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They can't harm you if they can't find you. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 semi-quintennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
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This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. When you're reaching for a container to put away leftovers, there's one name that likely comes to mind. It's a brand name who we use it so often it feels like the generic word. That's how deeply. The company Tupperware seeped into American life, but behind that success was a woman whose name is far less familiar: Brownie Wise.
While Earl Tupper invented the product, Brownie figured out how to sell it, bring women together, and give them a chance to sell it themselves. Here to tell the story of Brownie Wise is author Mary Lisa Guevenis. Take it away. Brownie Mae Humphrey Weiss was born in Buford, Georgia, in 1913 to a working-class family. And her father abandoned the family when she was not much more than a baby.
So her mother, who had been working as a hat maker to eke out the family income, started working as a union organizer for other hat makers, which meant that her mother was on the road all the time, and Brownie didn't see her for months or years at a time. And she had this childhood of extreme, extreme self-reliance. Her formal education, such as it was, probably ended around eighth grade. When she did leave school, though, she was able to spend more time with her mom, and that meant she was attending union rallies.
So during these rallies, there's a lot of rhetoric. There's a lot of telling women workers, "You are worth something. You deserve an opportunity." And there's a lot of sometimes gothy singing when they would take a familiar song like "Little Brown Jug" and they would substitute motivational lyrics for the usual words. There once was a union maid who never was afraid of the goons and the gangs and the company things and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid. She went to the As one direct sales executive explained, "Hey, we did that because it took people out of themselves.
It made them less self-conscious. It got them all together, working towards a goal." When Brownie was a teenager, her mom remarried. She was married to a Cuban immigrant, and they were living in New Orleans. And Brownie was just trying to pick up whatever work she could do. And the depression was on, so that was not very easy.
She managed to get herself at the end of her teenage years into a training scheme for girls who wanted business careers. And in those days, that meant secretarial work. That was the business career.
So she got some training in typing and shorthand, but she really dreamed of becoming a writer and an illustrator. And today she would probably be dreaming of starting her own ad agency, but in those days that just wasn't possible. Around 1936, she wins a contest to go to the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. And for a young person, that was probably one of the most exciting places on Earth at the time. Gene Autry, the cowboy movie star, was making a movie there.
Six million people were descending on Dallas from all over the world. It was full of. This newfangled air conditioning and these really beautiful Art Moderne buildings that had been built just for the centennial. And there she meets a man named Robert Weiss, who was working at the Ford Motor Company exhibit. She falls in love with him, marries him, and moves to Detroit.
So then Brownie's early married life was hell. Her husband was a violent alcoholic, but in those days, physical abuse was usually hidden because the wives were ashamed of it. Shortly after she gave birth to her son Jerry in 1938, Brownie was seriously injured in a car accident because her husband was drunk driving. Her recovery was very slow, very painful, very complicated. She was in and out of the hospital.
But finally, the husband is so violent and so alcoholic and so out of control that Brownie gets a divorce. She lists herself in the phone book as a widow and gets a job as a secretary, which, even though she had cracked typing and shorthand, paid next to nothing. She could barely support herself. Then one day in late 1945, a salesman for Stanley Home Products comes knocking at her door. She listens to a sales spiel, and she decides, "I could do better than that." She thinks of a million things that are wrong with the sales spiel.
So, by February of 1946, she has quit her job, and she's exchanging the security and routine of being a secretary for an open-ended selling opportunity and the culture of constant striving that comes with it. At the time, Stanley Home Products, which was a company that sold brushes and cleaning products, is the biggest and best-known direct sales company in the United States. They got that way because late in 1939, they had started what was called party plant sales or hostess party selling. Up until then, women didn't do any direct sales. It was considered too risky for a woman to go knocking on strangers' doors, and women were not supposed to be earning their own living.
Women weren't even supposed to be working outside the home in the best of all possible worlds. With the war coming and men getting jobs with the WPA and getting ready for the draft, Stanley Home Products had run desperate young men who wanted to go into door-to-door sales, and they noticed that one of the reps up in Maine was getting great sales by using a party model. They hadn't made a big thing about it, but the plan was essentially that you got. A local, popular housewife to invite her friends over. She passed out coffee and maybe some snacks or some cookies, and you pitched all these people at the same time.
