² Kearney, Richard, On Stories (New York, 2002), 129Google Scholar.

³ New York Times, June 30, 1889, 12. Ayer's history fits within the larger history of American women in business. While unusual, she was not alone nor a pioneer. For historiographical context, Drachman, Virginia G., Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar; and the special issue “Gender and Business History,” Business History Review 72 (Summer 1998): 185–249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ “Extract from Shirley Dare's Article in the New York Herald, June 15, 1890,” Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, Sept. 1890, 429–30Google Scholar.

⁵ New York Times, May 29, 1887; Printer's Ink, Jan. 6, 1892, 21. For context, Laird, Pamela Walker, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁶ The $40,000 amount is from the New York Herald, July 2, 1889. The $200,000 is from her obituary in the Oregonian (Portland), Nov. 26, 1903. The New York Times, Feb. 28, 1893, reported that she earned a salary of $12,000 a year in 1887 and 1888. According to the Consumer Price Index calculator at http://www.measuringwealth.com, in 2009 terms Ayer's monthly salary equaled $23,000, and the estimate of her yearly withdrawal equaled $1.2 million.

⁷ Hammack, David C., Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1982), 46Google Scholar. Greater New York had 30 percent of all the millionaires in the United States in 1892, while another 12 percent lived upstate, in Connecticut, and in New Jersey.

⁸ Most scholars of nineteenth-century America have concentrated on the concept of character, by which they mean moral character or internal character, rather than respectability. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York, 1997)Google Scholar. Salazar, James B., Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1, 9, writes that character “was perhaps the most coveted object of nineteenth-century American culture” and “was the most gilded of objects in a mesmerizingly Gilded Age.” I have chosen respectability rather than character to emphasize that Ayer was engaged in the performance of respectability, which was an aesthetic creativity that connects her life as a Chicago socialite to her New York business career and the court cases in which she was involved. Nineteenth-century discussions of respectability were often about what was not respectable rather than what was, except in the case of the law, where identification of a person as respectable or having character was equated with credibility and honesty.

⁹ Sandage, Scott, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA, 2006)Google Scholar; Sandage examined a different social class and focused on men, but thinking about how custom and practice placed restrictions on women's ability to pursue corporate business makes this an interesting idea for further study. Also Hilkey, Judy, Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar; and Balleisen, Edward J., Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ On the larger context of New York society and business in the period, Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Domosh, Mona, “Shaping the Commercial City: Retail Districts in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (June 1990), 268–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Domosh, , “Those ‘Gorgeous Incongruities’: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (June 1998), 209–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Homberger, Eric, Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven, 2002)Google Scholar; Jaher, Frederic Cople, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Edward Berenson writes that microhistories such as this allow historians to tease out those “vital meanings [which] tend to escape other methods of enquiry.” Such accounts, Jill Lepore remarks, serve “as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.” Berenson, Edward, “The Politics of Divorce in France of the Belle Epoque: The Case of Joseph and Henriette Caillaux,” American Historical Review 93 (Feb. 1988): 31–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 31; Lepore, Jill, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001): 129–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 133.

¹² Harriet Hubbard Ayer (hereafter HHA) to Margaret Ayer, May 18, 1890, fl. 56, box 1, Blanche Willis Howard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, ME (hereafter “Howard Papers, Bowdoin”). Ayer, Margaret Hubbard and Taves, Isabella, The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer (Philadelphia, 1957)Google Scholar.

¹³ Barrett, Walter and Scoville, Joseph Alfred, Old Merchants of New York (New York, 1940), 353–54Google Scholar; Reid, Robert W., Washington Lodge, No. 21, F. & A.M., and Some of Its Members (New York, 1911)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ First quotation: Lindner, Usher F. and Gillespie, Joseph, Reminiscences of the Early Bench and Bar of Illinois (Chicago, 1879), 260–62Google Scholar. Second quotation: Miller, Amos, “Lawyers of Montgomery County, Illinois,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 11 (Oct. 1918)Google Scholar: 382. Bateman, Newton et al. , eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Christian County (Chicago, 1918), 1:489Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Quoted in Palmer, John McAuley, ed., The Bench and Bar of Illinois (Chicago, 1890), 1:24Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Henry George Hubbard, son of Ahira Hubbard and Serena Tucker Hubbard, first came to Illinois from Massachusetts in the late 1820s. Mary Ann Hubbard, “Family Memories,” privately printed, 1912. Gurdon S. Hubbard first came to Illinois as a “voyageur” for the American Fur Company in the 1810s. He settled in Chicago in 1834, eventually opening the city's first meat-packing plant, called “Hubbard's Folly.”

¹⁷ Ayer's New York Times obituary, Nov. 26, 1903, gives her birth year as 1853. Bernard A. Weisberger states that “according to the most acceptable evidence,” Ayer was born in 1849; Weisberger, Bernard A., “Ayer, Harriet Hubbard” in Notable American Women, eds. James, Edward T., James, Janet Wilson, and Boyer, Paul S. (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 1:72–74Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 15–20.

¹⁹ Laird, Pamela Walker, Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, MA: 2006)Google Scholar, 2, defines social capital as “all those social assets that enable one to attract respect, generate confidence, evoke affection, and draw on loyalty in a specific setting.”

