SELLING OPPORTUNITY

How “a woman with no great aptitude for numbers” led her own influential company.

Mary Kay Ash’s eponymous, direct-sales cosmetics company, with its wildly successful focus on uplifting an adoring, mostly female sales force, made her an icon of 20th-century American entrepreneurship. “Before there was a company that gave working mothers a flexible schedule, there was a scared little girl making potato soup for her tubercular father,” writes journalist and author Gavenas (Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry, 2002), paraphrasing Mary Kay’s corporate mythologizing. “Before there was a company where women were encouraged to contribute, there was a male manager who shot down great ideas because his star seller was ‘thinking like a woman.’” Gavenas, who has a talent for holding the reader’s interest with fast-moving storytelling, shows how Mary Kay’s world was shaped by the culture of the direct-sales industry, which evolved from the itinerant peddling of the Yankee trader into the door-to-door hustling by the Fuller Brush man before settling into “party” sales and recent multilevel marketing. This was a culture deeply informed by self-improvement literature, motivational speaking, and the “gospel of prosperity”—all created to encourage ambitious men from all walks of life to view sales as godly, and potentially lucrative, work. It wasn’t meant to encourage women, least of all married women, even when they proved to be great at sales like Mary Kay. Anyone who enjoys biography, and particularly those interested in feminism or the history of American business, will want to read this account of a woman who “stands shoulder to shoulder with titans of industry.”

Wry and perceptive business biography.