The Queen of Tupperware

Who ushered housewives into the workforce and plastic storage containers into America’s kitchens? Today on the show, the rise and fall of Brownie Wise, the woman behind Tupperware's plastic empire — and a revolution in women’s work. Guests: Alison Clarke, author of Tupperware, the Promise of Plastic in 1950s America Bob Kealing, author of Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  All right, all right, all right. Time for my nightly ritual. It's the end of the day and I'm doing what I do every night, putting away the leftover food from dinner so I can repurpose it for my son's lunch the next day. Chickpeas, peas. Standing in front of my Tupperware drawer, which is basically a repurposed shoe rack in my kitchen closet. Problem is, you know, living in an apartment, I wouldn't mind having like an entire closet full of Tupperware, but that's... Oh, boy. That's not what I have. I'm playing the game of finding the right lid for the right Tupperware. We've all been there, right? It's fair to say that as a young mom,

• 0:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Tupperware is a big part of my life. I'm out here saving 10 peas and half a carrot because you know what that is? Tomorrow's snack. But if I'm honest, Tupperware has been a key constant my whole life. Extra pretzels, but the bag broke. Throw it in some Tupperware. You know, we don't want it getting stale. Dinner at my in-laws' house. I'm coming home with Tupperware. Chances are you too have used Tupperware at some point in your life. It's a part of our daily lives. And it's so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget that Tupperware, which has come to mean all kinds of food storage, is actually an iconic American brand. And when it first hit the market in the mid-20th century, Tupperware revolutionized American kitchens.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  This is Tupperware. The airtight plastic containers that keep good foods fresher, longer. You can freeze it, stack it, any which way. So salads keep there and gelatin desserts keep there.

• 2:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Tupperware came onto the scene after World War II, right when many American women were leaving wartime factory jobs to stay home as wives and mothers. More and more, modern kitchens had electric stoves and refrigerators, and the airtight Tupperware bowl became a big hit. And for decades, until the 1980s, when Tupperware's patented lid expired, it was the only game in town, a product marketed to and sold by women. But lately, it's been in the news for another reason.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  The iconic seller of storage containers and kitchenware had tipped into bankruptcy under a mountain of debt.

• 2:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2024, Tupperware filed for bankruptcy. And here's Alina Seljuk has more.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Over the years, the company's debts became nearly double its assets.

• 2:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Meet Alina Seljuk, one of NPR's business correspondents.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Hello, hello, through-line listeners.

• 2:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  So, Alina, you covered that Tupperware bankruptcy story, and normally, you would just move on. But you reached out to us because you found out there was more to the Tupperware story that doesn't get talked about much.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Yes, and it's more of a who. Basically, the reason why many of us still call everything we put our leftovers in "Tupperware" is because of one woman.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  I imagine some of you have heard me say that I don't have much confidence in luck. I never depend on it.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Her name is Brownie Wise.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  I'd rather put my trust in hard work.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  She became one of the first female corporate executives in US history.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  Today, we talk about women leaning in. Brownie Wise climbed the very highest part of the high dive and jumped in.

• 3:42Speaker 06

  She becomes, for lack of a better word, a Tupperware queen.

• 3:46Speaker 07

  Brownie Wise was a figure that had a kind of daunting power over other women.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  You're at your very best at a Tupperware party, aren't you?

• 3:57Speaker 00

  She was a shepherd who led a generation of housewives into the workforce in this quiet but powerful revolution.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  You're in your happiest frame of mind. Your appearance is at its best. You're alert and cheerful. This makes people receptive to you.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  And somehow, even though I cover big brands and the consumer economy for a living, I had never heard of her. So I went on a treasure hunt.

• 4:24Speaker 06

  Close the door, come in. Close the door. There's a lot of the law.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  There's a lot of cool stuff here. I went rummaging through the Tupperware archives at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

• 4:36Speaker 06

  OK, we're looking at an entire cabinet filled with various kinds of Tupperware.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  And my guide was historian and curator Faith Davis-Ruffens.

• 4:46Speaker 06

  That ranged from little cups to bigger storage bowls.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  To cake carriers, skewers, salt and pepper shakers, a rainbow of plasticware. And then there she was, the woman behind it all in a newspaper article from 1954. Wow.

• 5:09Speaker 06

  Here's Brownie Wise selling career for housewives. Crack salesman, glib, happy-go-lucky, and everybody's pal. A stock figure in American folklore, but always he's been male. Brownie Wise is plowing the ground for women.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  It felt so monumental to have this woman leading sales at a top American company at a time when the female ideal was a child-rearing, apron-wearing suburban wife. So that's already a big deal. And then she does it by essentially leaning into that very female ideal. This idea that, yes, a woman's place is in the home, but her living room can also be a sales floor. And her customers are other women just like her.