²⁰ Hattie, or Harriet Taylor Ayer, was born in August 1867, and Gertrude was born in October 1870. I thank Annette Blaugrund for providing Gertrude's birth date.

²¹ New York Times, Jan. 14, 1899.

²² Chicago Tribune, Jan. 13, 1899 and July 11, 1909. Contradicting this fantastical tale is an equally bizarre Chicago Tribune report that Herbert Copeland Ayer had been “found in the Confederate Army by his father, who thought he expired in infancy.” Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1887, reprint of an article from the New Orleans Democrat.

²³ New York Times, May 3, 1877; Chicago Tribune, May 1, 3, 1877.

²⁴ DeWitt, E. L., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1880), 35:11–17Google Scholar. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 18, 19, 21, 1883; Mar. 7, 1883; and Nov. 24, 1883.

²⁵ Chicago Tribune, Feb. 18, 1883, Nov. 24, 26, 1883. Other news reports claimed that Ayer, Herbert “failed for over $2,000,000.” Oregonian (Portland), Nov. 26, 1903Google Scholar.

²⁶ Kirkland, Caroline, Chicago Yesterdays, A Sheaf of Reminiscences (Chicago, 1919), 262–63Google Scholar.

²⁷ Chicago Tribune, Apr. 23, 1882.

²⁸ Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 48, 66, 90, 97.

²⁹ Meilhac, Henri and Halévy, Ludovic, The Widow: A Comedy in Three Acts (New York, 1877)Google Scholar.

³⁰ May was married to Alexander M. Wetherill, and Juliette, called Jule, was married to John Lockwood.

³¹ Grubb inherited the presidency of the Lebanon Valley Furnace Company and part-ownership of the Cornwall Mines. Prominent in Pennsylvania Republican politics, Grubb was married to Elizabeth Wadsworth Van Rensselaer from 1868 until her death in 1886.

³² According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1880, Herbert C. Ayer bought land on Dearborn Avenue from the Catholic bishop for $30,000. The New York Times, Feb. 17, 1883, reported that Ayer sold his house and lot to B. H. Campbell for $50,000.

³³ Chicago Tribune, Feb. 18, 1886. This article states that Chicago friends gave him $100,000. Also Chicago Tribune, May 21, Dec. 19, 1886.

³⁴ New York Times, Feb. 28, 1893; Brooklyn Eagle, Oct. 10, 1891.

³⁵ New York Herald, Aug. 25, 1893; Chicago Inter Ocean, Jan. 1, 1895; Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 117.

³⁶ Chicago Tribune, Oct. 14, 22, 1883. The San Francisco Call of January 1, 1896 included an interview in which Ayer claimed that she had represented Sypher in Chicago before moving to New York for a permanent position with the firm.

³⁷ The Curio, Dec. 1887, 192.

³⁸ Sypher & Company was founded in 1865 by D. Morley, who sold it to Obadiah Sypher, an employee, and H.R. Treadwell. It was located at 593 Broadway until 1878 and then at 739 Broadway for six years, when it moved to 860 Broadway. When Ayer worked there, the company was across the street from Tiffany and near Lord & Taylor and W. & J. Sloane. New York Times, Mar. 1, 1998.

³⁹ Chicago Tribune, Oct. 14, 1883; Chicago Inter Ocean Apr. 12, 1896.

⁴⁰ The Critic, Mar. 13, 1886, 137. Whether these women worked for her in New York or elsewhere is not clear. The Critic, Aug. 15, 1885, 78, indicates they were employed by her in New York.

⁴¹ The Critic, Mar. 13, 1886, 137.

⁴² Chicago Inter Ocean, Apr. 12, 1896.

⁴³ Macon (GA) Weekly Telegraph, Sept. 28, 1886; Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 163.

⁴⁴ King, Moses, ed., King's Handbook of New York City, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1893), 696Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Macon (GA) Weekly Telegraph, Sept. 28, 1886.

⁴⁶ On the Lockes, Currey, J. Seymour, Chicago: Its History and Its Builders, a Century of Marvelous Growth (Chicago, 1912), 160–66Google Scholar. Clinton Locke's obituary is in the New York Times, Feb. 14, 1904.

⁴⁷ Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 118.

⁴⁸ Fanny Cottinet Locke eventually married John MacKenzie, a mining engineer, who died in 1905. She then married Frederic Hatton, drama editor for the Chicago Post. Together they wrote plays and published Years of Discretion (New York, 1913).

⁴⁹ On Howard, Gustafson, Melanie S., “Blanche Willis Howard (1874–1898),” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 27:1 (2010): 160–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Howard, Blanche Willis, One Summer (Boston, 1875)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ It is unclear how much Blanche Willis Howard charged Adele Locke in the late 1870s, but by the early 1880s Howard was telling parents that between $1,000 and $1,800 “would cover all expenses.” BWH (?) to unknown correspondent, no date, fl. 32, box 1, Blanche Willis Howard Papers, Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England, Portland, ME (hereafter MWWC).

⁵¹ According to Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 164, 263, Howard charged Ayer $485 and $333 for two months of Margaret's care in early 1887. Margaret Ayer estimated that Howard took in $23,000 for her care alone.

