Tupperware: context for COL49, SLSL Intro
pynchonoid
pynchonoid at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 27 10:50:46 CST 2003
"One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a
Tupperware party [...]"
COL49, p. 1
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Amstdy at h-net.msu.edu (January, 2003)
Alison J. Clarke. _Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic
in 1950s
America_. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1999. x + 241
pp. Illustrations, bibliographic references, index.
$29.95 (cloth),
ISBN 1-56098-827-4; $16.95 (paper), ISBN
1-56098-920-3.
Reviewed for H-Amstdy by Adam Golub
<golub at mail.utexas.edu>,
Department of American Studies, The University of
Texas at Austin
The OTHER Other Fifties
In recent years, two separate impulses have spurred
much of the
scholarship on 1950s America. The first has been the
drive to
demystify the predominant image of the decade as a
postwar golden
age of consensus and contentedness. This image,
recurring in popular
culture and still invoked by contemporary politicians
and social
critics, limns the fifties as innocent "Happy Days,"
an era of
suburban solace and national unity that was shattered
by the
cultural and political excesses of the 1960s.
Scholars have taken
pains to recover the "other" fifties, showing us how
social ferment,
civic anxiety, and cultural transformation better
typified this far
more complex decade.[1] What's more, several observers
have disputed
the notion that the 1950s and the 1960s were radically
discontinuous
periods in American history. Seeking to unearth the
"seeds of the
sixties," such work traces the way minor cultural
currents of the
fifties, like the power critiques advanced by C.
Wright Mills, or
the multicultural themes engaged by black and Jewish
writers, became
major social preoccupations of the 1960s.[2]
A second impulse behind fifties scholarship has been
the critical
need to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the
cold war. A
panoply of studies have contended that the politics of
the cold war
were not just made manifest in U.S. foreign relations
and domestic
McCarthyism. Rather, the rhetoric and ideology of the
cold war
impacted myriad aspects of American society, from home
life to youth
culture to literature and film.[3] Rejoining this
school of "cold
war culture" studies, still other scholars question
whether postwar
political imperatives really enjoyed such hegemonic
influence. Their
critical stance urges us to view the cold war as only
a partial
explanation for the changed culturescape of 1950s
America, as only
one factor to be considered side by side with the
demographic
shifts, economic developments, artistic innovations,
and social
crises of the era.[4]
These two scholarly trends, along with their attendant
internal
debates, have certainly advanced a more sophisticated
portrait of
the 1950s than the one lodged in our popular
imagination. Yet in
their haste to elucidate the other "Fifties" or the
other "Cold
War," commentators run the risk of recontaining the
period within
these familiar categories, while their actual subjects
languish in
the shadow of larger interpretive discussions about
the relationship
between politics and culture. How refreshing, then, to
find a study
of postwar society willing to work unconstrained by
either critical
context, ardent to converge relentlessly on its
singular subject,
yet surprisingly capable of anatomizing the fifties in
new and
compelling ways. Alice Clarke's _Tupperware: The
Promise of Plastic
in 1950s America_, focuses our attention on an
everyday object that
was at once "mundane and extraordinary": plastic
kitchenware.
Seeking to understand how Tupperware has achieved such
iconic status
in the United States, Clarke focuses on the artifact's
cultural
context as much as its business and technical history.
The result is
a deft interpretation of the "Tupperization" of 1950s
America, as
Clarke examines the various processes of cultural
mediation, such as
suburbanization, postwar shifts in gender relations,
and changing
consumption practices, that transformed Tupperware
into more than
just a curious design artifact.
According to Clarke, functionalism alone cannot
explain the cultural
significance of Tupperware. [...] Tupper, a utopian
thinker and impassioned
entrepreneur, envisioned a wasteful society
transformed by his
sleek, economical, unbreakable home products. However,
sales
flagged, and Tupper grappled with a means of turning
Tupperware from
a mere novelty into a household staple.
Salvation came in the form of Brownie Wise, a divorced
single mother
from Detroit who was selling Tupperware door to door
to pay her
son's medical bills and supplement her secretarial
salary. She had
logged considerable sales figures, and an intrigued
Earl Tupper
sought to discover her secret. Wise had shrewdly
recognized the
enormous home demonstration potential of Tupperware,
and the
undeniable success of her direct sales approach
convinced Tupper to
withdraw his kitchenware from retail outlets in 1951
and distribute
the product exclusively in the form of the Tupperware
party. In
particular, the burgeoning suburbs of the 1950s were
targeted as a
"picnic ground for direct selling" (p. 100). [...]
Wise, an adherent to the self-help psychology of
"positive thinking"
that pervaded much of postwar American culture,
devised a flexible,
organic, horizontal management system aimed at
empowering her
predominantly female sales force. She created a potent
public image
of THP as a "woman's world" (even though 75 percent of
the
executives were male), and THP's corporate mythology
promulgated
stories of "shrinking violets" transformed into
self-assured
individuals by their experience as Tupperware dealers.
[...] She was the first woman ever
to be featured on the cover of _Business Week_. [...]
Despite Tupperware's success, the partnership between
Tupper and
Wise did not last. She was dismissed in 1958,
following a series of
contentious battles with Tupper that commenced after
the company
founder learned that Wise had purportedly used a
Tupperware bowl as
a dog dish. Soon after Wise's dismissal, Tupper sold
the company,
renounced his U.S. citizenship over frustration with
tax laws, and
eventually moved to Costa Rica. His subsequent
autobiographical
accounts of Tupperware's history never even mentioned
Wise and her
impact on the company. [...]
...enjoy!
-Doug
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