• 5:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's fascinating. It's like fighting fire with fire.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been calling it subversive domesticity. This army of housewives earning money, building community, growing their independence.

• 6:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Subversive domesticity. I like that. For women, by women, under the leadership of a woman, but only if it adheres to the quote-unquote "woman's domain of the home." Okay, I got it.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Exactly. So why isn't Brownie Wise in the history books more often, right? Well, turns out, Brownie vanished from Tepperware history almost as quickly as she rose to the top. She went from a luminary to a cast-off, and her legacy was quite literally buried away.

• 6:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and today on Throughline, NPR's Alina Seljuk brings us the story of the rise and fall of Brownie Wise, the woman behind Tepperware's plastic empire, who revolutionized women's work and America's kitchens forever.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Hi, this is Kirsty from Huntsville, Alabama, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 7:06Speaker 03

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• 8:10Speaker 05

  Part one, Wonder Bowl.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  Ours is a rich and variant land. We are a prospering people wherever we live or earn our livelihood.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  America was booming after World War II.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  All of us have the possibility of living one-third better than we do right now.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Wartime rations gave way to abundance on store shelves. Cities sprouted webs of suburbs. A renaissance of the single-family home and planned communities subsidized by government loans.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  It means more jobs, better housing, greater security, greater comforts for more and more of our people.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  During the war, millions of women went to work for the first time, stepping up as men got drafted away. Think Rosie the Riveter, building ships, or planes, or tanks. But now, the war was over. Tanks were not needed, and men who were returning wanted their jobs back. Women got offered a new American dream.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  And as responsible as anyone else for the care of these bounties is the woman in the American home.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  This was the baby boom era. At its center was the lovely housewife.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  In this kitchen that has made her task of food preparation so much lighter, the housewife can share her family's enjoyment at mealtime.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  She was a gracious caretaker. Meal Planning presents the homemaker with her best opportunities to express her talent. A modern woman whose fridge now had a freezer, whose stove was electric, and steel was stainless.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Mixers, blenders, rotisseries, and many others, all of your helpful service.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Her freedom, she could buy it.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Freedom from unnecessary drudgery. Freedom to go shopping when the urge hits you, or when there's a sale going on.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  She was the ideal 1950s woman.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  I stood in the kitchen, so efficient-looking, so sleek and shining. That, I thought, would look like an ordinary kitchen to anyone else. But to me, it's a magic carpet.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  And she was a fantasy.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  A fantasy that Brownie Wise had cultivated since before the war.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  It will be a privilege to polish glasses there in that pool of sunlight.

• 10:41Speaker 07

  She wrote these kind of very touching stories about idyllic domesticity for Detroit news under the pseudonym Hibiscus.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  This is Allison Clark.

• 10:53Speaker 07

  I'm the author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Allison says this magical domestic bliss that Brownie Wise was writing about in the late 1930s and 40s as Hibiscus, it was nowhere close to her real life.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  I, because I was fortunate enough to be born an American, can plan color schemes and landscaping for a new home.

• 11:16Speaker 07

  She obviously constructed imaginary worlds to survive.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Soon after Brownie moved to Detroit with her husband in the late 1930s, things got ugly.

• 11:26Speaker 07

  He was a drunk, drunken violin and kind of every other stereotype of the neglectful husband.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Determined to make a better life for her and her young son, Brownie divorced her husband in 1941. This was still somewhat taboo at the time, but she'd seen it play out, and she knew that sometimes you've got to seek your fortunes alone.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Brownie Wise was a lonely child. Her parents divorced when she was very young.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  This is Bob Keeling. He's the author of Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built and Lost a Tupperware Party Empire.

• 12:02Speaker 05

  She was raised by a strong-willed mother who would go out on the road and give speeches for the Hatmakers Union.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Brownie's mother worked at a local hatmaker's shop, and after getting involved with her local union, she became a full-time labor organizer promoting unionization and supporting strikes.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  She took Brownie with her, and Brownie showed a real proclivity towards being able to motivate people.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  By the age of 14, Brownie was on the road, giving motivational speeches to workers alongside her mother. She learned grit, self-confidence, and faith in the power of hard work. And so after her own divorce, Brownie got down to it. She picked up a job as a secretary and continued writing and peddling the domestic dream as Hibiscus.

