality a company that used Indian images could be. Founded around 1833 by Edwin Comstock, a fifth-generation New Englander, the Comstock factory was later the subject of a number of lawsuits by Edwin Comstock's male descendants, who fought amongst themselves about who had the right to own the company. Early on, they made medicines for both humans and horses, including Carlton's Liniment (for piles), Carlton's Celebrated Nerve and Bone Liniment for Horses and Cattle, and Judson's Chemical Extract of Cherry and Lungwort. Later, the names grew more exotic and more promising; for example, they sold Dr. Larzetti's Juno Cordial or Procreative Elixir (Shaw 3-7).
Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills were the invention of Andrew B. Moore, whose business partner, Andrew J. White, became involved with the Comstock factory in 1855 (Shaw 9). What is notable about Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills is not only that were there no Indians involved, but there was never even a Dr. Morse. Over time an elaborate story of "Dr. Morse" and the pills' origins was fabricated, in which "Dr. Morse" was said to have traveled widely in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, spending "three years among the Indians of our Western country, where he discovered the secret of the Indian Root Pills" and bringing the pills home just in time to save his dying father. A copy of this story was inserted in every box of the pills. (Shaw 10-11). It is a telling fiction about "dear Christian people" surrounding the "good and pious gentleman" who only grew worse, despite prayers ascending "like sweet incense to the throne above" and "eight of the most celebrated doctors to attend to him both night and day." Salvation came, however, for suddenly "a rumbling noise was heard in the distance, like a mighty chariot winding its way near, when all at once a fine span of horses, before a beautiful coach, stood before the door.
..." It was Dr. Morse, "a noble and elegant-looking man." The story continues, The doctor, surprised to see his father so nearly gone, immediately went to
his coach, taking therefrom various plants and roots, which he had learned from
the Red Men of the forest as being good for all diseases, and gave them to his
father, and in about two hours afterwards he was much relieved...Two days
afterwards he was much better, and the third day he could walk about the room...
and now we behold him a strong, active man, and in the bloom of health, and at
the age of ninety-five able to ride in one day thirty-five miles, in order to spend
his birthday with this celebrated Doctor, his son (Shaw 11).
A number of ironies are notable about this story. The "dear Christian people" can't save their loved one, even with the help of "eight of the most celebrated doctors." That they can do so with the help of "Indian" medicine is ironic if we remember Mankiller's comment about the Christian missionaries "all anxious to save the savages" (Mankiller 80). That such civilized people need not only Indian help, but the secrets of the forest, is also ironic.
We can understand this story more deeply if we explore the literary symbols that it uses; this seems appropriate, for after all, this advertisement is a work of fiction. First, Dr. Morse is "a noble and elegant-looking man" who comes in a "mighty chariot" pulled by "a fine span of horses," preceded by a powerful "rumbling noise." Immediately, this seems reminiscent of Zeus arriving from Mt. Olympus, but perhaps the symbolism goes deeper. J.E. Cirlot, in his Dictionary of Symbols, writes that the chariot is "one of the basic analogies in the universal tradition of symbolism.... The charioteer represents the self of Jungian psychology; the chariot [represents] the human body and also [represents] thought in its transitory aspects relative to things terrestrial; the horses are the life-force" (43). Chariots often carry gods or other magical beings across land, sea or sky, he says. When a chariot bears a hero, "it becomes the emblem of the hero's body consumed in the service of th
e soul. The appearance, nature and colour of the ... animals... represent the qualities, good or bad, of the motives driving the chariot" (43-44). Moreover, forests are also common in mythology, Cirlot says. "Forest-symbolism is complex, but it is connected at all levels with the symbolism of the female principle or of the Great Mother. The forest is the place where vegetable life thrives and luxuriates, free from any control or cultivation....Since the female principle is identified with the unconscious in Man, it follows that the forest is also a symbol of the unconscious....in contrast with the city, the house and cultivated land, which are all safe areas, the forest harbours all kinds of dangers and demons, enemies and diseases" (112).
Applying Cirlot's interpretation of symbols to the ad for Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills, we see that the fictitious Dr. Morse, the son, is portrayed as a hero who has been carried by a chariot in the service of the soul--perhaps not his own soul, but the soul of his father, which might be read as the soul of patriarchy itself. He has come to the "safe area" of a house and cultivated land, from the forest--the unconscious, the place of the Great Mother, but also the place of "dangers and demons, enemies and disease." Because the forest, in this myth, is the place of the "Red Men," we might conclude that to the patriarchal mind, Indians are somehow connected to the unconscious and to feminine earth energy, the "Great Mother" of matriarchal mythologies. But the forest is also the place of danger and disease, and yet, ironically, here it is the place from which healing has been brought by the hero, the patriarch's son, on his magic chariot. Since the very people that patriarchal white culture subjugated--far away from the Comstock factory in New York--are represented as saviors, perhaps what the story tells us is that to heal, the dominant culture must look to its
own unconscious, and to those it oppresses. Unfortunately, doing so in what was fast becoming a consumer culture was as easy as buying a bottle of Dr. Morse's pills--an example of what Jackson Lears must have meant when he said that many products of this era, particularly patent medicines, seemed "to conjure up the magic of self-transformation through purchase" (cited in Steele 110).