⁵² Scribner's Magazine, June 1887, 27. I am fairly certain that Ayer wrote most, if not all, of the Recamier advertisements.

⁵³ Vita Nuova is the title of Dante Alighieri's 1295 book of courtly love.

⁵⁴ In this ad, Ayer spelled Lillie Langtry's name “Lily Langtry.” The spelling comes from her nickname, the Jersey Lily. In other ads, her name was spelled correctly.

⁵⁵ Ayer wrote in a May 8, 1887 New York Times ad: “Mrs. Ayer has been the recipient of many testimonials … it would be improper for her to publish those from society women, but the leading artists of the lyric and dramatic stage have, without exception, adopted the Recamier Preparations.”

⁵⁶ New York Times, July 9, 1887, Oct. 10, 1889. Stillman was professor of industrial chemistry at Stevens Institute, where he had received his PhD. New York Times, June 15, 1883.

⁵⁷ New York Herald, July 2, 1889. In 1912, Stillman endorsed the Bauer Chemical Company's “Sanatogen, the Food Tonic.” New York Times, July 5, 1912.

⁵⁸ Schweitzer, Marlis, “Uplifting Makeup: Actresses' Testimonials and the Cosmetics Industry, 1910–1918,” Business and Economic History On-Line 1 (2003)Google Scholar; Schweitzer, , “‘The Mad Search for Beauty’: Actresses' Testimonials, the Cosmetics Industry, and the Democratization of Beauty,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (July 2005): 256–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moskowitz, Marina and Schweitzer, Marlis, eds., Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; and Pinkus, Rosa Lynn, “From Lydia Pinkham to Bob Dole: What the Changing Face of Direct-to-Consumer Drug Advertising Reveals about the Professionalism of Medicine,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12 (June 2002): 141–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ The declaration that the cream and other products were not a cosmetic appeared in many ads, for example, New York Times, June 26, Nov. 15, Dec. 18, 1887, and Jan. 1, 1888. Also Chicago Inter Ocean, Mar. 31, 1889, where Lillie Langtry writes: “While they are in no sense of the word cosmetics, of which I have a wholesome horror, they do away with the need of such meretricious articles and excel any preparations for the complexion I have ever seen” (emphasis original).

⁶⁰ Chicago Inter Ocean, Oct. 30, 1887.

⁶¹ On women and letter writing, Favret, Mary A., “The Letters of Frankenstein,” Genre 20 (Spring 1987): 3–24Google Scholar; Favret, , Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Russell, Penny, “Wife Stories: Narrating Marriage and Self in the Life of Jane Franklin,” Victorian Studies 48 (Autumn 2005): 35–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² The New York Times, Oct. 13, 1889, ran an ad/letter from Ayer about “the Gorgeous Programmes for the Kendal's First Performance in America.” “‘The outside covers were of heavy yellow satin,’ said the first-nighter, ‘and must have cost a pretty penny. On one side … the cast of characters was printed, and the other was entirely given up to a most artistic showing of the merits of Harriet Hubbard Ayer's world-famous Recamier Preparations. A letter of Adelina Patti Nicolini, with her letter indorsing the Recamier Preparations, above all others, occupied the centre.’” McAneny, Marguerite, “Decorum and Delight, on Both Sides of the Footlights as Seen in the William Seymour Theatre Collection of the Princeton University Library,” Princeton Library Chronicle 27 (Fall 1966): 168Google Scholar.

⁶³ In the 1880s and 1890s, notes Kathy Peiss, interest in women celebrities, electric lights, the increasing availability of photographs, and the growing cosmetics industry contributed to a “fundamental and far-reaching change … the heightened importance of image making and performance in everyday life.” Peiss adds that “women's growing interest in beauty products coincided with their new sense of identity as consumers.” Peiss, Kathy, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York, 1998), 49–50Google Scholar. Also, Berlanstein, Lenard R., “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture: Famous Women in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Women's History 16 (Winter 2004): 65–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and de Leon, Charles L. Ponce, Self-Exposure: Human Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, 2002Google Scholar).

⁶⁴ Schweitzer, “Uplifting Makeup,” 4.

⁶⁵ Susman, Warren I., Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Heinze, Andrew R., “Schizophrenia Americana: Aliens, Alienists, and the ‘Personality Shift’ of Twentieth-Century Culture,” American Quarterly 55 (June 2003): 227–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Ayer composed many of these ads to appear as interviews or news articles.

⁶⁷ Other businesswomen used their names and images to market their products. The Sutherland Sisters used images of their seven-foot-long hair to market their “hair fertilizer.” Martha Matilda Harper put her name on her hair product and franchises. Plitt, Jane R., Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream: How One Woman Changed the Face of Modern Business (Syracuse, NY, 2000)Google Scholar. Other examples include Lydia Pinkham and Madam C. J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove); Stage, Sarah, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; and Bundles, A'Lelia, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Darby, David, “Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology,” Poetics Today 22 (Winter 2001): 829–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ New York Times, Sept. 5, 1886.

⁷⁰ Brooklyn Eagle, May 29, 1887.

