Entrepreneur Brownie Wise: Selling Tupperware to America's Women in the 1950s

Abstract

Wise intuitively understood the postwar social and economic context— restrictive gender roles, increased consumerism, and the suburbanization of America—as she developed Tupperware’s unique distribution plan and corporate structure. Building and expanding on the idea of positive thinking, Wise’s marketing strategies of home parties, lavish incentives, and annual celebrations for top salespeople made Tupperware hugely successful. She promised women a way to balance society’s expectations of them as wives, mothers, and homemakers with their desire for economic autonomy and self-realization. Although Tupperware promoted female domesticity and affirmed traditional gender roles, it also gave millions of women the opportunity to be successful entrepreneurs outside the conventional work place, where men still dominated. 3 The Domestication of Plastic Tupperware was the right product at the right time. In the 1940s, Earl Tupper, a subcontractor for DuPont’s plastics war production, started tinkering with polyethylene to develop a product for the commercial market. By 1947, he had invented two new products: a tough, nonporous, and nonsmelling substance, unlike any other consumer plastic product, and the “Tupper seal, an airtight, watertight lid.” 4 The result was Tupperware: a line of pliable, shatterproof, heat-, and acid-resistant food storage containers. 5 Yet, beyond its usefulness, Tupperware was also marketed as a modern, beautiful, and glamorous object, the result of innovative technological development. Listing over one hundred patents filed domestically and