Conclusion:
Obviously, there are some differences in the way that images of women and Native Americans were used to sell patent medicines in the late nineteenth century. Women, confined ideologically to the domestic sphere, were pathologized when they sought independence through such means as paid work. Native Americans, increasingly confined to remote areas, were valorized as heroes of the past. Given the differences, however, the similarities are all the more ironic. For even as the actual members of both groups were confined to a narrow social sphere by the dominant society, their fetishized images were given vast amounts of space in the burgeoning consumer culture. Moreover, those fetishized images portrayed them as highly romanticized "others" in advertisements for elixirs intended as a more "natural" alternative to the "mainstream" medicine of the day. In the case of women and Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, the early efforts of a feminist truly interested in providing an alternati
ve for women were co-opted by advertising agencies which affirmed women's subjugation even while offering a supposed cure. To do so, they fetishized Lydia Pinkham as a way to hide women's increasing social subjugation, making it seem as though the kindly Lydia could cure women's "natural" weakness. And even as Native Americans were sent into what Hall refers to as "symbolic exile" (as well as real exile), they were reinvented in the white imagination and fetishized as saviors. Both groups were "put on a pedestal," as the cliche goes, to mask their increased debasement. Thus, the treatment of both women and Native Americans in patent medicine advertising offers an illustration of Barbara A. Babcock's comment in her book The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversions in Art and Society (cited in Hall 237): "What is socially peripheral is often symbolically centred."
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short2.html
Nervous Women and Noble Savages:
The Romanticized Other in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Patent Medicine Advertising
Jane Marcellus
University of Oregon
Abstract
This paper compares images of women and Native Americans in
nineteenth-century patent medicine advertising. Combining historical research
and textual analysis, I explore the context in which these ads flourished. I argue
that these two groups were exoticized and romanticized in ways that were similar
to each other but different from other groups--not surprising since their lives became
increasingly restricted during the course of the nineteenth century.
Nervous Women and Noble Savages:
The Romanticized Other in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Patent Medicine Advertising
Jane Marcellus
School of Journalism and Communication
University of Oregon
1275 University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403-1275
Phone: (541)346-2151 (office)
(541)334-1753 (home)
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
[1] In 1830, the United States had 650 weekly papers and 65 dailies, with an average circulation for the dailies of 1,200, acccording to Michael Schudson in Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. The total circulation was about 78,000. A decade later, there were 1,141 weeklies and 138 dailies. The circulation for the dailies averaged 2,200, making the estimated total daily circulation about 300,000 (13). While earlier papers had sold for six cents, making them too expensive for many people, these new papers relied on advertising revenue and were hawked in the streets for a penny. This "commercial revolution" (17) meant a fundamental change: "Until the 1830s, a newspaper provided a service to political parties and men of commerce; with the penny press a newspaper sold a product to a general readership and sold the readership to the owners" (25).
[2] Michel Foucault wrote of the increasing "hygienist interpretation of political and medical questions" of physicians in the eighteenth century: "Medicine, as a general technique of health even more than as a service to the sick or an art of cures, assumes an increasingly important place in the administrative system and machinery of power.... The doctor wins a footing within the instances of social power.... A 'medico-administrative' knowledge begins to develop concerning society, its health and sickness, its conditions of life, housing and habits, which serves as the basic core for the 'social economy' and sociology of the nineteenth century" (Foucault 176).
[3] The connection between supposed "hysteria" and the female reproductive system can be more deeply understood by looking at the etymological connections between "hysteria" and "hysterectomy." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both are rooted in the Greek word for womb, which is translated "hyster." The OED definition for "hysteria" notes that "Women being much more liable than men to this disorder, it was originally thought to be due to a disturbance of the uterus and its functions." The earliest use listed for "hysteria" comes from a British medical journal published in 1801, which noted it as a chronic disease of East London (a laregely poor section of the city). The 1881 Encyclopedia Britannica defined "hystero-epilepsy" as "a nervous disease of women." The word "hysterectomy" was coined by doctors in the 1880s. (OED).
[4] Her tribe is not noted in the article.
[5] The best source is Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979). Other sources on Lydia Pinkham's life include Bob Edwards and Jennifer Schmidt, "Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound" National Public Radio Morning Edition, Feb. 20, 2001; Donald Dale Jackson, "If Women Needed a Quick Pick-Me-Up, Lydia Provided One" Smithsonian 15 (July 1984) 107-119; Jean Burton, Lydia Pinkham is Her Name (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Company, 1949); Robert Collyer Washburn, The Life and Times of Lydia Pinkham (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1931);
[6] The recipe for 100 pints called for eight ounces unicorn root (Aletris farinosa), six ounces life root (Senecio aureus), six ounces black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa), six ounces pleurisy root (Asclepias tuberosa), twelve ounces fenugreek seed (Foenum graceum), suspended in alcohol (Stage 90).
[7] The number of employed women was steadily increasing during the late nineteenth century. According to Gordon, 1,900,000 women were employed in 1870. By 1890 that number had increased to 4,000,000. Gordon's source for these statistics is Alba M. Edwards, Comparative Occupational Statistics for the U.S. 1870-1940 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1943), Table 21.