• 12:48Speaker 05

  Just trying to make money for her son and herself.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  But she wanted, she needed more than the minimum, and opportunity came knocking at her door. Quite literally.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  One day, she gets a knock on the door from a traveling salesman from Stanley Home Products.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Door-to-door salesmen were almost a daily thing around this time, showing housewives how his vacuum would work on this very rug, or how the most stubborn stains could banish with new improved products.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  An array of cleaners, detergents, floor waxes, basic utilitarian products.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  And Brownie was really not buying it.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  The sales rep for Stanley Home Products gave her a pitch that was fumbling enough to where she really, she said later, "You know, I could do better than that."

• 13:41Speaker 00

  She's watching this man like, "Hold on a minute. I would be great at this. I could do this." So she did. She signed up to start selling Stanley Home Products.

• 13:52Speaker 05

  In June of 1947, so just after World War II, she received her first Stanley speakers kit and an outline of effective, an effective speaking course.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Right as many American women retreated into the suburbs and left the workforce, Brownie dove in.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Stanley had this primitive first version of the home party, where like the salesman would set up a card table and invite women to come over. And it was just the opportunity to get out of the house.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Women were still watching simple demonstrations and trying to spend wisely, but now in the company of other women. Picture pearls, kitten heels, light refreshments. And Brownie went all in on the home parties.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  Really, that's the genius. That's the vision of Brownie Wise.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Her home parties tapped into the world she had created as hibiscus. She pitched products that promised women a life that was a bit easier, freer from drudgery, and a chance to spend time with friends while still technically contributing to their household. Before long, Brownie went from a seller at Stanley to a dealer overseeing a group of sellers, to a top dealer in the country.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  You could not ask too much, apparently, of Brownie to make sure that her dealers and her unit were the highest performing of all.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Brownie honed her superpower of selling a possibility, a vision. Sure, she was pushing floor wax and hairbrushes, but she was also recruiting more sellers, mostly women, to join her crew. And she knew how to encourage them with something they really valued.

• 15:34Speaker 05

  It was recognition. She came up with this go-getter newsletter, which was one of the things to motivate these folks to try to compete, to get what was even more important to many of these women than money.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  The value of recognition, Brownie knew it because that's what she wanted. And she was doing so well for Stanley Home Products that she thought she deserved more. She should be in management.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  It just never seemed to occur to her that her growth in any endeavor could be stunted because she happened to be a woman.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  So when she saw a chance to ask for that recognition, to ask for a promotion, a little over a year into her Stanley career, she took it.

• 16:19Speaker 05

  Stanley had this notion of the annual pilgrimage where the sales force would go back to the home offices and learn all these different strategies of how best to sell the product and just new ideas. And at that time, Brownie, who was uber ambitious in this new line of work, actually met with Frank Stanley Beverage.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  The founder of Stanley Home Products. Not one to ever shy away, Brownie took her pitch straight to the top.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  And Stanley Beverage basically said, management's no place for a woman. She was doing everything she could to maximize her sales, working endless hours, and then bam, hits that glass ceiling. And it seemed to really take her off guard. When I interviewed her son, Jerry, he remembered his mother returning really upset. And she vowed to her son, I'll show him.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Brownie did not know exactly how she would triumph, but then...

• 17:28Speaker 05

  She discovers these luminous plastic bowls that have the airtight seal, just like a paint can.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Brownie found herself holding a groundbreaking new product from an up-and-coming company, Tupperware. It was called the Wonder Bowl.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  Her young protege, Gary McDonald, discovered it sitting on a department store shelf in Detroit. And he says to himself, "That could be a really cool home demonstration product." So he bought it, took it home to Brownie, showed her, and Brownie's fidgeting with the seal as well. And she goes, "Oh, you have to burp it, just like a baby." And at one point, she seals it and drops it on the floor, but it bounces because it's this new type of plastic product. It was not brittle.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Before the war, plastic was industrial, breakable, chemical smelling. But Tupperware was made from a new kind of plastic altogether, a material called polyethylene, or poly-T. Not just durable, but soft and flexible. It felt like a product of the future.

• 18:44Speaker 05

  It's hard to imagine a time when Americans did not know of Tupperware, but this is the time we're talking about still, just after World War II. So you had to, you know, the fact that someone is coming with these products for their food to stay fresh longer, boy, the timing was perfect.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  The idea was to help families save money by vacuum sealing food to keep it lasting longer. Tupperware's special burp-the-air-out lids worked much better than, say, waxed paper or glass jars. But this food storage revolution was not clear when the Wonder Bowl sat on a store shelf. People didn't know how to use it.

