S1 E2: Women’s Work

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Speaker 2 Hey, dream listeners. If you like this podcast, you're going to love the book.
Yeah, I wrote a book. It's called Selling the Dream, and it's coming out March 12th, 2024.
on Atria.

Speaker 2 It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and some that you've never even heard of, I hope. Check it out.

Speaker 2 Previously, on the dream.

Speaker 5 I think there are some FBI men in the room.

Speaker 2 I went, oh, far out. Is it really?

Speaker 3 Thinking correctly in America is supposed to lead to prosperity.

Speaker 5 I knew

Speaker 5 it was trappings for a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 3 How in the hell did I not see this?

Speaker 5 Eventually, there will be a peasant in Bangladesh who can't come up with the money, and the game will die. I knew that.

Speaker 3 Multi-level marketing has codified into an actual business the deceptions, the delusions, the manipulations that the airplane game introduced.

Speaker 2 All right, pulling into Owaso.

Speaker 2 Just past the Bonair, the Bone Air Motel.

Speaker 2 Oh boy.

Speaker 2 This is where you got to slow down. Start going 40 because it's a speed trap.

Speaker 2 Pulling into town.

Speaker 2 Open your maps app. Look up Flint, Michigan.
Now zoom out two ticks and look directly to the left of Flint.

Speaker 2 You'll see a bunch of faint boxes, township lines, to the west between Flint and the next noticeable town over, Owasso.

Speaker 2 This stretch of no man's land is where I'm from.

Speaker 2 Thought I saw a yard sale, but it was just junk in the yard.

Speaker 2 All right, and now we're pulling up to, what is this called? Bentley Grill. Didn't used to be called that.
My uncle used to work there.

Speaker 2 Salem Lutheran School. Dollar General,

Speaker 2 the library, Carl Mankey's barbershop.

Speaker 2 You may have actually seen this part of the country in b-roll footage from Michael Moore films.

Speaker 2 You know, tiny rural homes on dirt roads with rusted out cars in the front yard and chicken coops and decrepit barns leaning over out back.

Speaker 2 Michael Moore is fine, I guess, but he's from here, so I've always been kind of suspicious of his ogling. Like, ooh, look at all the poor people in their natural habitat.
Yeah, we're poor.

Speaker 2 You know that, Michael. But we're a lot of other stuff, too.

Speaker 2 Technically, Technically, none of my extended family's actual homes appeared in those movies, but they might as well have. As far as I'm concerned, those shots are of us.

Speaker 2 My family's lived around here for a long time. My dad's mom, Ruth, comes from an old English family that's been around these parts for a few centuries.

Speaker 2 My dad's dad, his family mostly came over from Prussia in the 1880s. That's what the ship manifests say, Prussia.

Speaker 2 As a preteen, I'd dig through the piles of junk in the garage on our family farm, and I'd pore over my great-great-grandfather's elementary school textbooks written in German.

Speaker 2 They were right next to some giant, dusty glass jugs of dark-brown, homemade dandelion wine. I never tried it.

Speaker 2 My parents got married here, too, right out of high school, and then left for Ann Arbor, but came back to Owasa when my dad finished school. He became a dentist.

Speaker 2 And when I was 10, we moved out to the family farm. There's Kerwood Castle.

Speaker 2 Everybody,

Speaker 2 James Oliver Kerwood's writing space.

Speaker 2 It's got a couple turrets.

Speaker 2 Owaso is famous among Owasans for being the home of James Oliver Kerwood, author of The Bear, a 1916 book originally titled The Grizzly King, which was adapted into a mostly silent French film in 1988.

Speaker 2 There's an annual festival in his honor, the Kerwood Festival, which is a carnival plopped on Main Street. Great beer tent and three-on-three basketball tournament.

Speaker 2 We're also the birthplace of Thomas E. Dewey of Dewey Defeats Truman infamy.
He didn't beat Truman, but almost. We're the home of the real Polar Express, whatever that means.

Speaker 2 And Paul Spaniola, the world's only six-time world pipe smoking champion, was born in Owasso, Michigan. And growing up out here felt kind of like being in a time warp.

Speaker 2 Partly because no one in my family throws anything away.

Speaker 2 So yes, there are those old cars and rusty rototillers lying around the front yard, just like you see in a Michael Moore movie, along with 100-year-old tools and books and toys and clothing and furniture, beds that I know more than a few of my grandparents died in.