⁷¹ Campbell, Colin, “Consuming Goods and the Good of Consuming,” in Consumer Society in American History, ed. Glickman, Lawrence B. (Ithaca, 1999), 19–32Google Scholar; Stearns, Peter, “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization,” Journal of Modern History 69 (March 1997): 102–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷² Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Davy Crockett as Trickster” in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 101Google Scholar.

⁷³ Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, 1974), 14Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ On single life for nineteenth-century women, Berend, Zsuzsa, “‘The Best or None!’: Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century New England,” Journal of Social History 33 (Summer 2000): 935–57CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁷⁵ Michael Schudson writes that people “want to consume more and better things, but not endlessly, not insatiably. They seek not social superiority, as a rule, but social membership” (emphasis original). Schudson, Michael, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York, 1984): 129–46Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ New York Times, June 12, 1887, also July 3, 1887. For background, Kwolek-Folland, Angel, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar. Susan Yohn makes a similar point about reputation when discussing Ayer's court case. Yohn, Susan M., “Crippled Capitalists: The Inscription of Economic Dependence and the Challenge of Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century America,” Feminist Economics 12 (Jan. 2006): 85–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yohn, , “‘Men Seem to Take Delight in Cheating Women’: Legal Challenges Faced by Business Women in the United States, 1880–1920” in Women and Their Money, 1700–1950, ed. Laurence, Anne et al. (New York, 2009), 226–42Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ New York Times, May 8, 1887.

⁷⁸ Ibid., Dec. 4, 1887.

⁷⁹ Ibid.

⁸⁰ Ibid., Sept. 5, 1886; Brooklyn Eagle, May 29, 1887.

⁸¹ New York Times, July 24, 1887.

⁸² Hoganson, Kristin L., Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁸³ For example, Alger, William Rounseville, The Friendship of Women (Boston, 1867)Google Scholar. Recamier's life also appeared in other texts, such as Holloway, Laura C., The Hearthstone; or, Life at Home, a Household Manual (Chicago, 1886)Google Scholar, which mentions Recamier's face-cleaning routine in the section on “The Toilet.”

⁸⁴ Luyster, Isaphene M., trans. and ed., Memoirs and Correspondence of Madame Recamier (Boston, 1867)Google Scholar, xiv; Luyster, “Madame Recamier,” Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1864, 446–70. Also Stewart, Mary Lynn, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s–1930s (Baltimore, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ New York Times, Jan. 8, 1882; Brooklyn Eagle, Sept. 9, 1877.

⁸⁶ New York Times, Oct. 13, Nov. 14, 1886. Ayer may also have had private reasons. Juliette was the name of Harriet's sister and mother; her mother spelled it with one “t.” In addition, Ayer may have identified with Recamier's story: both married young and grew up in a country shattered by war. Recamier was an influential hostess whose salon attracted important people in the arts, as did Harriet's in Chicago. Recamier faced financial troubles when her husband's business was ruined, fell in love with another man despite still being married, went into exile, and faced more financial difficulties. But the Frenchwoman had always bounced back, a tenacity with which Harriet Ayer identified.

⁸⁷ New York Times, June 12, 1887.

⁸⁸ Ibid., Dec. 4, 1887.

⁸⁹ With her patent medicine, Ayer entered a very competitive business field. By the 1870s, one quarter of all advertising was for proprietary drugs. By the turn of the century there were about 28,000 patent medicines (nostrums) on the market. Williams, Simon J. et al. , Pharmaceuticals and Society: Critical Discourses and Debates (Malden, MA, 2009)Google Scholar. Established rivals included James C. Ayer, who was no relation, but whose name may have helped market her patent medicine, and Lydia Pinkham, whose sons placed her likeness on their Vegetable Compound. Hower, Ralph M., The History of an Advertising Agency (Cambridge, MA, 1939)Google Scholar; and Stage, Female Complaints.

⁹⁰ New York Times, June 12, 1887, also May 22, 24, July 3, 1887.

⁹¹ Ibid., Dec. 11, 1887. Another ad claimed that “about 200 people a day went to 27 Union Square to get a dose of Vita Nuova.” New York Times, Dec. 18, 1887. Ayer's sales strategy included giving away free samples of her products. Ayer also introduced “Recamier Sarsaparilla.” New York Times, Mar. 31, Apr. 7, 1889. In the first advertisement, she provided a testimonial from Texas governor Webster Flanagan.

⁹² Brooklyn Eagle, May 24, 1887.

⁹³ New York Times, July 3, 1887.

⁹⁴ Ibid., May 22, 1887.

⁹⁵ Brooklyn Eagle, May 22, 1887.

⁹⁶ New York Times, June 19, 1887.

⁹⁷ Brooklyn Eagle, May 22, 1887.

⁹⁸ New York Times, June 19, 1887.

⁹⁹ Brooklyn Eagle, Nov. 20, 1887.

¹⁰⁰ This number comes from the entry on Ayer in Willard, Frances E. and Livermore, Mary A., eds., A Woman of the Century (Buffalo, 1893), 39–40Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Nineteenth Annual Report of the Trade and Commerce of Chicago for the Year Ending December 31, 1876 (Chicago, 1877)Google Scholar. For more on Seymour, Yohn, “‘Men Seem to Take Delight in Cheating Women,’” 228–32.