• 19:24Speaker 07

  The product was actually completely doomed as an invention.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  But not if Brownie Wise could help it. She was still upset with Stanley Home Products for clipping her managerial ambitions, and she started replacing her inventory of Stanley products with Tupperware. Eventually, it was almost all Tupperware, and she coined an amazing sales trick for the Wonder Bowl.

• 19:50Speaker 05

  One of the dramatic demonstrations she would give is she would fill the bowl with grape juice, seal it, and then throw it across the room. And it would usually be someone's family room and nice carpet and all this stuff. And of course, everybody's like gassed.

• 20:08Speaker 05

  And then it bounces and not a drop comes out.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  It was a gimmick, but it worked.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  And she started racking up big numbers, to the point where Tupper's like, what, what is going on out here?

• 20:22Speaker 00

  And big numbers were big numbers. In 1949, Brownie bought more than $86,000 worth of plasticware from Tupperware's factory. Today, that would be the equivalent of more than $1 million worth of bowls and storage containers. Brownie was buying it and distributing to other dealers, putting Tupperware in kitchens all over Michigan. Meanwhile, in New England, the Wonder Bowls inventor, Earl Tupper, was looking at his sales numbers going, "How is this one woman selling so much Tupperware?" So he sent someone to meet her and make her an official part of the Tupperware company.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  That's when things really start to skyrocket.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Coming up, Brownie Wise climbs the ranks to make Earl Tupper's invention a must-have sensation.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Hello, my name is Miranda Berger, calling from Seattle, Washington. You are listening to Throughline.

• 21:23Speaker 02

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• 22:24Speaker 03

  Part two. Mink coats and diamond rings.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  How many of you have said to yourselves, if I could only find some way to keep foods fresher longer? Haven't you wished for unspillable containers that wouldn't break?

• 22:39Speaker 00

  This is from an early 1950s Tupperware brochure that explained how to give a demonstration at a Tupperware party.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  I'm here to show you modern dishes for modern living, which will save you time and money.

• 22:55Speaker 07

  I think Tupperware parties were interesting because it was definitely the hostess imbuing her home with her kind of charisma.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  This is Allison Clark, author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Warm smile here, you're making friends. Talk to the entire group, draw them into your circle.

• 23:19Speaker 07

  This could be a woman who had never actually publicly spoken prior to being involved in Tupperware. So here she was in the middle of her living room, presenting, and she has an audience, probably for the first time in her life.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  The most outstanding feature is the Tupper seal.

• 23:35Speaker 07

  And she has the backup of a corporation and a product.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Press hard in the middle of the seal with one hand. And at the same time, lift the edge just enough to let the air out. There. Did you hear it?

• 23:51Speaker 05

  It was important that you would demonstrate it properly.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  This is Bob Keeling, author of Life of the Party.

• 23:58Speaker 05

  That you would put it out to where people would see, this is new, this is different, this is attractive.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Use your wonder bowls for making jello and puddings and for leftover potatoes.

• 24:12Speaker 07

  The items would be passed around for people to touch and feel, but importantly, one could also, as a hostess, make recipes and dishes to be served in the Tupperware to show you how great they were. Kind of pineapple upside down cake that popped out of a wonder bowl.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  So it was all very orchestrated to give the best possible impression to the homemakers looking to stretch the family budget.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  I hope you'll be invited to another party soon, or perhaps you'll be a hostess yourself.

• 24:44Speaker 07

  The Tupperware party was different culturally because it was about being modern and being part of a new consumer culture. And it was cool to have a Tupperware party down your street. And it's easy to forget that in the contemporary context, that they were kind of cutting edge. And to go to one was, had cachet.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Women who agreed to host a Tupperware party usually received little gifts from the seller if the evening went well, incentives like a set of knives or a silver tray.

• 25:14Speaker 07

  They were definitely about creating a sisterly environment where people felt that it wasn't just buying, if they were buying products in the party, they were actually helping out the hostess because she would then receive gifts. So there was a whole kind of network and social relations going on that were about helping each other.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  But the parties also dug into something deeper. It was a way for women to earn money on their own without threatening their husbands or society in general.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Hello, this is Brownie Wise. Tupperware is rolling out the red carpet of welcome to women who want to supplement their family income or who must earn enough to support a family.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  After being recruited to join Tupperware, Brownie Wise moved to Florida to oversee all of the sales in the Sunshine State. She kept perfecting the Tupperware party and routinely selling out. The factory could not keep up.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  And she's getting really frustrated. And she's had to complain multiple times. And finally, she's like, OK, I am done with this. And she called up the home office and she demanded to speak to Earl Tupper. And he gets on the phone and she's like, this is Brownie Wise in South Florida.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  And Earl is like...

