Amy Tan didn’t set out to write a bestseller. In fact, she found solace in the fact that she was able to write The Joy Luck Club with “no expectations.” “I had been told that the typical first book by an unknown writer might sell five thousand copies — if you were lucky,” she told Penguin Random House Books. “I heard that it might last on the bookstore shelves six weeks — if you were lucky.”

But Tan got more than lucky. Her 1989 book ended up on The New York Times bestseller list for more than six months and spawned a 1993 movie — which Tan co-wrote — that brought in $32 million worldwide. “I wrote The Joy Luck Club without the self-consciousness I would later feel when the book landed on the bestseller list,” she continued. “No one had predicted the book’s trajectory, and I was stunned, as if I had won the lottery without having ever bought a ticket.”

Not only was the book a personal achievement for Tan as an author, but it also was seen as a watershed moment, proving that a fictional book featuring intertwined multigenerational stories about Asian Americans could find mainstream success both on bookshelves and the silver screen. Tan was a freelance business writer working 90 hours a week when she decided to bring balance into her life by channeling a more creative form of writing in 1985. “I decided to attend a writers’ workshop, read certain books, and write a short story within the next year,” she told Publishers Weekly in 1989. To apply for the program, she wrote a short story about a girl who was a chess champion and her Chinese mother.

That got her wheels turning in the fiction world. But it was a very real event that launched her journey toward The Joy Luck Club. One day, she had to suddenly go to the hospital since her mother was thought to have had a heart attack. It was on the way there that she realized how little she knew about her family’s Chinese roots, and promised to herself that if her mom survived, she’d go with her to China and soak everything up, Publishers Weekly explained. While her mom’s diagnosis turned out not to be a heart attack, Tan did go with her mother to China in 1987.

Soon she had penned the book about a group of Chinese American women who play together in a mahjong group and their Americanized daughters. “The book exists for me in its own time capsule,” she told Penguin Random House. “It contains the circumstances that led me to write it. In many ways, it is an intimate diary of my ordinary thoughts and strange obsessions, all of which were absorbed into the writing of the book.”

For audiences, there was the relatability of family love and drama woven into the multiple perspectives of different generations throughout time. But for Asian Americans, it was a breakthrough. An actual story about the culture that was so rare on American bookshelves. “When I read the book, it was the first time I felt someone was writing about my life,” actress Ming-Na Wen, who later starred in the films, told The New York Times..

Despite the success in its written pages, the book didn’t find a quick road into the film world. At the time, Asian American roles largely succumbed to stereotypes, be it martial arts action stars or those with exaggerated characteristics. Some of the actresses who were later in The Joy Luck Club described their acting experiences before the movie as being stereotypes without any real depth. “Asian American women were objectified,” Rosalind Chao, who had played a Korean bride in M*A*S*H and laundry man's daughter on a Lucille Ball series, told The New York Times. “Pretty was really all that they cared about.” The last major film that had Asian American characters in the lead was way back in 1961 with Flower Drum Song, but that also had the music of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II behind it.

Most studios quickly passed on the project. “There was a perception that Americans — and that especially Americans in movies — had to be white,” Janet Yang, who was an executive producer for the film, told NPR. “But the selling point was the script… If you put aside the biases about it being an all-Asian cast...it was hard not to be moved. Many other studio executives — in fact, all the other studios that we approached could not put aside those concerns. But it took somebody who was willing to take a leap of faith.”

Finally, they found that somebody in Walt Disney Studios’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, who offered a $10 million budget and full creative control, The New York Times reported.

Yang says the studio was 'nervous' to put the all-Asian cast on display in promotions

Though they got the green light, it didn’t mean that it was smooth sailing. Yang recalled to NPR an incident where director Wanye Wang realized that despite the movie being a completely Asian American story, that very fact was going to be swept under the rug. “I do remember Wayne, who has the most lovely personality… he lost his temper one day in a marketing meeting,” she said. “We were going there to look at posters that they were going to consider for marketing Joy Luck Club and each and every one somehow managed to avoid showing full-on an Asian face.”

She believes that one was a woodcut and very abstract and angular, while another only used the backs of the women. “They clearly were nervous about showing an Asian face in, you know, a larger-than-life image,” Yang continued. “And it was ironic because we thought, well, they went and greenlit this movie. We just shot the whole thing. They say they love the movie, and now they're afraid to sell it.”

