Business bookshelf: The story of Brownie Wise, the woman behind Tupperware

Bob Kealing, Crown Archetype, 320 pages, $26. Long before Martha Stewart and Mary Kay and other celebrated mavens of domesticity, there was Brownie Wise. In "Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire," Bob Kealing, a journalist who has won four Emmys, offers an unvarnished look at how Wise used post-World War II optimism to not only create an early social networking system to sell the home plastics products line, but also to recruit thousands of women into the workforce at a time when a woman's apron strings tied her to the home. It was 1951 and Wise was a divorced mom who insisted Earl Tupper market his products through parties where women invited their friends into their homes for a combined sales and social presentation. Her business savvy invented much of the corporate culture of Tupperware, and soon she was a household name. Sadly, Wise's ascent was matched only by her fall. Tupper, who had myriad creative differences with Wise, and perhaps fueled by the fact she had become a celebrity, fired her abruptly in 1958. She died in 1992 at age 79 from cancer and in obscurity. The first woman to make the cover of Businessweek (in 1954) does not have a gravestone at her resting place in Kissimmee, Fla., not far from company's original headquarters. Originally published in 2008 by the University Press of Florida as "Tupperware Unsealed," this revised edition puts Wise's life at the forefront and has been optioned by Sony Pictures with Sandra Bullock to star as Wise.