Mary Kay Ash's legendary love for the colour pink symbolized her dedication to be a enterprise success by "considering like a girl." Colin McConnell /Toronto Star by way of Getty Photos
In 1963, the identical yr American businesswoman Mary Kay Ash began her cosmetics firm, writer W.W. Norton launched “The Female Mystique – the e book that has since been broadly credited with launching the up to date ladies’s liberation motion.
Ash loathed the time period “feminist” and disliked the motion. In a 1983 Dallas Morning Information interview, she dismissed “that foolishness feminists began within the ‘60s” of “making an attempt to behave identical to a person” by chopping their hair quick or decreasing their voices.
But Ash, who died in 2001, efficiently defied her period’s feminine gender norms. She turned a number of thousand {dollars} right into a multibillion-dollar cosmetics empire and led it for many years. Her gross sales drive grew from fewer than 10 ladies to tens of 1000’s.
Whereas researching a e book on Ash’s life and work, I’ve discovered that lots of the Mary Kay saleswomen had been snug with their period’s imaginative and prescient of femininity and motherhood. Ash’s firm motto of “God First, Household Second, Profession Third” put them comfy.
American ladies immediately owe gratitude to the ladies’s motion of the Sixties for making points like equal pay for equal work and sharing family obligations a part of the nationwide dialog – but additionally to a Dallas entrepreneur who reveled within the female mystique.
From underpaid saleswoman to CEO
In 1963, the yr Ash based “Magnificence by Mary Kay” in a small Dallas storefront, barely a 3rd of American ladies had been within the workforce. Ash was one in all them. She had peddled youngsters’s encyclopedias door to door, and carried out “home events” – house demonstrations of merchandise that catered to housewives – with Stanley Residence Items and different firms.
Ash constantly earned decrease wages than her male counterparts, who additionally handed her by for promotions. When she protested, one widespread response was to deride her for “considering like a girl.” One other was that males wanted more cash as a result of they’d households to assist.
“I had a household to assist too!” recalled Ash, a single mom, in her 1981 memoir. So she give up to construct an organization the place there could be no wage hole or male bosses, and girls could be rewarded for considering like ladies – all whereas embracing the imaginative and prescient of conventional gender roles that the feminist motion was making an attempt to overturn.
By 1969, the corporate was incomes US$6.3 million in internet gross sales, in keeping with The New York Instances. And an article within the Irving Day by day Information, a Texas newspaper, put the gross sales drive at round 4,000 ladies from 15 completely different states.
In 1976, Mary Kay Inc. turned the primary woman-founded and -led firm listed on the New York Inventory Change.
In 1979, glowing protection on “60 Minutes” prompted practically 100,000 extra ladies to enroll. The corporate was grossing over $100 million yearly and had a worldwide attain, and Ash was named one of many yr’s high company ladies in America by Enterprise Week journal.
The CBS information present “60 Minutes” aired a glowing profile of Mary Kay Ash’s beauty firm in 1979.
In 1985 Ash and her son led a $450 millon deal to purchase the corporate again into non-public household fingers. As of 2021, the corporate reportedly has $3.5 billion in annual revenues.
The Mary Kay mystique
Ash rejected feminism however sought to construct ladies’s confidence – one thing absent within the common housewife’s life, in keeping with “The Female Mystique” – in addition to their earnings.
“Right here’s a girl who’s by no means had any reward in any respect for something she’s ever completed,” Ash mentioned in her best-selling memoir. “Possibly the one applause she’s ever had was when she graduated from highschool. So we reward her for the whole lot good that she does.”
Primarily based on the interviews I’m doing for my analysis, this method labored.
Esther Andrews, a housewife, advised me that earlier than she turned a Mary Kay saleswoman in 1967, “no person had ever mentioned that I could possibly be nice at something.” Andrews, who raised three youngsters along with her Mary Kay earnings after her husband died, was among the many first winners of a pink Cadillac – an organization prize for high sellers. The automotive was each a logo of her success and a method of mobility few housewives loved on the time.
Andrews’ story displays that of many I’ve uncovered. From a former waitress and single mother in New Jersey who was in a position to elevate her daughter and buy her own residence to a former housewife in Ohio who has extra diamond rings than fingers and funds her household’s European holidays, Mary Kay has modified ladies’s lives.
Each of those ladies fought again tears as they shared their profession accomplishments with me. Each have been within the firm for greater than 30 years.
The Mary Kay firm continues to award high saleswomen with new vehicles in its founder’s favourite colour.
China Images/GettyImages AsiaPac by way of Getty Photos
In her e book “In Pink: The Private Story of a Mary Kay Pioneer Who Made Historical past Shaping a New Path to Success for Girls,” homemaker and early Mary Kay recruit Doretha Dingler remarked that “way more than elevating our household earnings, that type of incomes raised my consciousness” – language echoing that of the period’s feminists.
Alternatives for girls of colour
It wasn’t simply middle-class white ladies who discovered success in Mary Kay.
In 1975, Ruell Cone, a Black girl from Atlanta, was the corporate’s highest-earning saleswoman. She was honored in individual by Ash herself earlier than tens of 1000’s of saleswomen on the firm’s annual seminar.
In 1979, Gerri Nicholson advised The Document newspaper of Hackensack, N.J., that whereas she had “lots of hang-ups” from rising up as an African American within the South, working for Mary Kay “considerably elevated my household earnings” and gave her “a sense of self-worth.” At that time Nicholson had labored her approach up from saleswoman to gross sales supervisor, and would go on to grow to be Mary Kay’s first Black nationwide gross sales director.
By 1985, Savvy journal reported that Mary Kay Inc. may declare extra Latina and Black ladies incomes annual commissions of over $50,000 – the equal of $137,000 in 2022 – than another company worldwide.
Ash’s elevation of “considering like a girl” and the corporate’s acceptance of Black and Latina saleswomen are additionally forerunners of feminism’s “third wave” within the Nineties. On this period, youthful feminists shifted the motion’s focus from equal rights to range, embracing gender variations and celebrating femininity in its numerous kinds.
A ‘pink pyramid scheme’?
Together with these success tales, the corporate has confronted accusations of exploiting extra ladies than it enriches. A 2012 article in Harper’s Journal, “The Pink Pyramid Scheme,” pointed at unrealized guarantees of success, saleswomen going into debt to buy product stock, and excessive turnover charges.
I consider these tales are part of any correct telling of Mary Kay historical past.
Nevertheless, based mostly on my analysis, a considerable variety of the corporate’s “magnificence consultants” say they discovered camaraderie, recognition and confidence working for Mary Kay, and a feminine function mannequin in Mary Kay Ash.
These are issues working ladies immediately nonetheless discover elusive.
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de components, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer revenue de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
