Health Hints by the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Co. was published during a time when women were still expected to oversee the majority of the household's work and, simultaneously, look after the health of all family members. Though more Canadian women entered the paid labour force in the 1920s, many still spent their lives as housewives, tending to the home, their children, and their husbands. As such, information about health and wellness continued to be relayed through women. Though men needed health tips just as much as women did, they were not advertised to them to the same extent. Men, typically, did not pick up cookbooks or pay much attention to advertisements that promoted a vegetable compound for women's troubles. Generally, it was not considered men's responsibility to learn about their own health or take care of children, so there was no need for them to be educated on balanced meals or how to cure a cold. In many Canadian families, women were the cooks and looked after family members when they fell ill. 

In the United States, the Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis that triggered an economic depression, and it is the event that prompted Lydia E. Pinkham to start manufacturing and selling her compounds. Without this desperate need for supplementary income, Pinkham may not have started her business which became so popular among women. Immediately after the end of the First World War, Canada went through its own economic recession as the country dealt with the costs of the war and shifting from a wartime to a peacetime economy. As the 1920s went on, the economy recovered and many Canadians began to live and spend quite lavishly. Just two years after Health Hints was published, the crash of 1929 occurred and then the Great Depression began. At the time of its publication, the book would have been useful for all women, including the working class as it prided itself on providing affordable treatments, as well as tips for living a healthy life that did not require copious amounts of money. The Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Co. seemed to be conscious of women who could not afford a variety of different products to appear healthy, so it provided many lifestyle habits that could be incorporated into their day-to-day lives at virtually no cost. This information would have been very useful throughout the Great Depression. 

Along with more women entering the paid labour force in the 1920s, women also achieved some important political rights, including the right to be included as "persons" within the British North America Act. While Health Hints perpetuates the stereotypical housewife role that was assigned to women at the time, the book also encourages women to take charge of their own healthy and happiness. By recommending various tips to enhance women's bodily and mental health, it may have given women the opportunity to feel a greater sense of importance, and that their health concerns mattered. While men, typically, were entrusted with the family's financial health, women had the significant task of looking after the family's physical and emotional health. Though the book continued to support the traditional gender roles of the male breadwinner and female helpmeet, it may have offered women a measure of comfort because the book was tailored to their needs and offered guidance for some of the concerns that many women encountered in their daily lives. 

Pinkham’s vegetable compound emerged at a time when women's health concerns were often not taken seriously by the medical community. In the later 19th century, various aches, pains, and emotional concerns were often misdiagnosed as "hysteria," a sex-specific disorder that was thought to be rooted in the reproductive system. A variety of symptoms, including severe depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses could fall under the umbrella of hysteria. Some physicians thought that brain surgery and hysterecomies were cures for hysteria. A tonic such as Pinkham's vegetable compound may have alleviated some women's concerns that they were chronically ill with hysteria because the tonic promised to cure a range of ailments. It should be noted, however, that there is no proof that the compound had any curative properties and may simply have worked as a placebo, giving women hope that their illness were temporarily and curable.