Tupperware, unsealed

Postwar America was a period of tremendous innovation, in business and at home. Countless products were invented for and marketed to the housewife, promising to make her work easier, to make her home cleaner, and her family's life better. More than a half-century since its invention, Tupperware remains among the most memorable from those years of excess and optimism. While his product languished on department store shelves, eccentric inventor Earl Tupper sought a new way to market and sell his durable plastic storage containers. He found the sales revolution he was looking for in trailblazing businesswoman Brownie Wise. She led the company from obscurity to millions in sales through a remarkable innovation: the Tupperware home party. Wise's idea to sell Tupperware exclusively through feminized, in-home parties sparked a cultural revolution in post-World War II America. For the first time, minimally educated and economically invisible housewives had opportunities for careers. Then, at the height of their mutual success, Tupper fired Wise under mysterious circumstances, wrote her out of Tupperware's history, and left her with a pittance. He walked away with a fortune. Journalist Bob Kealing has interviewed pioneering executives who helped build the company alongside Wise, reviewed hundreds of primary source documents written by Tupper and Wise, and obtained access to a wealth of previously unknown information, including sealed court depositions regarding a series of boat accidents successfully kept out of the press by the company and details of secret recordings made by Tupperware Home Parties management seeking to prevent their distributors from unionizing. - Jacket flap.