¹⁰² New York Times, Dec. 11, 1886. This James M. Seymour is not to be confused with James Madison Seymour, who served as mayor of Newark, 1896–1901.

¹⁰³ On women and credit, see Olegario, Rowena, A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gamber, Wendy, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930 (Urbana, 1997)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 127.

¹⁰⁵ New York Times, Dec. 11, 1886; Outing, Oct. 1884, 316.

¹⁰⁶ New York Times, Nov. 2, 1884, Sept. 25, 1885; Dec. 10, 11, 15, 17, 18, 23, 1886; and Apr. 18, 1889. Three years later, Seymour sold the yacht to Joel B. Wolfe for $5.

¹⁰⁷ Smith, Duane A., “The Vulture Mine: Arizona's Golden Mirage,” Journal of the Southwest 14 (Autumn 1972): 231–52Google Scholar. Also Farish, Thomas Edwin, History of Arizona (Phoenix, 1915), 2:214Google Scholar. According to the Engineering and Mining Journal, Jan. 31, 1885, Seymour was also president of the Comet Mining Company, whose worth it valued at $22,000,000.

¹⁰⁸ Lingenfelter, Richard E., Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion (Berkeley, 1986), 158–59Google Scholar. New York Times, Jan. 15, Feb. 4, 1882, and Sept. 6, 1889.

¹⁰⁹ Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1889.

¹¹⁰ Lingenfelter, Death Valley, 158–59; New York Times, Jan. 15, Feb. 4, 1882.

¹¹¹ New York Times Sept. 6, 1889.

¹¹² Ibid., Oct. 11, 1889.

¹¹³ New York Herald, May 22, 1889. Among other activities, John W. Pinkham provided testimonials, for example, for Shafer's Medicinal Blackberry Brandy in Weeks and Potter's Revised Catalogue of Foreign and Domestic Drugs, (Boston, 1879)Google Scholar.

¹¹⁴ New York Herald, May 22, 1889, Dec. 1, 1907.

¹¹⁵ Chicago Inter Ocean, Apr. 17, 1896.

¹¹⁶ New York Times, June 12, 1887.

¹¹⁷ On patent medicines in this era, McTavis, Janice R., Pain and Profits: The History of the Headache and Its Remedies in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004), ch. 1–3Google Scholar.

¹¹⁸ According to Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 147, Ayer may have begun taking “a little morphine” to help her sleep after Gertrude's death. On women and neurasthenia, Schuster, David G., “Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Literary Women, and Neurasthenia, 1870–1914,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (Winter 2005): 695–722CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herndl, Diane Price, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1993)Google Scholar; and Gijswijt-Hofstra, Marijke and Porter, Roy, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam, 2001)Google ScholarPubMed. On the social context of neurasthenia, Lutz, Tom, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, 1991)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Charles E., “Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72 (Winter 1998): 714–30CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹¹⁹ Brooklyn Eagle, May 22, 1887.

¹²⁰ Ibid., May 25, 1887.

¹²¹ Boston Journal of Health, May 1888, repr. in Oleson, Charles W., Secret Nostrums and Systems of Medicine: A Book of Formulas, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1891), 13Google Scholar.

¹²² Oleson, Secret Nostrums, 10 (emphasis original). Boston Journal of Health, Oct. 1888, 25.

¹²³ Boston Journal of Health, Oct. 1888, 25.

¹²⁴ Chicago Inter Ocean, Nov. 4, 1888.

¹²⁵ Ibid.

¹²⁶ Ibid. In a different ad, Ayer wrote her success in business “should command for her the confidence in her sex in any and all statements she may make in regard to any articles she may offer for sale.” New York Times, May 8, 1887.

¹²⁷ Dr.Minor, T. C., “American Educational Journalism,” Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic, Feb. 2, 1889, 135–36Google Scholar. For a range of publications about Ayer and her patent medicine, Medical World, Aug. 1888; Pharmaceutische Rundschau, July 1888; Chemist and Druggist, Aug. 17, 1889; North American Journal of Homeopathy, Sept. 1889; Kellogg, John Harvey, The Household Monitor of Health (Battle Creek, MI, 1891)Google Scholar; Medical News, Oct. 1892; and Sanitary Era, Oct. 1892.

¹²⁸ Chicago Inter Ocean, Nov. 4, 1888. According to the Boston Journal of Health, Oct. 1888, the first of these articles/advertisements was a half-page in the Boston Herald, Oct. 7, 1888.

¹²⁹ The attack on Ayer and her response fits within the larger history of the decline of the patent medicine business, a decline accelerated by muckraking articles like Samuel Hopkins Adams's “Great American Fraud,” Collier's, Oct. 7, 1905. Adams estimated that by 1905 patent medicines makers earned an aggregate $75 million a year. Kay, Gwen, Dying to Be Beautiful: The Fight for Safe Cosmetics (Columbus, 2005), 20–21Google Scholar, estimates $90 million a year. Bok, Also Edward, “Cleaning Up the Patent-Medicine and Other Evils” in Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok (New York, 1921), ch. 30Google Scholar; Young, James Harvey, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulation (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar.

¹³⁰ New York Herald, May 22, 1889; Chicago Inter Ocean, Nov. 27, 1889.

