The Woman Tupperware Erased

Earl Tupper patented his airtight "burping" plastic seal in 1947, four years after spinning the bowls off a polyethylene slag from a DuPont factory. Hardware stores stocked them. Almost nobody bought one. Shoppers picked them up, couldn't figure out the seal, and put them back.

Brownie Wise was a divorced single mother in Detroit selling Stanley Home Products at house parties. She started buying Tupperware wholesale in the late 1940s and demonstrating the seal in living rooms — flipping a sealed bowl of grape juice upside-down on a hostess's couch was the trick. Her orders eventually got large enough that someone at the company called to ask what she was doing.

In 1951 Tupper pulled all Tupperware out of retail. He hired Wise, made her vice president of a new subsidiary called Tupperware Home Parties, and moved the operation to Florida. Sales hit $25 million by 1954, about $300 million in today's dollars. Business Week put her on the cover in April 1954, the first woman to get that treatment.

In January 1958, Tupper fired her. The two had clashed over her spending and her press visibility; he told the board she was impossible. She held no shares — she had never asked for any, and Tupper had never offered. Her severance was one year of salary, around $30,000. Later that year, Tupper sold the entire company to Rexall for $16 million and retired to a private island in Costa Rica.

Tupperware spent the next decade scrubbing her from its corporate literature. The company's official history, into the 1990s, named Tupper as the inventor of the home party.