TUPPERWARE is the story of how the plastic food storage bowls with tight fitting lids that were invented by Earl Silas Tupper in the 1950's and marketed to and by housewives to other housewives by a self-taught marketing wiz named Brownie Wise, began and expanded, leading to what is now considered a global business. Sadly, there is evidence that after Brownie managed to break through obstacles for women to earn money and work, talking to husbands so that they would "allow" their wives to earn, not "bread and butter" but "cake," holding contests and fun jamborees for her mostly female sales force, came the day when Earl Silas Tupper decided that she needed to be - disappeared.
The end of Brownie Wise's reign is a bit of a mystery with hints of a falling out, serious undiagnosed illness that was probably exhaustion (though sometimes I wonder about hyperactivity when I hear of people who never seem to be without energy), or some other medical malady that prevented her from working. Her name was no longer referenced at the company and it was as if she had never existed. (Shameful!)
She tried, however, to start up her own make-up empire that also used the chain sales and party plan technique that she had been so successful with for Tupperware, and failed. The Tupperware people stayed with that company for many reasons, including their efforts to get where they had gone, and perhaps the saddest, but most predictable thing for the era in which is was standard operating procedure for women employs to be paid less than men just because they were women and assumed to be less deserving, is that for all her work she did not retire rich.
Brownie knew that a woman could not approach a bank for a loan and that some of her most successful sales women would have husbands who would get with the program. In some interviews of senior women who began with the company early, we learn of men who quit those "bread and butter" jobs for the speculation of greater wealth.
Though this DVD doesn't get feminist, I couldn't help but think of the issues of equality in the workplace and in education, and all the changes that have occurred to us as a nation since the 1950's, so that a stay at home wife and mother is today pretty rare, especially once the children are in school. I've personally always been skeptical of party plan and chain sales companies since being invited to them to buy things like candles, lingerie, and so on has always felt like pressure to buy things in order to keep a friendship.
As a woman and as a genealogist, the absence of records for women is often an issue, a roadblock that must be gotten around. In a sexist cultures women are simply not thought of as significant enough to be recorded. Example: Baptismal records that only record the name of the father since he "owns" the child. The many death records I've seen where the wife is listed as "Mrs. Jones" without a first name, or even references to her parents, as if the woman was an orphan, when she was not. (How could her husband, the death certificate reporter not know this information?)
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