Blast from the Past: Tupperware parties

For years women used to hold get-togethers, not to sell anything as frivolous as lipsticks or scandalous as lingerie, but plastic food containers - Tupperware.

The very word conjures up the white picket fences of 1950s America, where mom stayed home to bake apple pie, dad was the breadwinner and the kids exuded corn-fed wholesomeness.

Tupperware parties started in America in 1948 inspired by Brownie Wise, a single mother from Detroit, and her mother, Rose, who organised hostess parties to sell anything from ‘ketchup pumps’ to ‘ashtrays with a brain’.

Earl Tupper, who founded the eponymous company in 1946, found that shop sales of his products were not going well and, five years later, switched entirely to the mother and daughter party scheme.

From the 1950s onwards, Tupperware parties were synonymous with suburban housewives not just in the US, but in the UK - even the Queen, so it is claimed, keeps her breakfast cereals in Tupperware containers. So there.

The parties turned ordinary housewives into mini-moguls, sharing the delights of Wonder Bowls, Ice-Tup Molds and Party Susans and playing jolly games such as Write An Honest Advert To Sell Your Husband.

They were also a chance for women to get together to swap gossip and enjoy some company, whilst sipping on a sweet sherry and waying on the pros and cons of the various plastic paraphernalia on offer.

By the late 1970s, with the advent of the all-women, alcohol-fuelled Ann Summers parties selling all sorts of raunchy regalia, Tupperware parties were reduced to something of a joke.

And in the early 2000s the party was over for Tupperware, as it was revealed UK Tupperware party people were simply not producing the goods. However, Tupperware parties are still going strong around the world and in Ireland helping many women turn a tidy profit.

There may still debate about whether Tupperware propelled suburban women into entrepreneurship or reinforced stereotypes of women’s domestic drudgery, but what is certain is that when you need it most, you’ll never be able to a find a lid for your Tupperware lunchbox.