Born: 12 May 1918, United States
Died: 22 November 2001
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mary Kathlyn Wagner
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Mary Kay Ash built a cosmetics empire, the eponymous Mary Kay Cosmetics, from virtually nothing. At 45, with only $5,000 to her name, she launched the company on September 13, 1963 with a goal of empowering other women. Although companies like Mary Kay, Avon, and Tupperware laid the groundwork for predatory multi-level marketing schemes of later decades that prey primarily on women, Ash wanted to create a business opportunity for women in a world where they were certainly not plentiful. Selling Mary Kay products was one of very few flexible work options for women looking to earn money on their own schedules.
Ash was also a philanthropist dedicated to funding cancer research through various organizations, including the Mary Kay Ash Cancer Research Institute at Dallas’s St. Paul Medical Center. The Mary Kay Ash Foundation continues to support this research decades after her passing. Her various accolades included being named one of “America’s Twenty-five Most Influential Women” in the 1985 World Almanac and Book of Facts and being inducted into the National Business Hall of Fame in 1996 by Fortune magazine. Ash died in 2001, but she left behind a company that would span the globe, with millions of employees and billions in annual revenue.
Unfortunately, it had also become the opposite of what she intended—rather than empowering women and providing financial stability, by the 2010s Mary Kay had a well-known reputation among the worst MLMs. Predatory MLMs typically target financially and/or emotionally vulnerable women as “salespeople,” convince them to spend their own money out of pocket on start-up costs and products, and leave them holding the (sometimes literal) bag when these women are frequently left further in debt because they can’t sell enough to break even, much less turn a profit. These women’s social support networks often suffer as well, as MLMs turn those networks into nothing more than potential buyers to use hard-sell tactics on. Ash’s legacy is a stark reminder that the things we build, once out of our control, can turn ugly in ways no amount of make-up can hide.