Ultimately, the box office success spoke for itself, as the film found success among a broad range of American audiences.

As further proof, some of the actors were quickly cast in big studio and mainstream roles, like Lauren Tom playing Ross Geller’s love interest Julie on Friends and Wen voicing the title character in the animated version of Mulan. Director Wang also got his next film Smoke financed quickly. “I always say that The Joy Luck Club was my green card to Hollywood,” Wen told The New York Times.

However, what seemed to be a shift in Hollywood standards, was short-lived. It took a shockingly long 25 years before another Asian American major studio film was made — Crazy Rich Asians, starring Constance Wu, Henry Golding and Michelle Yeoh, in 2018. That, also, translated into big bucks in its time, bringing in $238.5 million worldwide.

That gap in the timeline was noticeable. “It took a really long time before another feature film came out with characters in the United States by a writer in the United States,” Tan told the San Francisco Chronicle. “The difference between what happened then and what’s happening now — it’s money, it’s money, and it has to make a ton of money at the box office.”

But the author is also a fan of the film that found success thanks to the road her film paved. “I loved Crazy Rich Asians and laughed like crazy!” she added. “It’s over the top, but that’s the point, it’s meant to be funny. The part that is true — that doesn’t matter what your income is — is introducing your girlfriend or boyfriend to your parents, and their reaction, and how much you will endure for that love.”

After all, a good story is universal and the more diverse ones there are, the more it captures the much-needed representation that is lacking on screen. “I have had a number of people say to me that they and their mother read this book together when their mother was dying, and that was the last thing they did together,” Tan reveals. “That is so incredibly touching. I’m grateful. It wasn’t through my intention, but this book, in the hands of readers, gets overlaid with their own experiences and emotions, and it becomes their book.”

BY     RACHEL CHANG

Rachel Chang is a journalist and editor specializing in pop culture and travel.

Yoshiko Uchida was born on November 24, 1921, in Alameda, California, to parents Dwight Takashi Uchida (1884–1971) and Iku Umegaki Uchida (1893–1966).  She had an older sister, Keiko ("Kay," 1918-2008).

Yoshiko and Keiko enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. The family lived in a rented home in an area of Berkeley.  The girls took piano lessons and the family went to concerts and museums, while also taking vacations to the East Coast and to Japan.  As leaders in the Bay Area Japanese community, their parents often hosted visitors from Japan.

Despite being sickly as a child, Yoshiko graduated from high school in 2-1/2 years and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, at age 16.  She majored in English, history and philosophy.

World War II brought dramatic changes for the Uchida family. As a community leader who often hosted Japanese visitors, Takashi was immediately suspect in the eyes of authorities and was arrested on Pearl Harbor day, held first in the Immigration Detention Quarters in San Francisco, then moved to the Missoula, Montana, internment camp.

The rest of the family was forced to leave their home and were sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center where they lived in a former horse stall.  About a week into their stay, they learned that Takashi had been "paroled," and he joined them shortly thereafter. After helping her sister establish a nursery school in camp, Yoshiko became a second grade teacher. Finding that she enjoyed teaching, she decided to seek teaching credentials, having received her Berkeley diploma through the mail. She also took first aid and art classes and joined the church choir.

After five months, the family moved to an interment camp in Utah, where they lived for almost three years.  Yoshiko first worked as a secretary before getting another teaching job. Her father became the board chairman of the camp co-op.  In the camps Yoshida had the chance to see and experience the injustices and ill-treatment Americans perpetrated against the Japanese/Americans.  These experiences would provide the basis for many of her books, both autobiographical and fiction.  Many of her other books deal with issues of ethnicity, citizenship, identity, and cross-cultural relationships. The years she was incarcerated left a deep impression. Her 1971 novel, Journey to Topaz, is fiction, but closely follows her own experiences.

In describing her experiences during those years, Yoshiko wrote: “I worked hard to be a good teacher; I went to meetings, wrote long letters to my friends, knitted sweaters and socks, devoured any books I could find, listened to the radio, went to art school and to church and to lectures by outside visitors.  I spent time socializing with friends and I saw occasional movies at the Coop.  I also had a wisdom tooth removes at the hospital and suffered a swollen face for three days.  I caught one cold after another; I fell on unpaved roads; I lost my voice from the dust; I got homesick and angry and despondent.  And sometimes I cried.”

