Breen's Holiday Reading (No.1: TUPPERWARE by A.J. Clarke)
morriss...@yahoo.com
URL: http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/11/10/clarke
"Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America" by Alison J.
Clarke
A smart, fun history considers the influence of those indispensable
containers on the culture of the nation.
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By Jonathan Groner
In 1942, a New Hampshire inventor named Earl Silas Tupper produced a
bell-shaped, flexible, injection-molded polyethylene container that
would quickly prove ideal for a multitude of kitchen uses. Tupperware
had made its first appearance, and as soon as World War II ended and an
era of American consumption could begin, the rest would be history. But
what kind of history?
That's not at all a frivolous question. In "Tupperware: The Promise of
Plastic in 1950s America," an entertaining study of the sociological
and psychological significance of the phenomenon, Alison J. Clarke, a
tutor in design history and material culture at the Royal College of
Art in London, breaks new ground in our understanding of 1950s culture.
She takes pains to debunk two commonly held scholarly interpretations
of those ubiquitous plastic bowls and presents her own quite convincing
neofeminist alternative. Tupperware, it turns out, makes an effective
prism through which to view aspects of the cultural development of the
nation in the latter portion of this century.
As Clarke points out, Tupperware couldn't possibly have achieved its
place in American life without the Tupperware party, that oft-ridiculed
but wildly successful suburban mainstay. The plastic containers,
however attractive and functional they may have been, were languishing
on the shelves until 1951, when Earl Tupper, in an act that, Clarke
says, showed either "inspired entrepreneurial vision or a reflection of
his desperation," handed over his entire sales effort to a neophyte
named Brownie Wise.
Wise, an impoverished single mother from Detroit with little but a
dream in her heart, was a true American original. She soon built a vast
nationwide network of women dedicated to selling Tupper's products out
of their homes. Her flamboyant style and the cult of personality she
encouraged came into conflict with Tupper's austere New England ways.
The clash ultimately got her fired; the "party plan" lives on to this
day as Tupperware goes international.
Clarke rejects two academic views of the Tupperware phenomenon, one
favorable and one critical. The positive one is that Tupperware became
an American icon entirely because it was "a simple, uncluttered
functional design, born of the modernist ethos 'Form Follows
Function.'" Not so, Clarke argues: The Museum of Modern Art may have
put Tupperware on exhibit in 1956, but American women wanted it in
their refrigerators because it conveyed middle-class status, because it
appealed simultaneously to frugality and ostentation and because their
friends and neighbors were selling it and buying it.
The negative view is that the Tupperware party was a vapid, stifling,
oppressive institution imposed upon passive American women by the
forces of mass culture and advertising. Clarke strongly dissents:
Actually, she says, Tupperware culture "offered an alternative to the
patriarchal structures of conventional sales structures, which many
women, completely alienated from the conventional workplace,
wholeheartedly embraced." And Tupperware events permitted many women of
the 1950s to gain their voices by speaking in public, thus developing
the self-esteem they had lacked. Fostered by Brownie Wise's elaborate
circles of reward for sales achievements, Tupperware's "self-help ethos
countered alienation and fostered self-determination."
The 1950s are undergoing a reappraisal, with some scholars concluding
that the drab black-and-white tones in which the movie "Pleasantville"
conveyed the decade don't do it justice and that a good deal more was
happening in those suburban developments than we had believed. Clarke's
work is a significant addition to the reconsideration of that
misunderstood decade.
salon.com | Nov. 10, 1999
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"Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America" has been
recommended by MORRISSEY BREEN, Daisycutter Sports