I found the PBS documentary on Tupperware to be thoroughly entertaining. Yes, the archive footage as kitsch was a bit fomulaic, but the personalities of the history - whether the key figures of Tupperware inventer Earl Tupper and sales genius Brownie Wise or the everyday women who sold Tupperware - are fascinating subjects. Still, I can’t help but wonder about the thesis of the film, namely that Tupperware was a movement of mass female empowerment. In the words of the documentarist Laurie Kahn-Leavitt,
The Tupperware Ladies… were hugely successful. In the 1960s, `70s, and `80s, they spread out to every continent across the globe, offering women from India to Peru to Australia what they’d been offered: a chance to work part-time from home and gain some economic power without threatening their husbands.
Thus in the documentary you get talking head testimony from women who paid for their mothers’ medical bills with Tupperware parties, or were able to skirt the anger of the household patriarch with spare cash of her own. But what of the countless women who felt compelled to buy overpriced plasticware out of social obligation? Or those encouraged to host parties that did not generate much further interest in the sales chain? Overlooked in the women-being-successful narrative of Kahn-Leavitt’s history is any sense that Tupperware and the sales model it represented (adopted by Avon and Mary Kay) is one big fat Ponzi scheme. The big money in Tupperware sales comes from being in early on the chain of ever expanding house sales. And not to channel Naomi Klein, but can we not think of a better way to empower the economic life of women in Peru?
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