In May of 1943, she received a full scholarship to graduate school at Smith College in Massachusetts. At the same time, Keiko received a job offer at nearby Mt. Holyoke College.  The sisters left camp on the same day in June. A few months later, their parents left camp to resettle in Salt Lake City, due in part to threats Takashi had received because of his position with the co-op.

Uchida graduated with a M.Ed. from Smith College in 1944, first and took a teaching job at the Frankford Friends' School in Philadelphia. But the demands of teaching made it difficult for her to pursue her interest in writing—and having contracted mononucleosis—she moved to New York where Keiko had settled and took a job as a secretary.  She worked first for the Institute of Pacific Relations (1946–47), then for the United Student Christian Council (1947–52). In her off hours, she wrote short stories, submitting them to publications like the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and generating piles of rejection slips. After taking a class on writing for children at Columbia University, her instructor encouraged her to submit a manuscript she had written of Japanese folk tales she had learned from her mother and adapted for American audiences. The Dancing Kettle, and Other Japanese Folk Tales was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1949 to great acclaim, setting Uchida on the road to a successful career as a writer of children's books. Her second book, New Friends for Susan (1951), was her first with Japanese American characters and was set in prewar Berkeley. 

Over the course of her career, Uchida published more than thirty books, including non-fiction for adults, and fiction  for children and teenagers.  She is best known for her books on the concentration camp experience, the first such books for children written by a Japanese American author. In speaking about her children’s nooks She said, “ I try to stress the positive aspects of life that I want children to value and cherish. I hope they can be caring human beings who don't think in terms of labels—foreigners or Asians or whatever—but think of people as human beings. If that comes across, then I've accomplished my purpose.”

Yoshiko continued to write into her last years. Plagued by health problems in later years, she passed away at the age of seventy on June 21, 1992

 

For more information including a list of her books go to Wikipedia.

Also see Densho Encyclopedia

This past weekend many tributes were made to the late, great baseball star Jackie Robinson, the first  Black man to play in major league baseball in 60 years and the first to open the door for succeeding Black players.  All of the tributes were well deserved, not only for the history he made on the baseball field, but for the accomplishments he made in his personal life.

But as writer Tim Ott explains in his post on Biography , Jackie Robinson’s baseball career might well have taken a different turn were it not for his wife Rachel.

                                                  ********************************

On August 28, 1945, Jackie Robinson entered the office of the Brooklyn Dodgers to meet with team president Branch Rickey.

Keen to introduce the first Black player to Major League Baseball in more than 60 years, Rickey was looking for an individual with impeccable character traits to match his skills on the field. As such, his line of questioning was designed to determine whether the candidate had the makeup to handle this monumental task.

"Do you have a woman?" he asked Jackie, who responded in the affirmative. "Well," said Rickey, "you'll need her."

Indeed, Rachel Robinson would prove an invaluable component of what became known as Rickey's "noble experiment," her strength and support sustaining her husband through the herculean task of demonstrating, on a very public stage, that Blacks could be the equal of whites in a pre-civil rights America.

Jackie and Rachel Isum met at UCLA following her arrival for the fall 1940 semester. Jackie was already the Big Man on Campus, star of the school's football, basketball, track and field and baseball teams, but he quickly fell for the charming nursing student.

As described in the Ken Burns documentary Jackie Robinson, Jackie felt at ease talking to Rachel and was impressed by the drive and determination behind her shy exterior. Rachel also realized her suitor's ambition and loved how he wore white shirts to emphasize his dark skin. "He was never, ever, ashamed of his color," she remembered.

The two were engaged in 1941, but their relationship was tested when Jackie received his draft notice and was assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas, the following spring. He sent her a box of chocolates every Friday, though a misunderstanding arose when he mistakenly thought she was also joining the Army, where she would be surrounded by other men, prompting her to return the engagement ring "so he wouldn't think he could tell me what to do."

After earning his honorable discharge in late 1944 (on the heels of being court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of a bus), Jackie played baseball in the Negro Leagues as Rachel worked toward completing her nursing degree. Although he enjoyed the camaraderie, Jackie felt the enterprise was disorganized and hated the indignities heaped upon him and his Black teammates as they traveled. As such he was ready to accept Rickey's challenge to integrate baseball, after first proving himself with the minor league team the Montreal Royals.