Stanley noticed how well that was doing, so at the end of 1939, they started adding women to their sales force, and the company absolutely took off. Within a couple of years, Stanley was phenomenally successful. Women dominated its sales ranks. Most of them were women who were married or who had been married, who had children under the age of eighteen, and really had not been to college or any kind of professional training, and had no opportunity for another job.
So it was a chance for them to make money, to socialize, to meet their friends, to be part of this big, popular company.
So Weiss was signing on to Stanley with this habit of extreme self-reliance that she had developed when she was a kid. She had a desperation to prove herself.
So Weiss commits her heart and soul to Stanley, and she's soon promoted to unit leader. What happens next with Brownie? You won't want to miss it on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life.
If you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to hillsdale.edu. That's hillsdale.edu. GLP-1s are changing weight loss. My sister had amazing.
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It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 semi-quintennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition release. And reissues.
Shop new official coins at usmint.gov/semiq. That's usmint.gov/semiq. This is Hoda Kotb from Joy One Hundred One with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing.
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Offer subject to change. Terms apply. All right. Quick quiz for the hiring managers out there: What's worse, being understaffed or being poorly staffed?
Well, that's a trick question because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, "This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs." You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. Or go a different way and get no traction. Seriously, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95 percent more likely to report a higher than non-sponsored jobs. It really is a no-brainer.
Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a seventy-five dollars sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com/podcast. Just go to Indeed.com/podcast right now.
Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And we're back with our American stories, and the story of Brownie Wise.
When we last left off, Brownie had committed herself to Stanley Home Products, and her belief in direct selling was only growing. Here again is Mary Lisa Guevinas on the Stanley pilgrimages, which were these annual rallies that Stanley would have up in Massachusetts. They would gather everyone there for days of motivational talks and singing, and not so much sales tips. It was mostly about you can do it, you can do anything. Opportunity is endless for you and Stanley Home Products.
She was told that her native ability and her superhuman determination could overcome her bad start in life and her spotty schooling. She heard that enthusiasm was the key to success. As Mister Bev tells us, enthusiasm is a motive power of success. It's a dynamo which makes things go. Enthusiasm is his greatest asset in the world.
It beats money, power, and influence. Enthusiasm is nothing more or less than a working expression of faith—faith in yourself, in your job, in the product you are selling.
So, Wise decided to show Stanley how enthusiastic she could be. During her routine orientation as a unit leader, she demonstrated her super duper enthusiasm by taking down every word of every talk in her perfect secretarial shorthand, and lest a single slogan be lost, creating her own sheets of carbon by covering the back of each notebook page with scribbled graphite pencil.
So she not only took down every word, she made copies of it. And she would also copy lists like how to get best results from your people, and make so many annotations and additions that she ended up with her own version. She wrote and mimeographed a long, chatty newsletter called the Go Getter. She would dream up slogans like "Be Wise, Stanley Eyes." She would invest in incentives out of her own pocket for her sales force, like corsages and lipsticks, to spur them to more sales and greater glories. The praise that she gave the women in her unit was intense and unrelenting, and just, just full of enthusiasm.
There was no length that she would not go through to make them successful. I imagine some of you have heard me say that I don't have much confidence in luck. I never depend on it. I'd rather put my trust in hard work. I have wished a lot of you success at different times.
But never good luck, Brownie. When she put her whole heart and soul into something, she really did. When you look at those papers where she's taking notes for being a Stanley unit leader, and you see her scribbling and creating her own carbon paper, you still get a feeling of the intensity of emotion when she's taking those notes. It's crazy. It's almost like it leaps off the paper at you.
Most people who were full-time direct sellers had more than one line. Several Stanley dealers got the idea of selling Tupperware, which were storage containers made of molded polyethylene, because it just seemed like a natural thing to be selling during a Stanley party. Stanley was full of brushes and mops and cleaning fluids, and here was Tupperware. It was this newfangled plastic. That was neither completely rigid nor completely flexible.
It was very mod. It was pastel, and Stanley had been around for a while. It was kind of boring. Everybody was used to these parties by that time because the company had been so successful. Tupperware gave them something new to talk about at the parties and something to show off.
