Barnes-Brus’ research featured on Radcliffe site

Research by Tori Barnes-Brus ’97, associate professor of sociology, on the advertising used by the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company was featured by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study earlier this month.

Barnes-Brus researched the company and the way it portrayed women in its advertisements during her sabbatical. In the post on Radcliffe’s site, she wrote:

Advertising was at the core of the [company’s] success from its inception. Recognizing that the Vegetable Compound needed to stand out in a sea of other tonics, the company made history as the first to use a woman’s likeness in advertising when they began using a comely, grandmotherly picture of Lydia E. Pinkham on its packaging and in its ads. In addition to using Lydia’s picture in newspapers across the country, advertisements articulated “women’s weaknesses,” offered testimonials about the relief of symptoms, and claimed to restore women’s pep so that they might be better wives, mothers, and workers.

Her research, “‘Saviour of Her Sex’: Lydia E. Pinkham Patent Medicine Company and the Construction of Female Health,” was supported by a Schlesinger Research Support Grant from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She will be a Faculty Fellow for the ACM Newberry Seminar in the Humanities, “Novel Action: Literature, Society, and the Public Good” in the fall of 2016.