• 26:34Speaker 05

  I know who you are.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Earl Tupper, the creator of Tupperware, grew up wanting to be an inventor. He had many failed creations, including pants that don't crease and a boat powered by fish. But it's a job at a DuPont plastics factory that changed his life. After the war, he got a bunch of polyethylene, a wartime material that DuPont could not find a use for in peacetime.

• 27:00Speaker 05

  He would be at his plastic molding machine 10:15, according to his son, even 20 hours a day, trying to figure out, OK, I have this waste product. What could I do with it to come up with something that is useful and I could make money from?

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Earl figured out DuPont's trouble. They'd made the plastic stiff, and he kept it soft. He molded it into the beautiful translucent Wonder Bowl. It won design awards. He patented the special sealing lid. It was food storage like you had never seen before. And then came this phone call from this high-energy woman complaining that her parties were selling Tupperware faster than Tupper could manufacture it.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  People didn't usually dress down Earl Tupper like that.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  The two of them could not have been more different.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  It's like the yin and the yang. Tupper was very sort of Spartan and straightforward New Englander. Didn't take, you know, not a lot of backtalk here. He's the boss. He didn't like the razzle dazzle of the home parties and he doesn't want to have his picture taken in publicity photos and that kind of thing.

• 28:11Speaker 07

  And Brownie Wise was seen as probably a little brash because she wore incredibly, you know, bright colors, bright lipstick. Clearly came from a completely different cultural background. So there'd be pictures of Earl Tupper showing Brownie Wise, or very, very glamorous with amazing hairstyle and beautiful clothes, a handful of plastic pellets. And it very much looked like she was the kind of queen and given a kind of offering from this slightly dowdy inventor.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  As Brownie's influence and sales grew, Earl Tupper recommended that his company bring her into the executive suite. And in 1951, Brownie Wise became the vice president of marketing, one of the very few female executives of her time. "Brownie, just this little line, to be sure you know I appreciate what a whale of a job you're doing in spite of all the many problems. It's the first time I've ever had anyone so good on my team. Believe me, it's a good feeling." Tupperware essentially split into a plastics manufacturing business run by Earl and the home party sales business run by Brownie. He brought the designs, she brought the razzmatazz.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Business started flying. On her 40th birthday, Earl sent Brownie a gift, a five-year-old Palomino horse named Golden.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  She was finally bringing his baby to the world. And that was everything to him.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  And the other thing she was bringing was a clear understanding of who would fuel Tupperware's success.

• 29:51Speaker 07

  She believed in women and empowering themselves.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Brownie understood that recruiting women to become sellers was a delicate act.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Do you need money? Do you want an automatic dishwasher, a new car, or perhaps a piano for your children?

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Often, a woman would have had to convince her husband that he would still be the breadwinner, while her earnings would just be extra, the icing on the cake. If she sold enough Tupperware, she could win a Disney trip for the kids or a car for the family. We are in competition with husbands who would prefer not to have their wives work outside their home, even though the family income needs to be supplemented. And as Brownie's letters to Earl Tupper show, she knew what she was up against. We are competing with the natural fear of a woman with no sales experience, the fear that she cannot accomplish the unknown.

• 30:47Speaker 07

  So it was very much was an oppressive culture of homemaking and that women's roles should be in the home.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  This is the woman, mind you, who regularly transacts dozens of sales a day. She sells her husband on leaving the car at home that morning so she can shop. She sells the butcher on a good steak cut.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  So Brownie's task was twofold. She needed to sell Tupperware, and she needed to convince other women to do the same.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  A housewife with three children who had no previous sales experience. You can do exactly what she did. Join the thousands of Tupperware dealers working part-time or full-time, who are paying off mortgages, sending their children to college, or buying furniture for their homes.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Earl Tupper had little interest in interacting with the sellers, or the shoppers for that matter. He wanted to tinker and invent. Brownie is one of the few persons I've met that I could feel confident about on all scores, right from the start. She's completely unselfish. A business like ours needs that. But I didn't dream anyone could find a person so good. So Brownie presided over the Tupperware headquarters in Florida from her perch on a peacock chair. At one point, the company hired a marketing firm that declared that Brownie was Tupperware's secret sauce, a female success story for women to look up to.

• 32:16Speaker 07

  She's the first woman on the front cover of Business Week in 1954 with the slogan, "If we build the people, they'll build the business."