Plus, it was a natural for home demonstration because the famous Tupperware seal that kept all the food inside so fresh involved what was called a magic button in the middle of the lid.
So you had to depress that button and flip the bowl to create the vacuum seal.
So it was fun. It was kind of silly. It was easy to demonstrate. It looked good. Nobody had these products, whereas everybody had brushes already.
When Brownie started with Tupperware, it was being sold in stores. In New York, it was in Bloomingdale's and Gimble's. In Detroit, it was in Jordan Marsh. Tupperware had also tried a direct sales catalog. It was it was trying everything to put the product across.
It advertised in publications like Everybody's Poultry Magazine, which I could not even believe was a real publication, but it was. And the inventor Earl Tupper was trying everything to make it take off and. Only having limited success, even though a lot of his efforts at promotion were being underwritten by Dupont, where he was getting the polyethylene.
So what Brownie was running into at the same time was that she was still selling Stanley. At the same time, she was selling Tupperware. Direct selling was such a hard way to make a living that, like every other direct sales company, Stanley was constantly doing everything it could to motivate its sales force. We say that a person in Stanley can acquire the equivalent of a college education in five to ten years, and that is true. If you'll pay attention, we'll teach you how to make a respectable living and how to make more than that.
And many hundreds of people are doing it. I hope that'll be your case, and yours, and yours, and yours. Aside from the gatherings in Massachusetts, they went to weekly meetings, and they heard that sales may not give you a guaranteed salary, but it offers no caps on earnings. The opportunity is endless.
Well, Brownie. As she excelled at Stanley, she was finding out that the opportunity was not endless. After she was made unit leader, Stanley really wasn't giving her any place to go from there.
So by the late '40s, virtually all the sellers in Stanley were female, and all of its management was male. Company policy was that a wife and mother's place was in the home. Any place where you had a guaranteed salary or you made real money in commissions, that belonged to a man.
So Brownie was getting incredibly frustrated that Stanley's selling opportunity was not as open-ended as she had been led to believe, and she decided to go in with Tupperware full time. And she resigned from Stanley to devote herself to burping bowls. Within a year, she was off to open Tupperware territory, moving from Michigan to Florida, where she'd always wanted to live, as if she was following a star. And not even Tupperware's mercurial management and messy distribution system and its wacky promotions could dissuade her. She.
Decided that she was in charge of her own destiny. What happened next was, yes, she was in charge of her own destiny, but she still had to rely on Tupperware to get her supplies.
So she took it upon herself to talk to Earl Tupper, the inventor, directly. When one fine day her order of Tupperware was late yet again. And she demanded to speak to him and wonder why and what was going on and. Fast forward, and Brownie Weiss is convincing Earl Tupper to pull Tupperware out of stores and sell it only through party plan sales. And she convinces him because her own sales are so impressive, and because it's coming not just from her.
He's seen this happen elsewhere, and he's also not having much luck in the retail department stores.
So by the spring of 1951. Brownie Weiss is now vice president in charge of sales at Tupperware. Selling Tupperware will fill a real need for lots of women right now, and isn't that true of Tupperware in all ways? It fills all kinds of needs for many, many people. As she went forward, and she's getting more and more involved in Tupperware, she apparently would sleep with a notebook and a typewriter either on her bed or next to her bed in case she had any thoughts about building Tupperware.
And in contrast to other entrepreneurs who sometimes had a backup system, her whole life was Tupperware. She did have her son. But she didn't really have any close personal friends. She never seemed to take a vacation. She was a complete, complete workaholic, and it was almost as if she was suspicious of anything that would take her away from Tupperware.
And you've been listening to Mary Lisa Guvenis tell the remarkable story of Brownie Wise. Old school notions of what women can and should be able to do were predominant. And then came the opportunity at Tupperware, and my goodness, she didn't just lead the sales team. She convinced the management to stop selling in stores and start selling direct, and that made her top brass VP of Sales at Tupperware. When we come back, more of the story of Brownie Wise here on Our American Stories.
