The Entrepreneurial Woman by Sarah Becker ©2018 Alexandria’s good ‘ole boys rarely admit it, but much of the property upon which Alexandria was established—property north of Hunting Creek to a line approximating present-day Queen Street—was first owned by a female. Margaret Brent, an attorney and femme sole, took ownership of the land in 1654. “She was the prototype of what the nineteenth century calls the new woman,” Harper’s magazine said in 1898. Mistress Brent first asked to vote in 1648. Women have come a long way, especially since the 1970s. “I did not set out consciously to start a revolution when I wrote The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan said, “but it changed my life, as a woman and as a writer, and other women tell me it changed theirs.” “The essence of the denigration of women is our definition as sex object,” Friedan exclaimed in 1969. “To confront our inequality, therefore, we must confront both society’s denigration of us in these terms and own self-denigration as people. Am I saying that women must be liberated from sex? No. I am saying that sex will only be liberated to be a human dialogue, sex will only cease to be a sniggering, dirty joke, and an obsession in this society, when women become active determining people….” In this the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, I ask. Who is Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham, the sloganeer who said “The Health of Women is the Hope of the Race?” She was a wife, mother and entrepreneur, a 19th century woman with a 21st century success story. Lydia’s business was born of husband, Isaac’s 1873 financial ruin. Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham, of Lynn, Massassachusetts, was among the first to market over-the-counter medicines to menstruating and menopausal women. Born in 1819 her home based, family owned…