Clarke, Alison (Jane)

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CLARKE, Alison (Jane)

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Manchester Metropolitan University, B.A. (design history); Royal College of Art, M.A. (design history); University College London, Ph.D. (social anthropology).

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Smithsonian Institution Press, 750 Ninth St. NW, Suite 4300, Washington, DC 20560. E-mail—[email protected]

CAREER:

Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, former senior lecturer; University of Brighton, former senior lecturer; Royal College of Art, senior tutor. Visiting professor in design history and theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.

WRITINGS:

Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, Smithsonian Institution Press (Washington, DC), 1999.

Member of editorial board, Journal of Visual Culture and Journal of Consumer Culture.

SIDELIGHTS:

Drawing from an extensive academic career in consumer culture and product design, Alison Clarke wrote Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, which explores the higher function of those celebrated plastic containers in a context that reflects gender roles and consumerism in the mid-twentieth century.

Tupperware follows the career of Earl Silas Tupper, a plastics innovator who patented the tight-fitting lidded bowls in the late 1940s. Product sales for his creations were bleak until a Detroit single mother named Brownie Wise revolutionized 1950s consumerism with the advent of the Tupperware party, a lucrative in-home sales vehicle that offered extra income and regular social interaction to millions of American women. Reviewer Susan Vincent said in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology that Clarke's neofeminist take on Tupperware asserts that "the Tupperware experience is a valid part of women's history, disputing the mainstream feminist understanding of party sales as exploiting homemakers and promoting an image of subordinate domestic femininity." Clarke instead holds that Tupperware liberated suburban housewives via the sales experience and income it provided at a time when conventional workplaces were seldom realistic or available for women.

Chicago Sun-Times contributor Rachel Hartigan called Tupperware "a heavily academic cultural critique of Tupperware as a symbol of 'modernity,' an 'artifact' of consumerism and a facilitator of suburban 'social networks.'" Certainly, Clarke suggests that the Tupper-ware phenomenon was vital to the development of American consumer culture at the time—much larger than the sum of its injection-molded plastic parts, and surely a symbol of middle-class modernity and aesthetics. Jonathan Groner wrote in his Salon.com assessment, "Clarke's work is a significant addition to the reconsideration of that misunderstood decade."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, August, 2001, Susan Vincent, review of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, p. 357.

Chicago Sun-Times, December 26, 1999, Rachel Hartigan, "Pop This One in the Fridge: The Story of Tupperware," p. 20.

Guardian (London, England), December 4, 1999, Veronica Horwell, review of Tupperware, p. 9.

Houston Chronicle, January 4, 2000, Kathleen Purvis, review of Tupperware, p. 3.

Journal of Women's History, summer, 2001, Andrea Friedman, review of Tupperware, p. 159.

Publishers Weekly, August 2, 1999, review of Tupperware, p. 60.

Women's Review of Books, March, 2000, Susan Porter Benson, "The Life of the Party," p. 6.