Two weeks after their marriage on February 10, 1946, Jackie and Rachel left Los Angeles for the Dodgers' spring training site in Daytona Beach, Florida. Rachel was the only wife invited to join the group of players.

Right away, the Robinsons got a taste of the difficulties to come when they were bumped from their flight during a stopover in New Orleans and again after landing in Pensacola, forcing them to board a bus to finish the 400-plus-mile journey across the Florida panhandle. As she remembered in Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait, Rachel wept after her proud husband quietly acquiesced the orders to move to the back.

Things didn't get any easier after their late arrival to spring training. While the players practiced in nearby Sanford, Rickey learned of a possible threat to Jackie's safety, forcing him back to the more progressive Daytona Beach. One scheduled game in Deland was canceled because the stadium lights supposedly didn't work, even though it was daytime. Another in Sanford was halted in the third inning when the police chief threatened to arrest the Royals' manager if Jackie wasn't removed from the lineup.

Although he initially struggled under the pressure, Jackie improved as he drew strength from Rachel's presence. He thought of them as a team, as noted in Burns' documentary, using the term "we" even when referring to something he had done in a game.

Rachel, too, realized the importance of traversing the fire together. "From the moment we were bumped from the American Airlines flights, my role had begun to unfold," she wrote. "My most profound instinct as Jack's wife was to protect him – an impossible task. I could, however, be a consistent presence to witness and validate the realities, love him without reservation, share his thoughts and miseries, discover with him the humor in the ridiculous behavior against us, and, most of us, help maintain our fighting spirit."

The next few months in Montreal delivered a respite between the tensions of spring training and drama still to come. Expecting to encounter difficulties with her housing search, Rachel instead was bowled over by the warm welcome offered by the woman who became their landlord and their neighbors. And while he faced plenty of hostility on road trips, Jackie was immensely popular with the hometown fans.

Later that year, while checking up on Jackie's progress, Dodgers executive Buzzie Bavasi sat in the stands for a Royals game, near the players' wives. Taking note of the magnetic Rachel, he reported to Rickey, "If Jackie was smart enough to pick her as his wife, he's the guy you want."

Jackie's play certainly warranted a promotion to the big club, as he led the International League with a .349 batting average. After the Royals won the Little World Series, Jackie was swamped by delirious Montreal fans. As journalist Sam Maltin famously noted, "It was probably the only day in history that a Black man ran from a white mob with love, instead of lynching on its mind."

Putting an exclamation point on a triumphant year, Rachel gave birth to Jackie Jr. that November.

The following spring, Rachel and the newborn joined Jackie in New York City ahead of his April 15 debut with the Dodgers. They briefly lived in the McAlpin Hotel amid Manhattan's busy Herald Square, often hosting reporters as drying diapers dangled throughout their cramped room, before finding a place in the Bedford-Stuyvesant part of town.

Again struggling with his massive burden, and fighting the instinct to retaliate, Jackie's Major League career got off to a quiet start. Along with enduring the taunts of rival players and fans, he wasn't exactly welcomed in his own clubhouse, as several teammates reportedly had signed a petition to force his ouster.

Rachel made sure to attend every home game, after which she and Jackie walked back together, reliving the highs and lows of the day, before putting it behind them as they entered the sanctuary of their home. Occasionally she joined the team for road trips, during which time, she wrote, she sat up very straight in the stands, "as if my back could absorb the nefarious outbursts and prevent them from reaching him."

Jackie eventually righted the ship amid the abuse, galvanizing fans with his exciting style of play and winning over the teammates who initially wanted nothing to do with him. After the Dodgers advanced to the 1947 World Series, he was named the National League Rookie of the Year and, underscoring how his achievements transcended the baseball field, finished second to Bing Crosby in a radio poll to determine the most popular person in America.

Two years after signing on for the noble experiment, Jackie and Rachel had weathered the harshest storm to prove the undertaking an unqualified success. Their shared battle against entrenched racism was hardly finished, but there was no closing that door that Jackie had emphatically kicked open.

 BY TIM OTT      Updated:  Jan 28, 2021     Original: Feb 4,2021

 Tim Ott has written for Biography and other A+E sites since 2012.

