Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (review)

In 1956 New York’s Museum of Modern Art featured Tupperware products in an exhibition of modern design. Critics praised the household containers for their purity of design and functional form. Despite such accolades, the appeal of Tupperware, Alison J Clarke contends in her insightful new study, lay less in its aesthetics or its utility than in its promise of a more rewarding life to suburban women. She argues that “it was Tupperware’s appeal to sociality and the valorization of women’s domestic lives, in its objects, sales system, and corporate culture, that led to its success.” (5) Clarke is tutor in design history and material culture at the Royal College of Art in London, and both fields, as well as the burgeoning literature on women and consumer culture, inform her history of Tupperware.

Clarke draws on Earl Tupper’s diaries and invention notebooks, company records and promotional materials, and oral histories from Tupperware dealers, in her examination of one of the postwar era’s most unique products and corporations. She argues that Tupperware’s success resulted from “a dynamic process between production and consumption” (56), represented respectively by Earl Tupper’s inventive genius and Brownie Wise’s marketing genius. From polyethylene, an odorless, flexible, and lightweight industrial plastic, Tupper created in the 1940s a durable container that, combined with his patented “Tupper seal,” provided airtight storage. Despite the product’s undeniable utility, however, American women did not rush out to buy Tupperware. One problem was the need to demonstrate the seal Enter Brownie Wise and the home party Astonished at the sales figures of this Detroit single mother, Tupper appointed her to develop a home party plan for the company. Wise refined the plan into a phenomenal sales machine, gave thousands of women jobs, and made Tupperware literally a household word. Clarke asserts that Wise and the party plan were just as important as Tupper’s seal to the company’s success Recognizing this, Tupper withdrew his product from stores and in 1951 made Wise a vice president and the public face of Tupperware.

Tupper and Wise made an odd but effective business couple. Clarke demonstrates that they represented different attitudes toward consumption. Tupper, Clarke claims, had less in common with the industrial designers among whom MOMA placed him than with the visionary inventor-engineers of the nineteenth century He believed that Tupperware would transform society and enhance consumers’ lives. He saw consumption of his products as a way to inject traditional values into the modern household; the reusable containers promoted thrift rather than the waste associated with consumer culture Wise, in contrast, viewed consumption itself as transformative and embraced the good life promised by consumer culture in the postwar era She consumed lavishly herself, showered expensive gifts on her dealers, and promoted Tupperware as part of an affluent suburban lifestyle. Clarke argues that Tupperware’s success came from its ability to resolve the tensions between these two views of consumption It appealed to postwar women as both a thrifty product and a symbol of material abundance.

Clarke suggests that Tupperware prospered on such seeming contradictions. The Tupperware party blurred the lines between consumption and socializing. The product line and promotional materials defined women domestically even as the company offered them jobs and encouraged them to think of Tupperware as a career. If Tupperware still privileged women as consumers, it nevertheless provided real financial opportunities.

Tupperware’s history challenges the academic stereotype of the postwar suburban housewife. Clarke demonstrates that the sales force included blue-collar and lower middle-class women, divorcees, single mothers, and ethnic and racial minorities. Moreover, Tupperware employees did not work simply for “pin money”; many dealers, like Wise herself, were the sole support of their families. Clarke suggests that Tupperware, which enshrined the domestic ideal but also valued women’s labor, offered a more realistic alternative than Betty Friedan’s call for women to abandon the home for a professional career.

Certainly Wise herself...