Five trailblazing female businesswomen from history

I promised that I would write this week about the lives of some trailblazing female businesswomen from history, most of whose achievements were overlooked compared with their male counterparts.

It’s a small attempt on my part to redress that glaring injustice - and the imbalance of Tycoons, our book of original obituaries of 50 pioneers of business, which, so far at least, contains only one woman. So here are five awe-inspiring females who made significant contributions to the world of business and who demonstrate conclusively that entrepreneurship has no gender.

Lydia Pinkham (1819-1883)

Dubbed the 19th-century Ann Landers or Dr Ruth, Pinkham converted her herbal home remedies into a hugely successful business. She invented a herbal-alcoholic "women's tonic" for menstrual and menopausal problems, and aggressively marketed her products to women and educated them about health issues.

Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, a mix of ingredients such as black cohosh, life root, unicorn root, pleurisy root and fenugreek seeds mixed in alcohol, became one of the world’s best-known medicines, and Pinkham was deemed a crusader for women's health in an age when their needs were largely ignored by the medical profession.

With her advertising featuring her photograph, Pinkham became famous and she received - and answered, with the help of staff - 100,000 letters a year from women who believed that the compound relieved their symptoms. One newspaper said Pinkham was known to “every man, woman and child in the United States as well as Washington, Lincoln and Grant”.

During Prohibition, the medicine had a particular appeal as a readily available 40-proof alcoholic drink, and became the subject of a bawdy drinking song, "The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham". A version of the song was the unofficial regimental song of the Royal Tank Corps during World War II, and a sanitised version became a 1968 number one hit in the UK by The Scaffold, with the memorable refrain:

“We'll drink a drink a drink

To Lily the Pink the Pink the Pink

The saviour of the human race

For she invented medicinal compound

Most efficacious in every case.”

The Pinkham firm continued to flourish after her death and was bought by Cooper Laboratories in 1968 for more than $1 million (about $7.5 million in today’s money), and the compound is still on sale today in a modified, tablet form.

Olive Ann Beech (1903-1993)

Beech, nicknamed the “First Lady of Aviation”, began work in 1924 as a secretary at an aircraft company run by three men, Walter Beech, Lloyd Stearman and Clyde Cessna, who would go on to found the Beech, Boeing and Cessna aircraft manufacturing businesses. She married Walter, and they co-founded the Beech Aircraft Corporation in Wichita, Kansas, at the height of the Depression in 1932. He knew airplanes, she knew finance. Together, the Beeches grew the business from 10 employees to 10,000. Two hundred and seventy of their Beech Model 17 Staggerwings were manufactured for the US Army during World War II. After Walter died from a heart attack in 1950, Beech became president and CEO.

During nearly 20 years in charge, she transformed the company into a multimillion-dollar aerospace corporation. She retired in 1968 but continued to serve on the board of directors until 1982. In 1980, Raytheon Corp purchased Beech Aircraft for $800 million. Beech always bristled at the notion of being singled out as a woman in a male-dominated industry, saying that gender had little to do with the work in hand. “I understood the job,” she said. Despite running an aviation business for decades, however, she never learned to fly.

Bridget “Biddy” Mason (1818-1891)

Born into slavery in Georgia, Biddy Mason eventually become a successful property developer and philanthopist. But it was a long and arduous journey. At the age of 32, she was forced by her owner to trek 1,700 miles behind 300 wagons to California, where he wanted to try his luck in the goldfields. With the state having outlawed slavery a year before their arrival, Mason went to court to successfully sue for freedom for herself and her three daughters.

She found work in Los Angeles as a nurse and midwife at $2.50 a day, delivering hundreds of babies during her career. With her knowledge of herbal remedies, she risked her life to care for those affected by a smallpox epidemic. Living frugally, a decade later she had enough to buy two parcels of land for $250 in what is now the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Due to a real estate boom, it was worth $200,000 a few years later, the equivalent of $3m today. She continued to buy and sell property, increasing her wealth.

But Mason never forgot what it was like to be poor and she made significant charitable  contributions. People in need often lined up outside her home to ask for assistance, and she responded generously. She provided food for the hungry and shelter for the homeless, and visited prisoners. She was instrumental in founding a traveller's aid centre, and a school and day-care centre for black children. Along with her son-in-law, Mason also established the city’s first African-American church. Because of her kind and giving spirit, many called her "Auntie Mason" or "Grandma Mason".

Eliza Lucas (1722-1793)

Lucas was born in Antigua but went to finishing school in London, where she developed a passion for botany. Her family moved to South Carolina when she was a child, and her mother died soon after. When she was 16, her father went back to the West Indies, and she took over the management of the family’s three plantations.

In 1739, Lucas began making high-quality blue indigo dye that was in great demand in England. She persuaded other planters to follow suit and created a new industry. Within two years, indigo ranked second only to rice as South Carolina’s leading export crop. Lucas also began producing flax, hemp, silk and figs. After her death in Philadelphia in 1793, George Washington was a pallbearer at her funeral. In 1989, she became the first woman to be inducted into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame.

Rebecca Lukens (1794-1854)

In 1825, Lukens had just lost her husband, was pregnant with her sixth child and was deep in debt, when she took over her late father’s struggling business, Brandywine Iron & Nail. It was close to bankruptcy, but, motivated by her Quaker faith, perseverance and courage, Lukens overcame the adversity. Under her leadership, the business not only got back on track, it boomed. Her first task was to complete the manufacture and delivery of plates for the Codorus, the first iron-hulled steamship in the United States. Its success established Brandywine’s reputation for producing high quality, specialty iron plates. Over the next 22 years, she established the company as the country’s premium supplier of iron. In the 1830s, during a transportation revolution, the mill was a leader in the production of boiler plates for steamboats and railroads.

In her diary, found some 150 years after her death, she revealed how difficult those early days after her husband’s death were. She wrote: “With some fear, but more courage, I began to struggle for a livelihood. I think at this period I must have possessed some energy of character, for now I look back and wonder at my daring. I had such strong, such powerful incentives for exertion that I felt I must succeed. I will not dwell on my feelings, when I begin to look around me, but necessity is a stern taskmistress [and] my every want gave me courage."

As her health declined, Lukens withdrew from running the business in 1847. By the end of her life, she’d accumulated more than $100,000 in personal property, a far cry from the $15,000 of debt she’d started with.

More than 30 years after her death, Brandywine Iron & Nail became the publicly traded Lukens Iron & Steel. The company, which continued to be run by her descendants, remained listed on the New York Stock Exchange until 1998, when it was purchased by Bethlehem Steel for $490 million. In 1994, on the 200th anniversary of Lukens' birth, Fortune posthumously crowned her “America’s first female CEO of an industrial company” and inducted her into the National Business Hall of Fame, while the Pennsylvania Legislature and City of Coatesville declared her "America’s first woman industrialist".

You can read about the life of Madame C.J. Walker (1867–1919), another legendary female businesswoman, in Tycoons, our book that contains the original obituaries of well-known pioneers of business - you can buy a copy here in paperback for £8.99 or £4.99 as an ebook. Warning: it also contains quite a few men.