Rachel Greenfield is the author of the new biography Rose Knox: How One Woman Mixed Kitchen and Boardroom to Remold an American Business. Greenfield spent many years as a publishing and digital business executive. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of Rose Knox (1857-1950), the businesswomen behind Knox Gelatine?
A: When I went to work at Time Inc. in the 1970s, people viewed women in business management as trailblazers and a new phenomenon. Men certainly acted that way, as business was often done at male-only clubs. As a history major, I knew that there had to be women in business before us, but no one had written about them.
When I found Rose Knox, and learned the persona she had shown to men and women, the statements she had made, and the positive reception she had received to her portrayal melding domesticity and business, I knew I had to write her back into history.
Q: How did you research her life, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I was lucky enough to get an introduction to the Knox family from a librarian in Johnstown, N.Y., Rose Knox’s hometown. The family took me up to the attic of her summer house, which still held all her personal and business documents, letters, pictures, and newspaper clippings.
I then spent eight years looking at these documents and pictures, all of which had been stored, in no particular order, in the unheated, and unairconditioned, attic. I put them in order, searched for greater context, and immersed myself in the places Mrs. Knox had lived, including Mansfield, Ohio, where she had grown up.
My friends and I also made the recipes which ended up in the book, in gelatine-recipe-making parties that were great fun.
Much of Mrs. Knox’s story was new to me since she had been ignored since her death in 1950.
The thing that most surprised me was that, when she took over Knox Gelatine in 1908 after the death of her husband, she didn’t tell anyone she was managing the company. At that time, respectable middle- and upper-class women weren’t supposed to be running the business of a major, national company.
I knew that, in 1911, she had attended the American Specialty Manufacturers Association (later the Grocery Manufacturers Association) annual meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. What I didn’t know was that the men attending thought her husband was still alive, even though he had already been dead for three years. Mrs. Knox didn’t reveal her presidency to American consumers until 1914.
Q: The author Julie Des Jardins said of the book, “Rachel Greenfield reintroduces us to Rose Knox, a woman who Americans once knew and yet has been lost in modern memory.” How well known was Knox in her day, and why do few know about her now?
A: Mrs. Knox was one of the best-known American businesswomen of the 1920s and 1930s, and her national recognition continued until she died in 1950.
She put her name on Knox Gelatine’s ads which ran in women’s magazines read by tens of millions of women every month. Articles were written about her in national magazines and syndicated in newspapers throughout the country.
Papers even noted when she took a cruise. Mrs. Knox spoke on radio. The company printed millions of recipe and nutrition pamphlets with her name on the front which it distributed in home economics classes. American women knew Mrs. Knox and her values.
When Mrs. Knox died in 1950, women’s history was not a field and the almost exclusively male historians chronicling business history were not paying attention to the few women who ran businesses. It has taken until the 21st century for historians to begin to excavate these women from historical oblivion.
Q: What do you see as Rose Knox’s legacy today?
A: Rose Knox appeared to do it all. She was written about and visible across America as an attractive, femininely dressed woman who said “every woman can do more than she possibly thinks she can.”
Mrs. Knox believed that all women should be able to support themselves if they needed to. She portrayed a female business executive who was both devoted to her family, home, and community, AND devoted to her business. She spoke out for women’s abilities in business, saying business management just took common sense, which all women had.
Mrs. Knox left a legacy of doing it all – an aspiration which many American women still have. I believe that, for white women, she was the first 20th-century, national, public example of that. She also left us many surprisingly delicious gelatine recipes.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My goal in writing this biography of Rose Knox was to write her back into history. I plan to spend the next year speaking about her wherever I can so that women in America realize the sort of example our grandmothers had in front of them when they were growing up.
History leaves us visions of who we can be. Understanding Mrs. Knox’s legacy gives us an important perspective on our own expectations and the way others expect us to behave now.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There are many other women, of all races, who have run local, small, and nationally large impactful businesses. They have been marginalized because either they chose to remain invisible or they were such an anomaly during their time that, when they died, no one knew what to do with their accomplishments and personal stories.
Women have made up over 50 percent of the U.S. population since 1950. It is important to revive their stories as executives as well as workers, and claim our place as an important majority voice.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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