# 20: Tupperware’s Brownie Wise — Erasing History?
Story behind the Passage
This morning I wanted to write a text about an interview that I had conducted almost a year ago with a medium-sized industrial company. The business has continuously expanded since its founding almost 150 years ago. I had done the interview with the two women who have largely been responsible for the success of the company — the former CEO and her daughter who currently runs the business. It was remarkable to learn from the two generations of leadership women. Before finally starting to write about the experience , I went on their website again to check some historical dates in the company chronology. I was shocked to find that the names of the two women have completely disappeared from the record.
Fortunately, it then turned out that I had accidentally confused the company with another one with a very similar name in the same industry. Still, this incident immediately got me thinking about the issue of “erasing history” by deleting names from the record. And this, in turn, made me remember Brownie Wise’s story. Wise was the soul behind Tupperware, or, as you might also call her, in line with the title of the biography mentioned above, The Queen of Tupperware.
Obviously, almost everyone knows about Tupperware as the company that produces the plastic containers that help with your home-made lunch at work, your barbecues and your children’s lunch bags. The brand “Tupperware” has even become a generic name that people use for plastic containers of any brand (like Tempo, Kleenex, Tip-Ex…). This global popularity of Tupperware already highlights how successful the company has become. And that was mostly due to one person: Brownie Wise.
The problem with Wise, however, is that she has mostly disappeared from the company’s records. Well, at least until researchers and biographers like Fergus Mason started writing about her story. But Wise is no exception. We know from historians of (women’s) business history that this happened to many women. From my perspective, however, it is quite troublesome that this issue of being written out of history has become discussed mostly from a gender studies perspective. If this happened to women, it probably also happened to men— naturally, we do not know about these people because their names got lost. And who knows; maybe the internet is not a guarantee that this will not happend in the future.
The truth is, however, I do not even want to write about this lack of recognition in a negative or critical way. What I find a lot more interesting is the question: Can you even do this, i.e., erase someone from history? Is it even possible? Yes, I know, you can delete names from historical records and thereby shift attention to other people who might get credit for something they never did. And then you can have an army of researchers who get funding for recovering what was lost. Surely, I am not opposing this, it is important to reconstruct history in a way that this written history is at least closer to the facts than some previous status quo. But does this reconstruction, the rewriting of history in books and other narratives, really change history?
My Learnings
“Over the next few months she watched in disbelief how her name was systematically purged from the company’s literature.” Literature in Wise’s case indeed has a double meaning when it comes to the company’s history. The sentence above refers to business documents but as the passage reveals, Wise herself had written a book entitled Best Wishes: How to Put Your Wishes to Work in 1957. Since most of her books were destroyed by Tupper, you can hardly get them anywhere, unless you pay hundreds of dollars. I was lucky at some point to get an electronic version of the book. As you can tell from the title, Wise wrote it to especially encourage women to dare wishing and pursuing their dreams at work (also see my post on Edith Mae Cummings if you are interested in historical business women). But how could it happen that such a woman would be erased from the company’s records?
The easy answer is: Earl Tupper saw an enemy in her because she was successful. This answer is easy because it is the “good girl — bad guy” image that we are always confronted with when women get kicked out of C-level positions or never even get there. In the case of Wise, as far as I know from the papers and biographies I wrote back in 2015/16 when I taught her story, this seems to be true. The story that by now has gained her fame as a marketing queen also earned her the hatred of Tupper. He had basically invented the plastic for the products but no idea how sell them. This is where Wise came in. Because of her previous direct-sales expertise, she immediately figured that retail selling in stores would not work for plastic food containers. Hence, she applied the direct-sales approach to the new and uknown plastic products and the famous Tupperware Parties were born.
The party plan allowed the company to massively scale. For Tupper, this of course meant that he got rich and famous but Wise remained the business genius in the company. And besides continuously coming up with newer and innovative marketing ideas to sell Tupperware products, internally Wise implemented a modern system of HR development that even today can count as progressive. She developed further training opportunities, had big team gatherings in remote places, and was really creative in rewarding outstanding achievements. Since the salespeople of Tupperware were almost exclusively women, Wise can count as a pioneer of the promotion of women in business.