To read more about this remarkable woman, go to Rachel Robinson.  She is so much more than Jackie Robinson's wife.

 

Victoria Woodhull   (1838-1927)    The first woman to run for president and the first female stock broker on Wall Street, Victoria Woodhull achieved remarkable success in finance, journalism, and politics. A spiritualist, suffragist, and free love advocate, Woodhull was an iconoclast who fought for her beliefs no matter how controversial they were at the time.

Victoria Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio on September 23, 1838 to parents Reuben Buckman Claflin and Roxanna Hummel. Woodhull’s childhood was a turbulent one: she received only three years of inconsistent schooling at Homer’s Methodist Church school before her family was forced to leave town under the suspicion that her father had purposefully burned down the mill he owned for the insurance payout. She then spent her early years taking part in her family’s traveling medicine show, telling fortunes and selling homemade medicines.

In 1853, 15-year-old Woodhull married a 28-year-old doctor, Canning Woodhull, and the couple had two children. Her husband was an alcoholic who neglected the family, so Woodhull worked as a seamstress, store clerk, and stage actress to support them. Woodhull’s younger sister, Tennessee Claflin, had set out on her own as a traveling fortune teller and healer. Woodhull eventually joined her sister, promoting herself as a “medical clairvoyant” who could cure the sick.

Tired of his drinking and adultery, Woodhull divorced her husband in 1865. She became an advocate of the free love movement, which argued that individuals should be able to remain with romantic partners as long as they chose and then move on, rather than marry for life. The free love movement also sought to destigmatize divorce and make it easier for wives to leave abusive husbands. In 1866, Woodhull married Union army veteran Colonel James Harvey Blood, after he sought out her services as a healer.

Woodhull and Claflin found success as mediums and their work introduced them to railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who hired clairvoyants to help him contact his recently deceased wife. Acting off financial advice from Vanderbilt, they grew their savings significantly and quickly amassed a fund of almost $700,000 (over $15 million in 2022). In 1870, they used that fund to start a brokerage, Woodhull, Claflin, and Company, making them the first women to operate a financial firm on Wall Street. Struck by the novelty of female stockbrokers, the press referred to them as “the Bewitching Brokers” and the “Queens of Finance.” But Woodhull sought to leverage her financial success to further her political agenda: improving rights for women, workers, and the poor.

She and her sister soon started publishing Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a newspaper that supported free love, women’s suffrage, and other progressive political reforms. The newspaper was notable for publishing the first English-language copy of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and for publishing an account of an affair between prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher and one of his congregants. The allegations raised controversy and led the newspaper to face criminal charges for obscenity.

Woodhull became involved in the women’s suffrage movement in 1869 and her success as a public speaker on behalf of the cause led her to take on prominent roles at suffrage conventions in the next few years. She made history in 1871 when she became the first woman to testify before a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Joined by fellow suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Isabella Beecher Hooker, Woodhull argued in front of the House Judiciary Committee that American women already possessed the right to vote under the 14^th and 15^th Amendments and called on them to draft legislation that clarified women’s right to vote. However, her argument failed to persuade the committee to take action.

Woodhull again made history in 1872, when she became the first woman to run for president of the United States. The new Equal Rights Party, which Woodhull was instrumental in establishing, nominated her for president and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass for vice-president, though he never acknowledged the nomination. In a letter to the New York Herald announcing her campaign (a full two years earlier), Woodhull wrote, “While others argued the equality of woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why woman should be treated socially and politically as a being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed.”

Her presidential campaign was not taken seriously by much of the public. Aside from her sex, Woodhull was not yet 35, the minimum age to assume the presidency. Further, Woodhull’s political reputation was declining: her radical views supporting free love, communism, and spiritualism alienated many and suffrage leaders distanced themselves from her. Further, her newspaper’s publication of the Beecher affair, and the resulting obscenity charges, meant that Woodhull faced legal trouble and scandal at this time, even spending Election Day in jail. The legal issues lasted for several years, forcing Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly to shut down publication.