GLP-1s are changing weight loss. My sister had amazing. The ideal treatment is. Seems like everyone's a GLP-1 expert these days. But when it comes to your health, it pays to listen to someone who actually is.
Like OrderlyMeds.com with 50% off your first two orders and personalized support along the way. We're making it easier to get started. Visit OrderlyMeds.com. Bringing order to the chaos of GLP ones. Individual results may vary.
Eligibility and prescription required. Not medical advice. Visit orderingmeds.com for details. Compound medications are not FDA approved. Your home address is on the internet right now.
Anyone can find it. Anyone, a stranger, a scammer, someone with a grudge, someone sitting in a car outside your house. I didn't believe it, so I typed my name into a people search site. Seconds later, there it was: my home address, my cell number, my family members' names, all of Exposed for anyone who looked. That's why I use Incogni.
Incogni sends requests to remove your personal information, including your home address, from hundreds of data brokers and people search sites automatically. It keeps sending them because these sites love to sneak your info back up. You don't fill out a single form. You don't make a single call. Incogni has sent 344 remover requests for me, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Think about who could be looking. You up right this minute. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Go to incogni.com/lee for sixty percent off. That's i-n-c-o-g-n-i dot com/lee.
Incogni dot com/lee. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past two hundred and fifty years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 semi-quintennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins. At usmint.gov forward slash semiq. That's usmint.gov slash semiq. This is Hoda Kotb from Joy One Hundred One with Hoda Kotb.
If you started your holiday shopping yet, this time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending. On gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex card, you can be a little savvier.
Finding the right gift feels good, and maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get five percent cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, three percent on dining and drugstores, and one percent on all other purchases.
So while you're checking names off your holiday list, those gifts can be a treat. For you too, this holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex.
This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change.
Terms apply. All right, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse? Being understaffed or being poorly staffed.
Well, that's a trick question because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, "This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs." You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. Or go a different way and get no traction. Seriously, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are ninety-five percent more likely to report a higher than non-sponsored jobs. It really is a no-brainer.
Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed dot com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed dot com slash podcast right now.
Indeed dot com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Your home address is on the internet right now.
Anyone can find it. Anyone—a stranger, a scammer, someone with a grudge, someone sitting in a car outside your house. I didn't believe it, so I typed my name into a people search site. Seconds later, there it was—my home address, my cell number, my family members' names. All of it exposed for anyone who looked.
That's why I use Incogni. Incogni sends requests to remove your personal information, including your home address. From hundreds of data brokers and people search sites, automatically it keeps sending them because these sites love to sneak your info back up. You don't fill out a single form, you don't make a single call. Incogni has sent 344 removal requests for me, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Think about who could be looking you up right this minute. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Go to incogni. dot com slash leave for 60 percent off. That's I N C.
Incogni dot com slash Lee, Incogni dot com slash Lee. And we're back with our American stories and the story of Brownie Wise. Tupperware had become Brownie's focus, and she intended to keep it that way. Here again is author Mary Lisa Gouvenez, Earl Tupper, and Brownie Wise. The two of them are usually portrayed as complete opposites.
Earl Silas Tupper was a working class boy. He's born in nineteen o seven in New Hampshire. He didn't go to college. But he still saw himself as a latter-day Leonardo da Vinci.
Sometimes he saw himself as Thomas Alva Edison.
Sometimes he saw himself as Henry Ford. During the Depression, he worked as a tree surgeon during the day, but he would be endlessly tinkering at night with these what he saw as Da Vinci-like inventions. He preserved his own notebooks because he was sure that posterity would want to know what his genius thinking was, and you find that they're full of gadgets like egg peeling clamps and eyebrow dye shields and an Egyptian slave girl belt to reduce fatness. Tupper's big break came when he got a job as a sample maker for a plastics company in Massachusetts that was under contract with Dupont. That meant that he could tinker with plastics all day.
Any mistakes really weren't coming out of his own pocket. And by 1939, he was able to start his own business, Tupper Plastics. Where he made things like soap dishes, and he had started experimenting with a plastic called polyethylene, and that soon became known in a few years as polyt, what he called the material of the future. In the mid to late forty s, he applied for a patent on what he called the temperware seal, and that was the famous what would later be known as the burping bowl, the vacuum seal. And he finally got his patent in nineteen forty nine, but it was already being sold in stores by then.
