And who doesn’t LOVE it in coffee, cakes, cookies, candles and face masks? October is also National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Lots of pink everywhere, sometimes overwhelmingly.
Fourteen years ago as I was mid-chemotherapy, it overwhelmed me. But here’s an important story I learned while researching Radical Sisters.
In 1991, there was zero common knowledge about breast cancer. Mammograms were brand new, women knew nothing about self exams, and research dollars lagged. Worse, it was killing women at an epidemic rate.
Enter Charlotte Haley, whose family had been ravaged by the disease. She began making peach ribbons to wake up America. She gave them out at grocery stores, to her friends, and sent them to celebrities and first ladies. The mission of her tiny, grass roots movement was to take breast cancer off the back burner of America’s consciousness.
Meanwhile, Evelyn Lauder (Estée’s daughter-in-law and now the female face of the company) had just recovered from her own breast cancer and was looking to wake up America, too. When news of Charlotte reached her, she and her good friend, editor of Self magazine, called Charlotte to offer a partnership.
Charlotte said no. She didn’t want her mission commercialized. The women’s response was that their combined reach could up the ante in awareness and research money (they accomplished both). Charlotte promptly hung up on them.
But that wasn’t the end. The company attorney pointed out to Evelyn and her friend that a ribbon of a different color would be perfectly legal. We all know the rest of the story. However, it’s also important to know how much those first little pink ribbons changed the future of breast cancer patients and survivors forever, and in a good way!
The full story plays out in Radical Sisters: Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, Evelyn Lauder, and the Dawn of the Breast Cancer Movement. The book is available everywhere books are sold. And the prologue is available HERE