¹³¹ All quotations are from Ayer v. Seymour unless otherwise noted. For the two cases, both decided on May 27, 1889, Daly, Charles P., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Common Pleas for the City and County of New York (New York, 1891), 15:245–65Google Scholar.

¹³² Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1889.

¹³³ New York Times, May 21, 1889.

¹³⁴ Trenton Times, May 21, 1889.

¹³⁵ Ibid. Roger A. Pryor, a former Virginia congressman and Confederate general who eventually became a New York Supreme Court justice, had also represented Theodore Tilton in the Beecher-Tilton trial.

¹³⁶ New York Times, May 28, June 1, 1889.

¹³⁷ Ibid., Feb. 28, 1893.

¹³⁸ Ibid. The Times also reported that daughter Hattie Ayer Seymour had instructed her lawyer to “stop this litigation” by giving Harriet Hubbard Ayer all the disputed stock in her name.

¹³⁹ Also costly was Ayer's determination to continue legal pursuit of her son-in-law, Lewis Seymour. In September 1889, Ayer had Lewis Seymour arrested and charged with “embezzlement of a letter,” and in October and November she testified in court that he had intercepted and opened letters addressed to her. The charges were eventually dropped. Chicago Inter Ocean, Sept. 5, 1889.

¹⁴⁰ New York Times, June 6, 1889.

¹⁴¹ Ibid., June 9, 1889. An earlier advertisement for the soap in the Brooklyn Eagle, Sept. 4, 1887, stated: “Soap manufacturers having thoroughly educated the public to the vital importance of using a pure and medicated soap … I have at last succeeded in manufacturing a perfectly pure medicated soap containing the same healing ingredients that have made my Recamier preparations so famous. 25 cents a cake.” On the increasing use of soap, Hoy, Suellen, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and on the marketing of soap, Vinikas, Vincent, Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in the Age of Advertisement (Ames, IA, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹⁴² On Charcot, , Goetz, Christopher G., Bonduelle, Michel, and Gelfand, Toby, Charcot, Constructing Neurology (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹⁴³ New York Herald, May 22, 1889.

¹⁴⁴ Sufonal (sulfonmethane) is a powerful hypnotic drug. Teuffel (an appropriate name for a German allegedly involved in such a devilish conspiracy) wrote to the Paris Herald, May 26, 1889, that he treated Ayer from Dec. 26, 1888 to Jan. 6, 1889, and found her to be a “former morphinist and now inveterate brandy-drinker.” His treatment involved “hypodermic injections” of “strophanthus.” According to Ellingwood, Finley, American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy (Evanston, IL, 1915)Google Scholar, 220, strophanthus acts “vigorously upon all muscular structure and specifically upon the muscular structure of the heart.” Howard wrote her lawyer, the famed Boston attorney Moorfield Storey, that Ayer had twenty-two injections of strophanthus and strychnine and that throughout January 1889, Howard had administered the powder upon Teuffel's prescription. BWH to Moorfield Storey, typescript, June 4, 1889, fl. 54, box 1, Howard Papers, Bowdoin.

¹⁴⁵ New York Herald, May 21, 1889.

¹⁴⁶ New York Times, May 21, 1889.

¹⁴⁷ New York Herald, May 21, 1889

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., May 22, 1889.

¹⁴⁹ This is most evident in the letters from Blanche's nieces and nephews to their mother. Marion Howard Smith, Blanche's younger sister. For example, folders 13–29, box 1, Howard Papers, Bowdoin.

¹⁵⁰ BWH to Marion Howard Smith, June 2, 1895, fl. 12, box 1, Smith Family Papers, MWWC.

¹⁵¹ BWH to Marion Stuart Smith, Aug. 20, 1891, fl. 23, box 1, Smith Family Papers, MWWC.

¹⁵² BWH to Marion Stuart Smith, June 2, 1895, fl. 28, box 1, Smith Family Papers, MWWC.

¹⁵³ New York Herald, May 21, 1889, repr. in Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 195–96.

¹⁵⁴ BWH to Marion Howard Smith, Jan. 1, 1889, letter placed inside diary cover, fl. 32, box 2, Howard Papers, Bowdoin. After 1886, Harold Smith and his older sisters Christine and Marion Stuart (Mae) lived with Howard; their older brother Howard Smith had been with her since 1879. They all became good friends with Hattie and Margaret Ayer. St. Vitus's Dance was another name for Sydenham Chorea, which was a movement disorder now known to be caused by rheumatic fever. Christine was eventually hospitalized until her death in 1903.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid. In 1897, Blanche Howard's niece, Marion Stuart Smith, wrote her mother, Marion Howard Smith, that Blanche Willis Howard told Dr. Teuffel about Margaret's illegitimacy “and that she had a liaison with Howard [Smith; Marion's older brother] that caused his illness.” Margaret, Marion Stuart Smith reported, thinks that Blanche Howard's end will be “insanity”; “some of her actions seem so now.” Marion Stuart Smith to Marion Howard Smith, Sept. 4, 1897, fl. 24, box 1, Smith Family Papers, MWWC.

¹⁵⁶ Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 220–21.

¹⁵⁷ BWH Diary, Aug. 12–30, 1897, fl. 32, box 2, Howard Papers, Bowdoin.