But he just was still having all his problems putting it across. He was the ultimate cranky Yankee inventor.
So here you have Earl Tupper, who's had this totally. Different route. Who's living in Massachusetts and then in Rhode Island, and then you have Browning Weiss, who's down in Florida and who's flamboyant and outgoing and a dynamite salesperson and motivator. And most people say he was the opposite of Browning in appearance and personality and business style. But what everyone ignores is what they had in common.
They did have some things that they really shared: this entrepreneurial mindset. This lack of formal education, this predisposition to these crazy utopian ideals, and they both had an extreme belief in self-reliance and the power of positive thinking.
So, at Tupperware, where she's a vice president and executive now—a title that women just did not get—Weiss was giving direct selling the pep and pizzazz it had never had at Stanley. At Stanley, they invited dealers to their pilgrimage in rural Massachusetts. Weiss was inviting them to sunny Florida, to headquarters in Kissimmee, where there was a huge, impressive world headquarters with everything custom built for Tupperware. She was having them put their wishes and their dreams inside Tupperware containers and throw them in a wishing well to make their dreams come true. By 1952, Weiss had handed out keys to seven Cadillacs, and that was just her warm-up.
Other direct sellers were using extravagant incentives as attention getters and recruitment tools. Brownie Weiss was going to outdo them all. What she was doing with Tupperware parties was it differed from a Stanley party because a Tupperware party was. More fun. It was more flamboyant.
It was sillier. It followed the same format that everyone already knew from Stanley, so they didn't threaten the status quo. It gave women an excuse to be around other adults, to get away from cleaning, to get away from the kids for a while. It was fun. They played ridiculous games.
It was corny, but it was just away from that endless slog of childminding and cleaning. And at a time when women weren't supposed to want anything for themselves, it was just nice to be around other adult women and to sort of oo and ah over dresses and pink containers and exchange recipes and sip coffee with your friends. Brownie became famous for motivating her sales force. You can never, in front of your own dealers, reach around and pat yourself on the back, either for being an awfully nice Joe, or for having produced some very fine sales programs. But the distributor over in the next territory to you can come over there and do it.
He can pat you on the back and tell your people what a wonderful fellow you are and how proud they should be to be working as dealers in your territory. And of course, too, he can challenge your people to beat his people, which is a good, healthy thing. And you can go over to his territory and do the same thing. In 1953, when Tupper was still trying to take his company to an even higher level, and Brownie was building this incredible sales force, he contracted with a well-known New York public relations firm called Rudder and Finn, probably the top PR firm of its day. And they took one look at his company, and they evaluated it, and they said, "Well, the thing that you really have going for you is there's a great story in Brownie Wise.
There's no other woman that's in this position anywhere else in the country as an executive, and the stuff that she's doing is just so over the top and makes such a great story that this is what we're really going to push." So Rudder and Finn began pitching stories about Wyson, the mere women, as they put it, who sold Dupperware, Life Magazine, which had a. Huge, huge circulation. Did a photo essay documenting the company's first jubilee in nineteen fifty four, and it showed what they called six hundred and thirty three salesgirls and managers, ninety percent of them women, shoveling for nearly fifty thousand dollars of prizes that had been buried at the Tupperware headquarters. And that meant mink stoles, gold watches, the keys to a 1954 Ford, and the captions of the story explain that medics were on standby due to the dealer's tendency to faint from excitement of it all.
So that was the kind of publicity that they were getting, and Brownie totally played into it. In March of nineteen fifty-five, Coronet, which had an even bigger circulation as a magazine, published Ludwig Bebelman's tale of joining Weiss and six prize-winning dealers on a tour of Paris, where they stayed at the Ritz and sipped cokes and iced tea when they went to Maxime's. In 1956, life went back to Jubilee for its Wealth of Wishes celebration, where they did miss documenting what was called the Wish Fairy, who wafted around Treasureama, waving a magic wand, where she bestowed toasters and television sets on people who were just walking by. Tupperware Home Parties Incorporated is becoming known as the Wish Company. From the Life magazine story on Jubilee and the magazine ad showing the Wish Fairy, our reputation as the Wish Company is growing rapidly.