• 32:25Speaker 00

  On this historic cover, Brownie, with perfectly styled hair and a double strand of pearls, holds a block of polyethylene as a nod to Tupperware's origin. But in the article, the writer minced no words about Earl Tupper's role in the company. Normally, he is president of the sales company. Actually, Brownie Wise has just about carte blanche to run the organization. In a fold-out photo spread, Brownie is gifting one saleswoman a brand-new Ford. Then she's pretending to wear a Tupperware bowl like a bonnet on her head. And then she's tossing a Tupperware container full of plastic polyte pellets into a pond at the headquarters. She called it "Poly-Pond", and said its water brought good luck.

• 33:10Speaker 07

  She was a kind of cult leader.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  There are people that are like, you know, Tupperware's like a religion to me.

• 33:17Speaker 05

  Being the chief cheerleader and motivator, she would travel a lot to all these different locations, going as far as Hawaii to have a Tupperware party and awarded prizes and gave recognition to the highest-performing dealers to stoke the fires of competition among the Tupperware faithful. The women especially wanted to get their picture taken with Brownie.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  They would compete to win her dresses even. In 1951, when Brownie took the helm, Tupperware had 200 sellers. By the time of the Business Week cover, there were 9,000 of them, almost entirely women. Company sales tripled in that time to an estimated $25 million.

• 34:01Speaker 07

  One of the important things about her as well is that she wasn't business-trained. It was emotion. It was her emotion and her experience as a woman that created the kind of Tupperware culture.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  People must see an opportunity before they can take advantage of it. This is the spirit of Tupperware. Open the door for someone else, won't you?

• 34:25Speaker 07

  I managed to meet Brownie Wise in the late eighties. And within seconds, I was completely enthralled by her. I would have been one of her disciples at the top of her hat. She was so incredible. She told me to reach for the stars and anything could be mine. And I was completely converted. I could really see how she would transform other women's lives, that they would find recognition from her and belief in themselves. She was magical.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  And what better way to fuel those beliefs than a big old party?

• 34:59Speaker 05

  The jubilees became the annual celebration.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  I'm sorry, not a party, a jubilee. Part convention, part training, part corporate retreat, and altogether, a celebration of Tupperware's high-performing sellers.

• 35:15Speaker 05

  Once Tupperware established their home party headquarters down on the Orange Blossom Trail, south of Orlando, they really were the Magic Kingdom before Disney.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  You never knew what could happen at a Tupperware Jubilee. You could get a Cadillac, and you could get a Cadillac.

• 35:32Speaker 07

  So the jubilees were just these incredible extravaganzas. So burying underground mink coats, diamond rings, and then having women dressed as cowboys and Indians, as they were described in the 1950s, with spades, dig up these commodities from the ground.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Literally digging for treasure. And whatever you found, you got to keep.

• 35:58Speaker 07

  These were gifts that belonged to a different kind of lifestyle. And no man was going to give you that, realistically, however much you dreamed of it. So here you were, empowering yourself.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  It was a way to stoke the fires of esprit de corps. And Brownie, at the end of these sessions, they would have graduation for these people who've attended these training sessions.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Very formal and dramatic with candlelight and music.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  And they would go there and sing songs like, "I've got that Tupperware feeling down in my heart."

• 36:43Speaker 05

  So it was just a way for people to have a sense of belonging, to be motivated, and for them to maybe get some recognition from Brownie in person, which was the big deal.

• 36:55Speaker 07

  And they could be part of the Tupperware magic and dip their hand in poly pool that was blessed with a handful of polyethylene pellets. And they would get even more of the Tupperware magic.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  At first, when women started earning real money as sellers, Tupperware's subversive domesticity might have meant husbands helping with childcare or washing dishes. Eventually, the husbands started packing orders and getting involved. Many successful dealers were couples. The higher in Tupperware you went, the fewer women there were.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  I think it is a fair criticism that Brownie didn't bring along other women into the managerial ranks along with her.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  She did not drop the ladder, as they say.

• 37:39Speaker 05

  No, she didn't. She enjoyed being the central figure. And that became something of a metastatic problem as she got more and more publicity and started to feel like she was infallible. And that's when the trouble started.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Coming up, Brownie hits her own plastic ceiling.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Aloha, this is Avalon from Waikoloa, Hawaii. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  For the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Ditch overpriced wireless and get premium wireless for less. Go to mintmobile.com/switch to see which plan works for you. This message comes from Found. Found provides modern business banking with built-in bookkeeping, invoices, contractor payments, and tax tools. Categorize expenses, track receipts, invoice clients, and send payments right where you bank. Join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamlined their finances with Found. Open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D dot com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Lead Bank, Member FDIC.

