Paper Title
Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, feminist, labor/business, religion
Abstract
Mary Kay Ash founded the direct sales company Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963. Having begun her career as a direct selling representative, she worked her way up the corporate ladder as a senior executive in the 1950s. As her corporate myth goes, she quit when she learned a male assistant was promoted above her and given twice the salary. Her ambition was to own her own direct sales company; cosmetics were a convenient product to market, but later defined her image as a corporate maven. This paper examines the history Mary Kay created for herself, her political persona in early second-wave feminism, and her separation from the movement during the Equal Rights Amendment debates. Her own brand of corporate feminism translated to tens of thousands of women who fashioned their own stories in her image.
Keywords
Mary Kay Ash, Mary Kay Cosmetics, business
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Mary Kay Ash and the Business of Identity
Mary Kay Ash founded the direct sales company Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963. Having begun her career as a direct selling representative, she worked her way up the corporate ladder as a senior executive in the 1950s. As her corporate myth goes, she quit when she learned a male assistant was promoted above her and given twice the salary. Her ambition was to own her own direct sales company; cosmetics were a convenient product to market, but later defined her image as a corporate maven. This paper examines the history Mary Kay created for herself, her political persona in early second-wave feminism, and her separation from the movement during the Equal Rights Amendment debates. Her own brand of corporate feminism translated to tens of thousands of women who fashioned their own stories in her image.