“Soap and Hope”: Direct Sales and the Culture of Work and Capitalism in Postwar America

In 2015 more than twenty million Americans worked in direct selling.¹ Associated with corporations such as Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay, these men and women engage daily in acts of person-to-person commerce at customers’ homes, at their workplaces, or even at their places of worship. This army of salespeople, commonly referred to as distributors, peddle a wide variety of products that range from soap to nutritional supplements to insurance. One can even host a party to sell stun guns. Distributors often recruit and train their friends and neighbors to enlist in direct selling as well. Direct sellers are the engine of a $36 billion retail channel in the United States today, but they have no employment contract and receive no wages. Rather, today’s direct sellers participate in a curious mode of independent salesmanship that has at once deep roots in the history of American commerce and close connections to the more recent rise of casual labor, permanent contracting, and the “gig” economy.

Direct sales firms use a model of independent labor that can be traced back to the peddlers of the colonial period. In their nineteenth-century incarnation as commercial travelers, direct sellers acted as agents on behalf of the firm. They worked outside the direct supervision of managers and did not adhere to a wage-based model of labor. Peddlers and commercial travelers usually acquired goods from the company on credit. They then sold a product to a customer, repaid any credit due the manufacturer, and retained the balance as profit. With the creation of the New Deal, however, executives in the twentieth century began to recognize the value of such a semi-autonomous salesforce as a low-cost source of labor free of many of the financial and regulatory burdens imposed on the employer by the New Deal state. Largely in response to the threat of labor regulations, including the Social Security and Fair Labor Standards Acts, direct sales firms formalized in the 1930s a model of semiattached, casual labor that would become central to the late twentieth-century service economy.

“‘Soap and Hope’: Direct Sales and the Culture of Work and Capitalism in Postwar America” traces the evolution of direct sales as a commercial sector and as a category of work across the twentieth century. Analyzing the organizational structure of direct sales firms—including the Amway Corporation, Avon Products Inc., and Tupper-ware, among others—as well as their recruitment and managerial strategies, I show how these firms merged an older tradition of selling and distribution with new forms of corporate organization and ideology in the twentieth century. In so doing, I draw the history of direct sales—which, for the post-World War II period, has tended to focus on the relationship among gender, business, and culture—into a larger historiographical discussion about the history of American capitalism.²

The history of selling and sales work is central to our understanding of American capitalism. Sellers and sales institutions shaped consumer preferences, collected information about markets and customers, and drove the levels of demand necessary to the rise of the modern industrial economy. Marketing and advertising firms, sales and distribution outfits, and sellers themselves—as William Leach, Roland Marchand, Pamela Laird, and Walter Friedman have all shown—were as important to the transition to twentieth-century corporate capitalism as manufacturing firms.³ My research shows that the history of sales is equally necessary to understand the subsequent transition away from an industrial economy centered on the production of manufactured goods to one organized around service and knowledge work. My dissertation thus builds on the established literature in the history of sales, and moves in new directions by arguing that the decentralized structure of direct sales; its reliance on casual, often low-pay, and “feminized” labor; its home-based business model; and its emphasis on social networking, in fact, exemplify the trajectory of advanced capitalism in the United States.

In addition to offering a textured, historical account of the making of flexible labor, I probe direct sales for what...