With respect to her official status in the company, however, she remained an employee. She had not founded the company, neither had Tupper made her a partner with equal shares. Hence, when Tupper’s frustration grew and he could not tolerate Wise’s seemingly extravagant way of running the business, he started looking for ways to get rid of her. In the end, he simply fired her based on questionable accusations. She ended up with a ridiculously small amount of money as compensation. That was the end of her fabulous intrapreneurship story, as I would call her. She never became that successful again with any other business she started thereafter.
Now, that is the official story that you can read anywhere on the web in much more detail. My point — and this you cannot read anywhere yet — is: What does this say about history and, my favorite topic, impact? Wise was successful in implementing most of her ideas, it seems. Nobody knows exactly what else she could have achieved for Tupperware had she been able to stay. But she did what she did as long as she couldand this created impact — immediately: Women were trained, they had their own income, gender roles shifted in the 1950s/60s, women had extra money, the products changed the entire world of packaging food, and the direct sales system has spread to so many different branches nowadays (candle parties, sex toys…). All of this would not be happening without her impact.
Yes, sure, you might say now, but we would not know who started all this if we had not gotten the historical record straight, right? Is this what you are asking yourself now? Sure, I am not opposing this I am asking you to move away from the “record” now and simply go to the things, the events, the lives that have changed according to what she did and started. None of this would be different if we had falsely assumed that Tupper or anybody else did it. Yes, I know this might sound silly to think that way. If you go into this extreme mode of thinking, you could blame anybody for anything or reward anybody for anything, people would simply not matter for history then.
But the reason why I am thinking about this is because, in the end, this extreme way of thinking has one advantage: It completely shifts the focus to the action — to the results of this individual action. And especially today where there is so much noise surrounding us and so much storytelling by people — when do we really and only pay attention to the results? The real stuff? The things that really bring change to the world? The “wood”that is very often hidden behind trees? Let me quote one passage of Marc Aurel (I read one or two passages every morning, like other people read the Bible):
“Denke, welch ein winziges Stück des ganzen Weltwesens du bist, wie klein und verschwindend der Punkt in der ganzen Ewigkeit, auf den du gestellt bist, und dein Schicksal — welch ein Bruchteil des gesamten!“ — Reflections
For those of you who do not know Aurel’s Reflections: No, he did not take that as an excuse for not doing anything — far from it. The Stoics were very much in a ‘doing mode.’ This quote came up now because it shifts attention to the impact one person can create — no matter how small or big. Any impact will, based on the natural law of cause and effect, have impact on the course of history. And that is something very inspiring and it is much greater than the person who is doing it — since we are all here for a very limited time.
You might wonder now how on earth someone like me who is so much into biographies and storytelling by leaders runs such an “anti-personality” campaign. Well, again, life is about seeing the middle path while firmly walking one of your own. I think, we are living in times now that are so exciting because I see a very “conservative” turn coming. A turn back towards content, not packaging; a turn towards deep thinking, not just talking; a turn towards learning, not just skimming; and a turn towards books, not tidbits. All this is coming again, I think, and it will do away with many things that people write a lot about today and make money with. In the age of implementation, the only thing that counts is what ends up as action that has impact on the course of history as it happens from the individual perspective— not as it might be written.
Therefore, it is important to not erase the names of people from history and to learn from them. But really, this is just a matter of identification to me. Somehow, human beings have this habit of only identifying with people who are like them (similarity attraction). However, for people who truly understand what Marc Aurel and all other wise men and women have been writing, you do not need any other faces to communicate the message. Life is a call to action in and of itself. But everything that is not in your nature, is not meant to be.
As an entrepreneur, you are creating impact on a daily level. But forget about your name in historical records. It does not even matter that you are the head of an organization or, like Wise, a super creative intrapreneur. What counts is what you make of what you have. Not more, not less. Use that wisely and work on your goals every day. Life will tell you if this is what you are supposed to be doing of if there are other things waiting for you. Act today, worry about history later. If others decide to erase your name from some documents, they will do so anyways. But history will not be touched by this. It cannot be erased. It simply happens and will always be different from what is written.
Reflection Questions
1) Has it ever happened to you that someone else took credit for your work? What did you learn from this incident?
2) In case you are familiar with Tupperware products — has it ever occurred to you to check out the company’s story?
3) If you were only allowed to focus on one activity (skill) for the rest of your life, what would it be? How does this change the life of others?
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