L'image représentée par Tupperware est essentiellement féminine. Cet article analyse la littérature entourant Tupperware pour y retrouver cette image de la fémininité de classe moyenne, euronord‐américaine et domestique. L'analyse de cette littérature se fait en tenant compte des changements et continuités, au cours des 50 dernières années, des rôles domestiques, économiques et sociaux des femmes nord‐américaines. Ces rôles domestiques et économiques se sont entrelacés, ce qui a permis à L'entreprise de mieux les exploiter. La réussite de Tupperware en s'associant à cette image très précise peut servir comme baromètre pour révéler comment les femmes négocient les pressions combinées de la maison et du travail. Tupperware projects a quintessentially gendered image. This article explores writings by and about Tupperware to discover its representation of middle‐class white domestic femininity. This image is read against changes and continuities in North American women's domestic, economic and social roles over the past fifty years. There has been an ongoing intertwining of women's domestic and paid work roles that Tupperware has been able to exploit. The enduring success of Tupperware as a company associated with a specific image is thus a useful barometer indicating how women are contending with the combined pressures of home and work.

Peruvian development and government analysts criticize communities for irrationally using local development funds deriving from recently instituted political decentralization to beautify their villages rather than to improve infrastructural services, education and health, or to alleviate poverty. This paper challenges this critique by explaining why such cosmetic improvements are of interest to rural people. Using a case study of the peasant community of Allpachico, I argue that these projects encourage the return of pensioners and visits from migrants. Residents and migrants are mutually dependent as a result of livelihood strategies based on agriculture and the foreign-controlled resource extraction sector over the past 80 years. The relative position of these two groups in the social reproduction of the vernacular community has changed with the Peruvian political economy. Currently, in the neoliberal resource extraction economy, residents pragmatically opt to maintain relations with those who have stable wage or pension incomes.

Clothing occupies a complex and important position in relation to human experience. Not just utilitarian, dress gives form to a society's ideas about the sacred and secular, about exclusion and inclusion, about age, beauty, sexuality and status. In Dressing the Elite, the author explores the multiple meanings that garments held in early modern England. Clothing was used to promote health and physical well-being, and to manage and structure, life transitions. It helped individuals create social identities and also to disguise them. Indeed, so culturally powerful was the manipulation of appearances that authorities sought its control. Laws regulated access to the dress styles of the elite, and through less formal strategies, techniques of disguise were kept as the perquisites of the powerful. Focusing on the elite, the author argues that clothing was not just a form of cultural expression but in turn contributed to societal formation. Clothes shaped the configurations of the body, affected spaces and interactions between people and altered the perceptions of the wearers and viewers. People put on and manipulated their garments, but in turn dress also exercised a reverse influence. Clothes made not just the man and the woman, but also the categories of gender itself. Topics covered include cross-dressing, sumptuary laws, mourning apparel and individual styles.

In the Peruvian peasant community of Mata Chico, participation in the national economy over the twentieth century has transformed family relations. As people first adapted to an emerging capitalist economy, and then to a crisis in that economy, a family “community of interest” in farming gave way to “complementary interests” among parents and children, women and men. In pursuing complementary interests, younger family members undertake economic activities that lead them away from the farm but family ties, though significantly changed, remain strong.

This case study combines economic and life course history to highlight new forms of inequality. While a previous generation of industrial workers had jobs with benefits, their children have become a precariat. Peru is no exception, despite its booming resource economy. In a context of continuing strong inter-generational ties, pensioners from the community of Allpachico support their precariat children and receive personalized elder care in return. State-funded community development through participatory budgeting, an attempt to stave off the 'resource curse', has provided residential services that can ease pensioners' senior years. This permits them to choose whether to live in their community of origin or elsewhere. In contrast, elderly women and men without pensions may have to leave their peasant community homes to be cared for by their urban precariat children. Local economies that are oriented to pensioners' needs, however, are necessarily unstable since pensions cannot be inherited and the neoliberal economy generates few new jobs.