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

Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. By Alison J. Clarke. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. Pp. x+241. $24.95.

In the 1920s, the young Earl Tupper felt he was wasting his life working in his parents' commercial nursery in Shirley, Massachusetts. Like many an ambitious young American of his day, he imagined the possibilities of extricating himself from modest circumstances and an uninteresting occupation by becoming a great inventor. The exigencies of the Great Depression seemed simply to stoke his frustrations, and in the 1930s he filled diaries, notebooks, and other outlets with schemes, gadgets, and dreams in profusion. A job for a plastics molding company, helping to make sample designs and products, gave him access to the wonder materials of the twentieth century, as well as tools and machines with which to work them. The result of this combination of ambition and opportunity emerged in the early 1940s in the form of some kitchen containers molded of polyethylene. Within a few years, he had devised a clever means of shaping lids for these, and thus was born "Tupperware."

As a story of invention and technological development, that is just about the sum of the tale of Tupperware. But, as Alison Clarke makes so clear in this nicely written and researched work, this is really just the point at which things get interesting. As with so many of the articles of everyday twentieth-century life, the design and making of the artifact is a straightforward story compared to the work that went into selling it and, in this case as in others, making it into an icon of modernity. So distinctive was Tupperware's path to this status that most of us are in fact peculiarly aware of at least the most evident element of that path--the Tupperware party. The heart of Clarke's work is her account of the origins of this scheme and its elaboration and functions after 1948.

The center of the home party story is not Earl Tupper, but "a middle-aged, divorced mother from Detroit" (p. 94) by the name of Brownie Wise. While the "home party plan" was not Wise's invention (Clarke gives a fascinating account of home selling in the earlier part of the century), it was in her hands that it became the inseparable hallmark of Tupperware and the product's unstoppable vehicle to commercial and, indeed, cultural status. It is in fact this cultural role that is the primary subject of Clarke's study. The appearance and promotion of a product like Tupperware (which is actually a wide range of molded polyethylene articles) is a revealing episode in the conjunction of a range of forces at work in postwar America: the shaping of modern consumption patterns and expectations, the emergence of novel perceptions of women's roles in the economies of both the home and the larger community, and the ongoing revision of values attached to technology, novelty, and design.

Tupperware draws on the papers of Earl Tupper and Brownie Wise, along with records of the companies they founded and operated, and is thus rich in anecdotal detail and revealing glimpses of the principal characters. While Clarke does not stop at these sources (an intelligent use of contemporary news and magazine accounts is supplemented by interviews and recollections), she perhaps does hew to them a bit too closely. As wonderful as the colorful accounts of the Tupperware Jubilees are (and they certainly conjure an image of a very different America from today's--hilarious and frightening by turns), perhaps just a bit more attention could have been paid to providing readers with the basic facts of the Tupperware phenomenon: lacking are sales figures, comprehensive lists of Tupperware products, a discussion of product development in later years, or characterizations of the competition.

Nonetheless, Clarke does a wonderful job of linking her story to historians' discussions of a wide range of issues...