In this preview of the Jubilee film, Rudy Valley watches the Wish Fairy grant to Barbara Williams, Rockford, Illinois, her wish—a honeymoon to Niagara Falls with her husband and four children. Converts, recruits by the hundreds, were presenting themselves at Polly Pond, which was this big man-made pond at Tupperware headquarters, for baptism. Tupperware became like a cult. Opal Scott, Rome, Georgia, wished for new Sunday school rooms and a nursery for her church. The Tupperware Wish Fairy is happy to grant them to her.
Kay Tilden, San Diego, rides in her wish come true, an inboard motorboat for her husband. It appeared at one end of Polly Pond almost as if by magic, when the wish fairy tapped the water with her wand. Its thousand-acre headquarters became a site of pilgrimage. Greyhound did bus tours for sightseers who had heard about this place and just wanted to go by it. And as Tupperware parties turned into a cultural phenomenon, the product became so popular that back in New England, at the factory, workers were suspected of smuggling bowls out in their bras.
And you've been listening to Mary Lisa Guevenis tell this story. Of Brownie Wise and Earl Tupper as well, he learns from a PR firm that the best asset he has for selling the company is Brownie herself. The rest is history, and that headquarters became a place of not just sales but enthusiastic support for women empowering themselves to help their families. When we come back, more of the story of Brownie Wise here on Our American Story. GLP-1s are changing weight loss.
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Brownie had helped turn Tupperware into a household name, but her own story was far from over. Here's Mary Lisa Goveinis with the rest of our story.
Meanwhile, Weiss was tooling around Kissimmee, Florida, in a pink Cadillac that Earl Tupper had given her. She loved the color pink. She was completely obsessive about it. She dressed in pink whenever she could. The walls of her bedroom were pink.
Everything was pink. She took up residence in this lakeside villa that Tupper had rented for her, and it was really like a movie star's villa. And in one of Rutter and Finn's real coos, she appeared on the cover of Business Week in 1954 with the cover line, "If we build the people, they'll build the business." Inside the magazine ran a portrait of her with a bull on her head. And dozens of similar stories where Brownie was goofing it up and playing into whatever the reporter wanted followed. She had a real genius for using the reporter's condescension and their lack of curiosity to her own advantage.
So even though her formal education had ended around eighth grade, most of those profiles ended up giving her a year or two of college. And despite the fact that her ex-husband had a tendency to show up at Kissimmee headquarters unannounced and roaring drunk, Newsman kept describing her as a widow. And because it was taken for granted that no one got into direct selling without some kind of substory, Cosmopolitan, another huge circulation magazine, did a profile of the Sunshine Cinderella, and misinformed the world that Weiss had started selling only because her son was sickly. Weiss wrote a book, Best Wishes, promising success in sixty seconds, and the foreword was by former direct seller Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, whose book The Power of Positive Thinking had just spent a hundred and eighty-six weeks on the bestseller list.
Soon, Tupperware ascended to the number two spot in direct selling, right behind Stanley Home Products. But by the time Weiss's book was published in 1957, she was starting to be on the outs with her employer. He did not like the idea of having anyone think that a woman was responsible for Tupperware success. And in January of 1958, Tupper fired her without warning, burying hundreds of copies of her book behind the headquarters. Brownie had nothing in her name.
Her lakeside villa was owned by the company. Tupper threw her out of it within the week, and totally had her name erased from all company literature, from anything at Tupperware headquarters, from any mention at all. He did not even want to give her severance pay. She started to sue him, and he made horrible threats to her. And they finally settled for thirty thousand dollars.
So she had made him a millionaire, and she was left without any recourse at all. But she did get her thirty grand out of it, which she used to find a new place to live. That September, Tupper sold Tupperware to the Rexall drugstore chain for an estimated sixteen million in cash and stock options. He also divorced his wife, who had borne him five children and gotten up at four every morning to document his early inventions. He gave her limited alimony, only until she could find another husband.
