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She was born on February 9, 1819 in Lynn, Massachussets, United States, of English colonial stock, the tenth of the twelve children of William Estes, a shoemaker, by his second wife, Rebecca Chase. She spent her entire life, except for a few years of childhood, in her native town.
She completed the course in the academy of Massachussets.
After studies she became a school teacher.
The business that made her famous and her heirs rich was not started until eight years before her death. In the financial smash of 1873 her husband, whose principal occupation was speculating in real estate, lost his money, health, and spirits together, and by 1875 the family, which had never been really prosperous, was reduced to actual want. In their need Lydia bethought her of an herb medicine that she had been concocting off and on for about ten years and that was beginning to have a local reputation as a sovereign remedy for "woman's weakness" and allied disorders. With neighborly kindness she had given the nostrum to whoever asked for it, even to a perfect stranger who had driven all the way from Salem to obtain a bottle of it.
As Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound it made its commercial début in Lynn in 1875. The meager profits, after the family had been fed, were turned back into the business, and while Mrs. Pinkham labored over the kitchen stove her sons distributed handbills from door to door and endeavored to sell the mixture to druggists in Salem, Boston, and Providence.
Her son Daniel carried the campaign to Brooklyn and New York, he was the first, also, to discover that the compound might be recommended impartially for the kidneys of both sexes.
In 1876 a label was registered at the Patent Office, and sometime later a column advertisement in the Boston Herald gave the sales their first big impetus. Thereafter the Pinkhams bought newspaper space in larger and larger quantities until in 1898 the compound was the most widely advertised merchandise in the country. Besides supervising its manufacture, Mrs. Pinkham wrote the advertisements and answered faithfully a voluminous fan mail. In 1879 she authorized the use of her portrait as part of the propaganda.
In 1881 the two younger sons, Daniel and William, died of tuberculosis, which had been aggravated by overwork and the privations of their years of poverty. Shortly before her own death, which occurred within two years, the business was incorporated.
She died in 1883, aged 64.
Lydia Pinkham was a popular inventor of herbal-alcoholic "women's tonic" meant to relieve menstrual and menopausal pains. Her Vegetable Compound became one of the best known patent medicines of the 19th century. She sucessfully dealt with advertising of it: her own face was on the label, and her company was particularly keen on the use of testimonials from grateful women. Lydia's daughter Aroline Pinkham Chase Gove founded the Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic in Salem, Massachusetts in the honour of her mother.
Like most reformers she was too magnanimous to specialize: Sweden-borgianism, phrenology, temperance, Grahamism, woman's rights, and other causes enjoyed her warm approval, and in later years she embraced spiritualism and fiat money.
She was a member from its beginning of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn, was made secretary of the Freeman's Society.
On September 8, 1843, she married a young widower, Isaac Pinkham, and for the next thirty years she was a wife and mother and not much else. She had four sons and a daughter, the second son dying in infancy.