• 38:59Speaker 00

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• 39:15Speaker 00

  Part Three. Uncontainable.

• 39:22Speaker 07

  November 12, 1957. Dear Brownie, I hate to be critical, but I thought you followed my thinking about the use of Tupperware for a dog-feeding dish. The nail in the coffin of Brownie Wise's tenure as Vice President was her suggestion that Al Tupper should design a non-slip Wonder Bowl for dogs.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  This is Allison Clark, author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America.

• 39:52Speaker 07

  I never saw dogs or cats dish at a back door or anywhere that looked appetizing. And in a memo, he describes that someone visited her house and had seen a Wonder Bowl actually being used by her dog, and that how could this be possible that she would denigrate a piece of Tupperware for the use of an animal? When it's a dish that is normally associated with human food storage and serving. I think it's scarred. The mind of any user or potential user who sees it.

• 40:26Speaker 07

  It's very much about how Earl Tupper saw this beautiful, profane, holy object being defaced and denigrated. And Brownie Wise was just seeing a practical kind of sales opportunity of selling Tupperware dog bowls. It's bad at your house of all places. Don't you agree? Cordially, Earl S. Tupper.

• 40:49Speaker 07

  So it was the dog bowl that really led to Brownie's final demise.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  But tensions had already been rising between Brownie Wise and Earl Tupper, the inventor of Tupperware, months before this incident. May 26, 1957. On April 29, I received a memo from you to the effect that you were embarrassed that you had neither received a copy of this book, nor have you seen fit to discuss with me how you wish to handle its promotion. In 1957, Brownie published a book, a sort of memoir, called Best Wishes. Women and wishes just seem to go together. I certainly agree that they do.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  And it was just some of her homespun philosophy that she had learned from her mother and her grandmother about the importance of wishing and all of this, but...

• 41:37Speaker 07

  Earl Tupper saw it, and his male executives, saw it as an ego out of control, that this was a woman who did not know her place and was overstepping. The idea that his beautiful Tupperware product could be supplanted by this extravagant, flamboyant, consumer-frenzied-filled woman was horrifying to him.

• 42:02Speaker 05

  And that became a problem.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  This is Bob Keeling. He's the author of Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built and Lost a Tupperware Party Empire.

• 42:12Speaker 05

  And he said, "I didn't even know that you were doing this book. You didn't even think to send this to me." And that was a big strain.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  And Brownie was not having it.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Let's take the first point that you...

• 42:29Speaker 03

  receive a copy. At the time you wrote that memo, no one had received a copy.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Her letter goes on and on.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Did you have in mind that I was spending a lot of time on the promotion of something personal? That I was planning to get rich on this book?

• 42:46Speaker 00

  And on.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  That I was using the machinery and sales force of THP to increase the book's sales? If so, and it sounds that way, I am surprised at you.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  And you see Brownie's response is quite defensive, and there are several words that are typed all in capital letters.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Earl started inserting himself more and more into the operations through a constant barrage of memos, phone calls, and teletypes, seemingly less out of fear about the product and more about Brownie Wise.

• 43:19Speaker 07

  And I think, once she became more and more charismatic and powerful within the corporation, it seemed like the product would not survive without her.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  It's just this avalanche of publicity, where it's like, oh, yeah, you know, Brownie's the center of it.

• 43:34Speaker 07

  I think that's when it became problematic, because the entire empire was built on her shoulders. I think that he saw her as being uncontainable.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Earl and Brownie started fighting over everything. From your recent conduct, you seem to resist coming up here. There can be no justification for refusal or unreasonable delay, since I'm president of the corporation and no business can be conducted unless there is respect for authority. Won't you please recognize that fact?

• 44:06Speaker 03

  This letter is about as friendly as a mad dog and about as helpful as a first-class case of leprosy. I have read this letter over a dozen times. It is unbelievable. I can't help but wonder if you read it over even once before you sent it.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  And just a few weeks after the Dog Bowl incident came the big fiasco.

• 44:29Speaker 05

  Yes, this is Jubilee 1957. The Tupperware Home Coming Jubilee, called by many the most unusual sales convention in the world.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Brownie had a private island right off the Tupperware headquarters. It was a little oasis, so she invited the guests of the Jubilee to come over.

• 44:47Speaker 05

  She decided it would be a good idea to have a luau for the top performing dealers, distributors, hundreds of people. So the night she did that, in July of 57, she had forgotten one very important aspect of what it was like to be outside in central Florida in the summer. Thunderstorms would roll in, you could set your watch by it, and that's exactly what happened.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  And if you remember the infamous Fire Festival back in 2017 and how that ended...

