Tupperware

Tupperware, invented in 1946 in the New England region of the United States by amateur designer Earl Silas Tupper, popularized polyethylene as a domestic plastic used for food storage and as fancy goods in the home. Using the party-plan direct-sales method, Tupperware and Tupperware parties came to define a new form of postwar sociality based around informal food consumption and conspicuous consumerism. The Tupperware party began in the United States and expanded to Europe and Japan in the 1960s. Today, Tupperware remains a globally available product whose nomenclature has become the generic term for plastic containers. Corporate statistics estimate that a Tupperware party takes place somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds, and the traditional home-based party has spread to Internet distribution and virtual online equivalents. The “cult” of Tupperware consumption and the nostalgia invoked by its association with idealized domestic 1950s suburban lifestyle has led to its more recent ironic appropriation by contemporary transgender, gay, and alternative groups.

[Page 1485]Feminist historians and sociologists initially considered the Tupperware phenomenon as indicative of the capitalist creation of the optimal passive female consumer, patronized and disempowered by corporate manipulation and advertising and duped into selling and buying a product through exploitation of her own grassroots domestic and social relations. However, later scholarship in consumer history and material culture (incorporating methodologies such as oral history, ethnography, diary analysis) challenged this account of consumer culture as overly simplistic, asserting instead a model for the understanding of consumption as a form of modernity and the role of material culture in affecting, or mediating, social change. Tupperware, despite the visual rhetoric of its early advertising campaigns (which depicted exclusively white, married, middle-class mothers and generic nuclear families), was sold and consumed by an ethnically and socially diverse female population for whom access to paid work, formal education, and the postwar culture of consumption was otherwise denied.

In 1956, Tupperware, an injection-molded plastic object, was featured in New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) permanent display of “good design for 50 cents” and celebrated as the epitome of modernist logic borne, technological determinism, and rational design. Formal representations of the product avoided mention of the feminized business model of sales that underpinned the mass consumption of Tupperware in 1950s America or the cult of consumption that made it so popular.

Despite its acclaim in reputable institutions such as MOMA, the earliest advertising copy, packaging, and representation of Tupperware actively avoided the term plastic altogether, because the substance had negative consumer associations. The DuPont chemical company, a main supplier of raw materials for the Tupper Corporation, incorporated Tupperware into its own advertising as it strove to expand its postwar corporate profile as a supplier of domestic consumer goods. Earl Tupper, who had developed the product during war-time experimentation sponsored by DuPont, described the wares as being formed from “Poly-T: Material of the Future” to avoid association with plastic as a culturally ambivalent material that sat uneasily alongside the traditional ceramic tableware of the average middle-class home. Despite the ingenuity of the product's semi-airtight seal, the Tupper Corporation failed to sell its opaque white, flexible, lightweight bowls and containers in any large quantity until 1949, when the party-plan sales method—in which wares were sold to a collected group of women in a volunteer hostess's home—was introduced.

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