American Experience: Tupperware!

• On Amazon
• PBS site
• Director's site

PBS' American Experience: Tupperware! is a fascinating slice of American life in the 1950s. The story of plastic kitchenware is surprisingly off-the-wall; the interviews and stock footage are both strange and funny. I'd like more detail on the social and economic changes taking place in the postwar period, but the film is interesting and entertaining as it is.

The NY Times hits the major points of the film:

A reclusive inventor's plastic bowls rise to cultural icon status thanks to the marketing skills of a savvy single mother. The duo's unlikely partnership not only changes the way Americans store food, but creates the phenomenon of thousands of women making money by selling products from their living rooms.

The PBS promotional video and these three 1960s Tupperware ads show some great stock footage:

Fantasy & upward mobility

Earl Silas Tupper's patented designs drew critical acclaim but few sales. Brownie Wise had only an 8th-grade education and few assets, but her imagination and drive transformed Tupperware into an empire. The story sounds like corporate legend--but it's true. Wise was the prototype for a new upward mobility among "working-class women".

Wise’s concept was simple: Tupperware "parties" to pressure friends into purchasing. Creating a nice occasion was crucial to the message—both to partygoers and to saleswomen.

Wise herself had a strange history of embroidering her background. Her fantasies of wealth and comfort were specific, and she encouraged similar aspirations among her sales force:

Women who had worked in factories or five-and-tens or on farms were now dressed in white gloves and hats, self-assured, able to speak publicly with confidence. "It was a very privileged job ... Tupperware moved us up to being a lady," says dealer Clairie Brooks. Perhaps most important, Wise encouraged these women to believe in themselves and dream big. "Brownie had the ability to talk to your dreams. You could suddenly see yourself being something you hadn't thought about before," recalls salesperson Sylvia Boyd.

These fantasies played out at grand scale at the company’s annual Jubilee in Florida. The sales force was fêted and entertained at a giant playground for adults. In this video 600 Tupperware ladies dig for prizes including handbags, mink stoles, and double-boilers:

(More film clips)

Ah, '50s optimism

Tupperware! is based in part on Alison Clarke’s Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. One chapter is titled "The Feminization of Positive Thinking"; the PBS Tupperware! site also discusses the Tupperware phenomenon as part of a culture of positivity:

Dale Carnegie's incredibly popular book, How to Win Friends & Influence People (1936), suggested that striving was its own reward, and offered formulas for making people likeable and charmingly persuasive. It dominated the success literature for years --and it is still in print. By the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale was the big name in the field. His book, The Power of Positive Thinking, outsold every non-fiction book in the mid-1950s except the Bible.

I have to wonder how much of that optimism was black humor, or clutching at straws! As Virginia said on Teach Me Tonight,

"Leave It to Beaver" never showed the kids going through nuclear attack drills in their elementary schools. Real American kids did -- regularly.

Grade: B+. A documentary that amuses as much as it teaches. I just wish it had looked more directly at the macroscopic social changes of the time. Women were leaving the workplace after World War II; the industrial suburbs were taking on a new, upwardly-mobile character. Historian-director Laurie Kahn-Leavitt presents an enjoyably idiosyncratic view of Tupperware as a linchpin of cultural change, but I want more.

By the way, both the PBS website and the director's website are excellent.