¹⁵⁸ BWH to Marion Howard Smith, Jan. 9, 1898, fl. 25, box 1, Howard Papers, MWWC.

¹⁵⁹ New York Herald, July 2, 1889. Mason married an Arthur B. Frenzel just before the court case, but for coherence, I will continue to call her Mason.

¹⁶⁰ New York Times, July 2, 1889.

¹⁶¹ Ibid., Apr. 24, 1887; New York Herald, July 2, 1889.

¹⁶² New York Herald, July 2, 1889. All quotations from Mason are from this article.

¹⁶³ On Ayer's company at the American Exhibition in London, Chemist and Druggist, May 14, 1887, 574.

¹⁶⁴ New York Herald, July 2, 1889. Ayer continued to promote cosmetics with zinc in Harriet Hubbard Ayer's Book: A Complete and Authentic Treatise on the Laws of Health and Beauty (Springfield, MA, 1899)Google Scholar.

¹⁶⁵ New York Times, Aug. 4, Sept. 15, Oct. 13, 1889.

¹⁶⁶ Ibid., July 3, Sept. 15, 1889.

¹⁶⁷ Ibid., May 4, 1890. For a contemporary view on the connection between soap and perfume, see Colgate, Samuel, “American Soap Factories” in 1795–1895: One Hundred Years of American Commerce, ed. Depew, Chauncey (New York, 1895), 422–28Google Scholar.

¹⁶⁸ New York Times, June 9, 1889.

¹⁶⁹ Ibid., Aug. 4, 1889.

¹⁷⁰ Ibid., Nov. 30, 1890.

¹⁷¹ New York Herald, June 15, 1890. Shirley Dare was a pseudonym for syndicate writer Susan C. Powers; Current Literature, Nov. 1890, 400. She may have been the author of the Herald story, perhaps hired by Ayer. More likely, Ayer wrote it herself.

¹⁷² Leach, William R., “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925,” Journal of American History 71 (Sept. 1984): 319–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation 320.

¹⁷³ Among early commercial face creams that competed with Ayers', Madame Ruppert's Face Bleach was among the most popular. Like Ayer, Ruppert heavily invested in advertising and used a corrosive sublimate. “Madame Ruppert's Face Bleach,” Printer's Ink, June 22, 1898, 3–5Google Scholar; Homoeopathic Envoy, Oct. 1890, 50.

¹⁷⁴ On such cautionary tales in the ninteenth century, Battan, Jesse F., “‘You Cannot Fix the Scarlet Letter on My Breast!’: Women Reading, Writing and Reshaping the Sexual Culture of Victorian America,” Journal of Social History 37 (Spring 2004): 601–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷⁵ On what the press labeled the “famous Ayer divorce case,” New York Times, Sept. 21, Dec. 19, 1886; July 10, Nov. 15, 27, 1889; Chicago Tribune, May 21, Dec. 19, 1886, and July 10, 1889; Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, Mar. 1, 1887; and Boston Daily Globe, Dec. 19, 1886. On the legal issues in such cases, Hartog, Hendrik, “Lawyering Husbands' Rights and ‘the Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 84 (June 1997): 67–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷⁶ A series of letters in the Howard Papers, MWWC, describes the fight over guardianship.

¹⁷⁷ New York Times, Feb. 28, 1893.

¹⁷⁸ Chicago Inter Ocean, Nov. 27, 1889; New York Times, Nov. 15, 27, 1889.

¹⁷⁹ HHA to Margaret Ayer, May 18, 1890, fl. 56, box 1, Howard Papers, Bowdoin.

¹⁸⁰ Hattie Seymour to Marion Stuart Smith, Oct. 20, 1892, fl. 274, box 4, Smith Family Papers, MWWC.

¹⁸¹ Hattie Seymour to Marion Stuart Smith and Marion Howard Smith, Nov. 11, 1892, fl. 274, box 4, Smith Family Papers, MWWC.

¹⁸² New York Times, Feb. 28, 1893. Dr. Granger's Sanitarium in Bronxville, New York, opened in 1890, was also called the Vernon House. Granger had previously worked at the State Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo; Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal 29 (July 1890): 701.

¹⁸³ New York Times, Mar. 4, 1893.

¹⁸⁴ Ibid., Feb. 28, 1893.

¹⁸⁵ Ibid.

¹⁸⁶ New York Herald, Feb. 28, 1893. The New York Times, Mar. 11, 1893, reported that Frank Sprague, the electricity and transit entrepreneur who had become involved with the Ayer company, said she had not been in the office since the previous May.

¹⁸⁷ New York Times, Feb. 28, 1893; New York Herald, Feb. 28, 1893.

¹⁸⁸ New York Times, Feb. 28, 1893.

¹⁸⁹ Ibid., Feb. 28, Mar. 11, 1893.

¹⁹⁰ Ibid., Mar. 11, 1893.

¹⁹¹ Chicago Inter Ocean, Apr. 17, 1896.

¹⁹² Ibid.

¹⁹³ New York Times, Mar. 28, 1893. Dalzell, Frederick, Engineering Invention: Frank J. Sprague and the U.S. Electrical Industry (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.