And when she was able to find another husband, he tried to claw back the alimony that he had already. Paid. Then he also renounced his U.S. citizenship because he didn't want to have to pay income tax on his new windfall, and he moved to a private island in Central America. When she was fired, she didn't have much resilience, and she really couldn't see anything else coming because she just totally believed in what she was doing.
Famously, in the first jubilee that Tupperware held after she was fired, Weiss had already tried to start another company, and she was still living nearby in Kissimmee. And she was trying to recruit the people that had been, she thought, so loyal to her, to come to the new company. And they made an announcement from the stage, and they said, "Hey." Anybody that wants to follow Brownie Weiss, here's your chance. Go, go for it. And nobody got up.
At the time, people saw that as like she was being condemned. But in my opinion, Weiss was somebody who was just too good at her job. She had made them. Believe in Tupperware as this miracle container, this plastic, this this wonderful, futuristic road to riches, and they believed in that so strongly that they were not able to transfer their allegiance to another product overnight. And she'd also managed the company so well that these people were really, even though.
Direct sales is not a financially stable business. They had distributorships where they were making serious money, and they were having serious fun, and they weren't about to lose that. Even for Brownie Weiss, she was devastated by that, but. Nobody followed her to her new ventures, and she did have new ventures. She was left as a single mother without a home or an income when she was fired, and then she scrambled through a series of other direct sales jobs.
She would contribute her genius for peddling cleaning products and cosmetics. And she would have male partners who would contribute their access to capital, but the men just couldn't help themselves. They had to set her straight and tell her exactly how to manage everything.
So she would write a corny line of motivational copy, or she would write a slogan, and they would decide that her instincts just weren't good enough. Tupper had pretty much let her have her head for a long time, and she had just run away and created this cultural juggernaut. These guys, they had to micromanage her on every level. They are so condescending to Brownie Weiss, who was this brilliant, brilliant marketing person. But this time, she put up with it.
They had money, and she didn't, and she had therefore no control over her own companies. Weiss finally just gave up direct selling and resigned from the whole business by about 1968, which is a shame because that's when other companies that had been inspired by her, like Mary Kay Ash's company, were really starting to take off. Weiss stayed in Kissimmee, Florida. She dabbled in real estate. Her last crack at direct sales was with a midwestern contractor who had no experience in cosmetics, but decided he was going to start a beauty business.
He vetoed every suggestion that she made, and then he finally fired her in 1969.
So afterward, here was Brownie Weiss, the woman who had been on the cover of Business Week. And she ended up as a semi recluse. She did a lot of crafts. She started her own pottery studio in the back of her house, and then she finally would die in 1992. Tupperware went on and continued to use her sales tactics, her management, her marketing, her recruitment for decades afterward.
But those started to peter out, and especially when the patents on the Tupperware seal ran out, Tupperware declared bankruptcy in 2024. Today, Weiss is sometimes remembered, but mostly forgotten. When she is remembered, it's a lot of times for her love of pink and her empowerment and her over-the-top prizes, or just the silliness and the ubiquity of the Tupperware parties during the 1950s. The whole part of direct selling as a way for women to try and claim something for themselves is today associated so much with. MLMs and sort of fly-by-night direct sales companies that people don't really have any historical perspective on what it meant to women in the 40s and 50s and how it got them out of the house and how it was yes a very limited road but it was.
Their road to something that they could have for themselves and for their own self-respect, and a great job on the storytelling, editing, and production by our own Madison Derricott. And a very special thanks to Mary Lisa Goveinis and her airmail article, gaslit gatekept girl bosses.
Well, that's the source of this story. You can check her out at airmail. And what a story! A superstar by all accounts. The cover of Business Week, the cover of Cosmopolitan, the sunshine Cinderella, and my goodness, bringing Tupperware up to number two in direct sales.
Only Stanley was bigger. And then out of nowhere. El Tupper fires her in 1958. He didn't like the fact that she was getting all the credit for building up this great business. She tried a bunch of other things and ultimately, well, just left the direct selling world entirely.
In the end, ended up a semi-recluse, dying in 1992. The story of Brownie Wise and Tupperware here on Our American Stories. Premier hosts on Verbo deliver quality vacation rental stays with fast responses and clear instructions. Oh, I had a question, our host replied super quick. Premier move.
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