On an April afternoon in 1897, thousands of women packed the Boston Theatre to see the nation’s most beguiling female entrepreneur, a 45-year-old former homemaker whose talent for personal branding would rival that of any Instagram celebrity today. She called herself Madame Yale. Over the course of several hours and multiple outfit changes, she preached her “Religion of Beauty,” regaling the audience with tales of history’s most beautiful women, a group that included Helen of Troy, the Roman goddess Diana and, apparently, Madame Yale.
The sermon was her 11th public appearance in Boston in recent years, and it also covered the various lotions and potions—products that Yale just happened to sell—that she said had transformed her from a sallow, fat, exhausted woman into the beauty who stood on stage: her tall, hourglass figure draped at one point in cascading white silk, her blond ringlets falling around a rosy-cheeked, heart-shaped face. Applause thundered. The Boston Herald praised her “offer of Health and Beauty” in a country where “every woman wants to be well and well-looking.”
Madame Yale had been delivering “Beauty Talks” coast to coast since 1892, cannily promoting herself in ways that would be familiar to consumers in 2020. She was a true pioneer in what business gurus would call the wellness space—a roughly $4.5 trillion industry globally today—and that achievement alone should command attention. Curiously, though, she went from celebrated to infamous virtually overnight, and her story, largely overlooked by historians, is all the more captivating as a cautionary tale.
Day after day, online, in print, on TV and on social media, women are inundated with advertisements for wellness products that promise to fix our skin and our digestion and our hair and our mood seemingly at once. The (almost always) attractive women behind these products position themselves as uniquely modern innovators at the cutting edge of holistic health and beauty. But my research suggests Madame Yale, born Maude Mayberg in 1852, was using the same techniques more than a century ago. Think of her as the spiritual godmother of Gwyneth Paltrow, founder of the $250 million Goop corporation.
Like Paltrow, Madame Yale was an attractive blond white woman—“as beautiful as it is possible for a woman to be,” the New Orleans Picayune said, and the “most marvelous woman known to the Earth since Helen of Troy,” according to the Buffalo Times. Paltrow’s company markets “UMA Beauty Boosting Day Face Oil,” “GoopGlow Inside Out Glow Kit” and “G.Tox Malachite + AHA Pore Refining Tonic.” Madame Yale hawked “Skin Food,” “Elixir of Beauty” and “Yale’s Magical Secret.” Paltrow is behind a slick periodical, Goop, that is part wellness magazine and part product catalog. Madame Yale’s Guide to Beauty, first published in 1894, is a self-help book that promotes her products. Both women have aspired to an unattainable ideal of biochemical purity. Goop claims its G.Tox will “increase cell turnover and detoxify pores.” Madame Yale said her “Blood Tonic” would “drive impurities from the system as the rain drives the debris along the gutters.” And both, importantly, embodied their brands, presenting themselves as the best possible evidence of their efficacy, though Madame Yale, living in a simpler time before digital media (there are thousands of pictures of Paltrow available online), was far more explicit about it. (Goop did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)