¹⁹⁴ New York Times, Mar. 26, May 11, 1893; New York Herald, Aug. 25, 1893; Chicago Inter Ocean, Jan. 1, 1894. Beyond their Chicago connections, Mason and Ayer had connections through Jacksonville, Florida, where Mason represented railroads and Ayer was building a mansion. Electrical Engineer, Dec. 16, 1891, 667; Commercial and Financial Chronicle, May 16, 1891, 763.

¹⁹⁵ Chicago Tribune, Aug. 12, 1894; New York Times, Aug. 12, 1894.

¹⁹⁶ New York Times, Feb. 6, Apr. 20, 1896. The company had liabilities of $126,334 (including $6,924 owed to Ayer as salary) and assets of $7,858. Of the shares, Ayer held 526; Frank J. Sprague 343; J.H. Montgomery 100; F. W. McLanathan 30; and F. R. Williams 1. Frank Sprague's brother Charles was appointed receiver. Boston Daily Globe, Feb. 6, 1896.

¹⁹⁷ HHA to John Townsend, Feb. 12, 1896. I read this letter when it was for sale on EBay and later learned that it was bought by author Katina Jones, who is writing a book about being distantly related to Ayer.

¹⁹⁸ Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayer's Book. Ayer also contributed to Correct Social Usage: A Course of Instruction in Good Form, Style and Deportment by Eighteen Distinguished Authors (New York, 1903)Google Scholar, published by the New York Society of Self-Culture. The 1907 edition of this book identified Ayer as, at “the time of her death, two years ago, the best-paid woman journalist in the United States.”

¹⁹⁹ Recamier Manufacturing Co., Inc., v. Harriet Hubbard Ayer, Inc., 59 F.2d 802 (1932) District Court, S. D. New York (April 13, 1932).

²⁰⁰ Lillian Sefton and Margaret Ayer appeared together in Ziegfeld's production of Reginald De Koven's Red Feather in 1903; New York Times, Nov. 8, 1903. Sefton married Vincent Thomas in 1905 and after his death married to Roger Leftwich Dodge.

²⁰¹ Jones, Geoffrey, Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; and Jones, , “Control, Performance and Knowledge Transfers in Large Multinationals: Unilever in the United States, 1945–1980,” Business History Review 76 (Autumn 2002): 435–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰² In 2012, Ayer Cosmetics was based in Munich, Germany, with a branch in Paris. The parent company was Imperial Kosmetik and Parfums.

²⁰³ New York Times, Feb. 28, 1893.

²⁰⁴ Ibid., July 28, 1894.

²⁰⁵ Ibid., Sept. 16, 1897. Allen Lewis Seymour's legal troubles also continued. In 1894, he was arrested in connection with an alleged bribery attempt related to U.S. Senate deliberations over a sugar tariff; “Investigation of attempted bribery of certain senators to vote against tariff bill; refusal to answer and possible contempt of Allen Lewis Seymour, stock broker,” 53rd Cong., 2nd sess. (July 25, 1894), S rpt 624; The State (Columbia, SC), Oct. 19, 1894.

²⁰⁶ Ayer and Taves, Three Lives, 251.

²⁰⁷ Seymour, Harriet Ayer, How to Think Music (New York, 1910)Google Scholar; Herald Statesman (Yonkers, NY), Oct. 5, 1939Google Scholar.

²⁰⁸ Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 3, 1902.

²⁰⁹ Will of Blanche Willis Howard, July 8, 1898, fl. 8, box 1, Howard Papers, MWWC.

²¹⁰ For Herbert Ayer's obituary, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 13, 1899, Marion Howard Smith wrote her daughter that Blanche Willis Howard had “suffered greatly,” and it was sufficient to tell curious friends that she had died of “paralysis, which was probably only a result.” Marion Howard Smith to Marion Stuart Smith, “Tuesday evening” and “the 19th” (1898), fl. 113, box 2, Smith Family Papers, MWWC.

²¹¹ The Critic, Jan. 1904, 15–17.

²¹² Shortly before his death, Hubbard Cobb, Ayer's grandson, told me by telephone that the documents his mother, Margaret Hubbard Ayer Cobb, used for her 1957 biography of Ayer were later destroyed by the family because no one thought them of importance. That destruction left only Margaret Ayer's version of her mother's history, which is read best as a daughter's attempt to reconcile a troubled family history. Telephone interview with Hubbard Cobb, July 7, 2003. For a review of the biography, Samuel T. Williamson, “Triumph Over Torment,” New York Times, June 16, 1957.

²¹³ Maybe in this way Ayer was lucky because R. G. Dun & Co. rated most women as “poor risks”; Yohn, “‘Men Seem to Delight in Cheating Women,’” 13.

²¹⁴ Ayer also was not involved with political or social reform associations except for the Rainy Day Club, a dress reform organization, which she joined after beginning her work at the New York World.

²¹⁵ White adds that the “elimination of affection from corporate and political friendship in the Gilded Age was its genius.” White, Richard, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York, 2011), xxxii, 99Google Scholar.

²¹⁶ The term is from McGaw, Judith A., Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885 (Princeton, 1987)Google Scholar.

²¹⁷ Yohn, “‘Men Seem to Take Delight in Cheating Women,’” 24.