• 45:28Speaker 05

  People could not get off the island. There was really no cover. There were boat accidents, people were injured, hospitalized. Meanwhile, Brownie went home and left the evacuation effort to others.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Almost two dozen people ended up in the hospital. Some of them sued.

• 46:01Speaker 05

  By that time, Tupper had had it, and just the rapid expansion of this company was starting to take a physical toll on him. So after this confluence of events, he decides to sell and sell the company. And it's clear to him that Brownie Wise would be a liability. It was the sense that she had taken her eye off the ball and that the celebrity had really gotten to her.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  And so Earl decided it was time for Tupperware without Brownie.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  She ended up suing the company for over $1 million, and they settled with her for $30,000.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Brownie did not own her house. She had no stock or stake in Tupperware. There was no farewell Jubilee.

• 46:51Speaker 05

  So hundreds of copies that were left over of her book, Best Wish is Tupper, ordered that a big hole be dug on Tupperware property and that they be dumped in there and buried. And he also ordered everyone not to acknowledge her existence at all, once she was let go.

• 47:11Speaker 07

  As we would say now, you know, she was pretty much canceled. She was obliterated from the corporate history. Her erasure is incredibly effective, which is why when I first started my research, people would only talk about in hushed tones.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  The same year Brownie left.

• 47:32Speaker 05

  Earl Tupper sells the company to Rexall Drugs for $16 million.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Brownie got no money from the sale. Earl cashed out, divorced his wife, moved to Central America, and renounced his US citizenship, so he would not owe any US taxes. When he died in the 1980s, obituaries credited him alone with Tupperware's success. As for Brownie, she tried selling cosmetics and dabbled in real estate, but she was never able to recapture the stardom that she had with Tupperware.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  At one point in the late 80s, she was invited back, but they wanted to script everything she was going to say, and she politely declined. So she never really did have the homecoming many would say she deserved.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Brownie passed away in 1992 at the age of 79. She was buried in a plain grave. There's no razzle dazzle, no markings to reflect the role she played in so many women's lives. And Tupperware, having lost both of its pioneering parents, just kept going.

• 48:38Speaker 07

  So then they just imitated Brownie Wise's culture. They carried on doing the Jubilee's. She'd already got all the apparatus in force.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Tupperware products traveled to space. They sat in the cupboard of Queen Elizabeth. But Brownie died before her name got restored to Tupperware's official history. In 2016, the company donated $200,000. To develop a park by its headquarters, named after Brownie Wise. But by then, Tupperware was not quite the household brand that Brownie had helped build. After Earl Tupper's patents began expiring in the eighties, Tupperware copycats have sprung up in all shapes and sizes. And the very thing that once powered Tupperware started eroding its footprint. More and more women went to work outside of the home. There was less time or need for parties and ordering from catalogs.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Tupperware found new growth overseas, but never really nailed down its selling strategy for the internet. And just like Brownie Wise might have predicted, to this day, most Tupperware products are sold by individual sellers. Maybe on Facebook or TikTok, or maybe still in a woman's living room.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Have you ever stopped to think what happens when you say to someone, "You'd make a wonderful Tupperware dealer"?

• 50:00Speaker 07

  She doesn't profess to be a feminist leader. She doesn't profess to be a workers activist. But actually, it's kind of what she ended up doing, was empowering women and preaching self-empowerment in an era when many women had so many constraints over their lives.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  You're saying to her, in effect, "You have a charming personality. You would get along well with people. You have a wonderful smile and a friendly manner."

• 50:35Speaker 07

  Being a Tupperware lady was definitely kind of some figure in the community, that you had some respectability and that you had some standing. And bearing in mind that women may not have had any other roles in which they were recognized, to be a Tupperware lady, to be known and to be the center of a network, was definitely something to aspire to.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  You are just the kind of person Tupperware wants.

• 51:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 51:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  And me, and. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kay. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Kadyama. Sarah Wyman. Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 51:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was mixed and mastered by Jimmy Keely, and we want to thank the Smithsonian National Museum of American History for allowing us to visit and use so much of their archival collection. Our condolences to the family and friends of Smithsonian curator Faith Davis Ruffens, who passed away in late 2024. Thanks also to Emily Kopp, Johannes Dergi, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. And of course, thanks to NPR's Alina Seljuk for bringing us this story. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes. Navid Marvi.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected].

• 52:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 52:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.