Nearing bankruptcy and divorced from her second husband, Woodhull moved with Claflin to England in 1877. She married aristocratic banker John Biddulph Martin in 1883 to and tried to distance herself from her past controversies. She took part in the British women’s suffrage movement and together with her daughter published a journal, Humanitarian, from 1892 to 1901. The journal was known for promoting eugenics, the selective breeding and sterilization of a population intended to lead to desirable genetic characteristics. It was a popular school of thought in the late-nineteenth century, but one that discriminated against those thought to be inferior, whether because of race, ability, or another quality. Woodhull lived in the English countryside until her death in 1927 at the age of 88.

Works Cited

Feeney, Kathleen. "Woodhull, Victoria Claflin (1838-1927), reformer and first female presidential candidate." American National Biography. Feb. 1, 2000; Accessed Feb. 22, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1500771

“The First Woman To Run For President: Victoria Woodhull.” National Park Service. Jan. 25, 2021. Accessed Feb. 25, 2022. https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-first-woman-to-run-for-president-victoria-woodhull.htm

Horne, Eileen. “Notorious Victoria: the first woman to run for president.” The Guardian. July 20, 2016. Accessed Feb. 25, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/20/notorious-victoria-first-woman-run-for-us-president

Independent Staff. “Who was Victoria Woodhull? Meet the first woman to run for president of the United States.” Independent. Oct. 2, 2020. Accessed Feb. 25, 2022. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/woman-president-hillary-clinton-victoria-woodhull-voting-b744479.html

“Victoria Woodhull.” National Women’s Hall of Fame. Accessed Feb. 25, 2022. https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/victoria-woodhull/

Woodhull, Victoria C. “The Coming Woman.” New York Herald. April 2, 1870. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/6836678/victoria-woodhull-announces-her/

 

How to Cite this page

MLA – Brandman, Mariana. “Victoria Woodhull.” National Women’s History Museum, 2022. Date accessed.

Chicago – Brandman, Mariana. “Victoria Woodhull.” National Women’s History Museum. 2022. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/victoria-woodhull

Indra Nooyi  (1955-)

Indra Nooyi, a business leader and strategic thinker, is widely considered to be one of the top CEOs in the world for her leadership of the global behemoth PepsiCo for 12 years. She was the first woman of color and first immigrant to head a Fortune 50 company. Under her leadership, the company increased its profitability while also working to improve environmental sustainability and the healthiness of its food offerings. Nooyi is also a major philanthropist. Her donation to her alma mater Yale School of Management makes her the school’s largest alumni donor and the first woman to have endowed a Chair at a top business school.

Indra Krisnamurthy was born in Madras (now called Chennai), India, on October 28, 1955. She grew up in a close family with two siblings, her parents, and her grandparents. Her father was a bank official, and her mother was a house wife. Nooyi’s family was middle class and, like most of their neighbors, devout Hindus and relatively conservative. Nooyi remains close to her family. Her mother  has lived with her in the US and features prominently in Nooyi’s stories. Her sister Chandrika is also a successful businesswoman as well as a Grammy-nominated musical artist. A brilliant student in high school, Nooyi developed interests considered unusual for girls in that time and place. In addition to excelling at her studies in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, she competed on a cricket team and played guitar in a female rock band at Madras Christian College, from which she graduated in 1974 at the age of 18. She earned a spot at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where she received her MBA in 1976.

After graduation, Nooyi began her career as a business strategist. Her first job was at a British textile firm. She then moved to a product manager role at Johnson & Johnson in Mumbai. There she was charged with introducing menstrual pads, Stayfree, to India. This was a challenging task since India banned  direct advertising for such products. Nooyi devised a successful workaround, directly marketing the products to female college students.

She became convinced, however, that she needed a more global business education and applied to Yale School of Management after reading about it in a magazine. Somewhat to her surprise— since “it was unheard of for a good, conservative, south Indian Brahmin girl” to go overseas on her own—her parents supported her decision when she was accepted. Nooyi arrived in Connecticut in 1978 determined to succeed, describing her identity as an immigrant woman as her  “biggest internal driver.”

Nooyi worked as a receptionist to make ends meet at Yale.  After graduating in 1980 at age 24 with a Master’s degree in Public and Private Management, she worked at Boston Consulting Group as a strategy consultant for six years. She married fellow consultant Raj K Nooyi in 1981. The two remain married and have two daughters.

