Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America

Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. By Alison J. Clarke. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. xii, 241 pp. $24.95, ISBN 1-56098-827-4.)

In the late twentieth century, a Tupperware party took place somewhere around the world more often than once every three seconds. At the same time, about 90 percent of American households owned at least one piece of Tupperware. How did those particular products attain such popularity? Why did Tupperware become an icon of modern domesticity and mass consumption? Those questions animate Alison J. Clarke's recent study, Tupperware.

The most productive approaches to understanding "why certain objects come to matter more than others do," Clarke argues, must transcend purely functional analyses of product design. Such approaches must also recognize that material objects such as Tupperware achieve iconic status "through a process of social and cultural mediation...