After the Tupperware party
It is a skill of mine much admired in my household — and one much prized by me. I open the fridge and discover a container of soup, or tuna salad, or cut-up fruit. Someone has eaten half the soup (or the tuna salad, or the cut-up fruit) and thought nothing of putting the container, now no longer neatly full, back into the fridge.
I can’t stand them, these half-empty containers taking up unnecessary space on the refrigerator’s cool glass shelves. I rootle around in my collection of containers — you still with me here? I trust you are — and find, unerringly, no second-guessing, a tub that will fit the leftovers in question with a degree of precision that pleases me no end. I’m no good at maths; I’m not someone who delights in the puzzle section of the daily paper. Yet somehow there’s perfect satisfaction in observing a batch of leek-and-potato rise right to the brim of a plastic tub, in feeling the lid snap shut, contents and container perfectly matched. If such a pleasure has not yet occurred to you, well — you haven’t lived.
I considered this modest yet perfect joy as I read of the troubles of Tupperware, the famous American brand of plastic storage containers whose fortunes now are fading — terminally, it would seem. Shares sank sharply on Monday after the company announced “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern”. Is it any wonder? It’s more astonishing, perhaps, that Tupperware has survived so long: coming up for 80 years.
I’d long assumed — until pretty recently, if we’re being honest here — that the name “Tupperware” was somehow onomatopoeic, or punning. Save your supper in a tub: Tupperware! But it was Earl Silas Tupper (an American name if ever there was one) who created the product line that still bears his name. Tupper, born in 1907 in New Hampshire, was a restless inventor whose other brainwaves included a fish-powered boat; he got his start in plastic working in a factory owned by DuPont, and after the second world war worked with the company to develop peacetime uses for what had been a product of conflict.
Tupperware may have been invented by a man, but it owed its success to a woman, and to the postwar ideal of domesticity that pushed Rosie the Riveter and all her sisters into kitchens and living rooms built in new, sprawling suburbs that sprang up across the American continent as fighting men returned home from Europe, Russia, the Far East. “A living doll, everywhere you look./It can sew, it can cook,/It can talk, talk, talk”: Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Applicant’ puts a bitter spin on the (straight, white, suburban) American feminine ideal of the 1950s.
Yet women will find a way: and it was Brownie Wise, a single mother, who started selling the new plastic products at parties she held in her home. In 1951 Tupper noticed her sales figures and soon the products were sold exclusively in living rooms and kitchens: the “Tupperware party” was born. As design historian and social anthropologist Alison J Clarke has written, Wise “recognised that the product’s success revolved around its ability to embed itself in the intimate social networks of women who craved a life beyond the drudgery of domestic labour.” Tupper made Wise vice-president of the company and head of sales. In 1956 Wise became the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week — and the rest, as they say, is history — at least until Tupper became jealous of her success and kicked her out of the company in 1958; not much later he gave up his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes. Welcome to the American way.
You can still hold a Tupperware party if you want to. But really, who wants to? We may feel sometimes that social progress is sliding backwards, and yet not that far: Wise’s innovative business thinking has passed its sell-by date. Yet the product itself still holds a place in our homes. What am I doing when I contain the domestic space I inhabit in a plastic tub? I am offering myself comfort. My father was born in 1924; my mother in 1933, the year after Plath. Their American childhoods were coloured by the Depression, by a war that was distant yet still very much present; they didn’t buy Tupperware but saved plastic containers from deli-counter orders or the occasional Chinese-food delivery. They kept leftovers carefully, as I do now, always sure — as I am now — that the contents fit the container.
Life, even for the luckiest of us, can feel pretty ragged at times. What the hell is going on out there in the world? What can we do about it? We are overwhelmed — at least, I am, and I bet you are too sometimes — by the amount of information heading our way, the choices we have to make, the bills (financial, emotional, spiritual) we have to pay. A plastic container, Tupperware or not, does what you need it to do. Who doesn’t want to find a container that’s just the right size, and feel the lid snap tight?
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