In 1986, Nooyi moved to the telecommunications company Motorola, where she worked first as an internal consultant in the automotive team before pivoting to broader corporate planning.  In 1990, she switched firms again, this time to the Swiss machinery firm ABB where she led corporate strategy, including integrating diverse product divisions around a coherent overall plan. She developed a reputation as a strategic long-term thinker and a skillful communicator, and just 14 years after graduating from Yale she was wooed simultaneously for executive-level posts at two top global companies: PepsiCo and General Electric. She chose Pepsi, reportedly because the CEO there convinced her she would be able to exert real influence.

In 1994, at age 38, Nooyi began working at Pepsi, the company for which she would become famous for leading. Unlike many of her predecessors in the top job, she never worked in sales, instead focused from the beginning on long-term planning.  As she rose through the ranks at Pepsi, she played an instrumental role in shaping global strategy, including through acquiring and selling off subsidiary companies. She led the sale of Yum! Brands (which includes restaurants KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut) in 1997 and the acquisitions of Tropicana in 1998,Quaker Oats in 2001, and Gatorade, also in 2001. These acquisitions consolidated profits and tightened focus at PepsiCo to the core business of beverages and snacks.

In 2001, Nooyi was promoted to President and Chief Financial Officer. She pushed PepsiCo to adjust its business to meet what she saw as shifting consumer demand for healthier eating. She also pushed PepsiCo to acknowledge the need to be a good corporate citizen on  environmental issues, coining the term “Performance with a Purpose” as Pepsi’s new mantra. Named CEO in 2006, Nooyi led Pepsi for 12 years, during which time the company’s annual net profit more than doubled, growing from $2.7 billion to $6.5 billion. Her strategic guidance was largely a success, with Pepsi offering more low-calorie options and cutting the corporate carbon footprint through leaner packaging and the use of renewable energy.

A third pillar of “Performance with a Purpose” focused on retaining talent at the company, including through paid parental leave for men and women alike. Nooyi spoke candidly during her years as CEO of the unrealistic expectations placed on women executives who are also caregivers. She has acknowledged that her own support system included her mother, husband, and staff at PepsiCo. Nooyi instructed staff to give her daughter permission to play a video game when she called the office only after confirming that her homework and chores were completed.

In a recently published book, My Life in Full (2021), Nooyi focuses on the topic of work-life balance, admitting that there were many times when she felt that she fell short as a mother. On Valentine’s Day 2022, she published a note to her husband Raj sharing credit for her successes with him: “the truth is, there is no such thing as balancing work and family. It's a constant juggling act. And many times, it's the people around us — like our life partners — who make this juggling possible. It's a reminder that family isn't female. Family is family.”

After retiring from Pepsi, Nooyi continues to serve on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards. Her legacy as a brilliant thinker and corporate strategist will likely continue to grow.

Works Cited

“Pepsi CEO is Now Yale Management School’s ‘Most Generous’ Alumni Donor,” by Robert Hackett, FORTUNE magazine, January 12, 2016.  Accessed February 8, 2022. https://fortune.com/2016/01/12/pepsi-yale-alumni-donor-nooyi/

“Companies Like Ours Are Little Republics,” by Andrew Edgecliff-Johnson, Financial Times, October 22, 2021. Accessed February 12, 2022. https://www.ft.com/content/3c59db07-4516-427e-abe7-600f8bab3751

“PepsiCo’s CEO Was Right. Now What?” by Jennifer Reingold, Fortune, June 5, 2015. Accessed February 16, 2022.  https://fortune.com/2015/06/05/pepsico-ceo-indra-nooyi/

“Snacks for a Fat Planet: PepsiCo Takes Stock of the Obesity Epidemic,” by John Seabrook,The New Yorker,  May 9, 2011. Accessed February 8, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/snacks-for-a-fat-planet

“Why Pepsi CEO Indra K. Nooyi Can’t Have it All,” by Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, July 1, 2014. Accessed February 8, 2022.  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/why-pepsico-ceo-indra-k-nooyi-cant-have-it-all/373750/

“Profile of Indra Nooyi,” Financial Times, November 6, 2010. Accessed February 12, 2022.

How to Cite this page

MLA – Johnson, Arbora. “Indra Nooyi.” National Women’s History Museum, 2022. Date accessed.

Chicago – Johnson, Arbora. “Indra Nooyi.” National Women’s History Museum. 2022. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/indra-nooyi 

Image Credit: Jeff Bedford, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12566849