Speaker 2 This was a town slow and sleepy enough that the half-hour trip to the mall in Flint felt like a big production. In the 1990s, we still had a canning cellar and a milkman.
In the 90s, the 1990s.

Speaker 2 No one bothered to lay cable lines for the few of us who lived out here.

Speaker 2 We burned our trash in a barrel because there was no garbage service, even though you could see the county landfill from our front yard.

Speaker 2 In place of cell phones, we had a pair of binoculars on the windowsill. We could watch what was happening next door at my grandma's house or across the field a mile away at some stranger's.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I'm not here to reminisce. I'm here because my homeland has another weird quality, one that I'm constantly reminded of through Facebook and at family get-togethers.

Speaker 2 This place is a hotbed for multi-level marketing. I'm back here to find out why.

Speaker 2 And more than that, I'm back because I want to walk into my friends' and loved ones' homes and ask them the question that pops into my head every single time they try to pitch me some new miracle essential oil or a makeup kit or, you know, tell me about the key to financial freedom.

Speaker 2 I'm here to ask them,

Speaker 7 what the fuck?

Speaker 2 And I'm terrified.

Speaker 2 I'm Jane Marie, and this is The Dream, Episode 2: Women's Work.

Speaker 2 I told you that over the course of this season, we'd be looking at MLMs from the bottom of the pyramid-shaped business model thing all the way up to the top, where a few people sit counting bags of money they're making off of people below them.

Speaker 2 It works for the top because the majority of their workforce is at the bottom. including members of my family.
We've been trying to sell this stuff to each other and to everyone around us for decades.

Speaker 2 Take my Aunt Amy. Over the years, Amy's sold.
Mary Kay, Malaluka, Protandem, Herbal Life, Ladara,

Speaker 8 Young Living Oils.

Speaker 2 I think that's it. I'm not sure it is, actually.

Speaker 2 And working on this project, I've realized most of my friends here have had experience with MLMs. One reason why is pretty obvious.
Owaso is poor.

Speaker 2 According to the latest census, 25% of people here live below the poverty line. There was once a thriving economy here a while ago, like early last century.

Speaker 2 Owaso and Corano were bedroom communities for the auto industry in Flint. In the 70s, when I was born, about half the people around here worked for the car industry.

Speaker 2 Even my grandparents, along with their soybean and winter wheat farm, had a trucking company that shipped parts for GM. But then, you know what happened.
The bottom fell out.

Speaker 2 In the 80s, as plants closed, people would scramble. I remember the summer of fifth grade, a big GM plant shut down and everyone was trying to get jobs at Saturn in Tennessee.

Speaker 2 When school started back up in the fall, it was like the rapture had happened, just poof, gone.

Speaker 2 Today, Flint is half the size it was then, and almost half of those who remain live in poverty. If you live here, you live with risk.

Speaker 2 of the bottom falling out, of racking up debt to keep your house or your family together. Sunoco gas station still going strong.
Great.

Speaker 2 And it's not just that Owasso is poor. It's that being a girl here, there's no clear path to a career or an escape.

Speaker 2 Guys, they at least grow up believing that their uncle or their dad can get them a job on the line or on the farm or at the tool and dye shop that supplies stuff to the guys on the line or on the farm.

Speaker 2 But being a girl here, the advice was, number one, Don't get pregnant. Not sure what you're going to do after you don't get pregnant, but whatever it is, it won't be an option if you're pregnant.

Speaker 2 Number two, okay, so you're pregnant. Definitely get married to anyone and make sure the grandmas are cool with watching the kids for free while you work on.

Speaker 2 Number three, securing some sort of job or training that you can fall back on when you inevitably become a single mom, which is what happens if you get pregnant.

Speaker 2 I felt weird saying this, so I called around to other girlfriends of mine who also left Owaso, and they were like, yeah, that's what they told us.

Speaker 2 While the population of most communities around the country has naturally grown by 5% over the last 10 years, Owaso's has lost 5%.

Speaker 2 A lot of us leave.

Speaker 2 So that's really what's on my mind when I'm sitting in my apartment in California, flipping through Instagram, seeing a post from an Owasan friend begging all of us, her friends, her followers, to help her sell like 10 more pairs of banana leggings in an hour so she can earn some bonus.

Speaker 2 It makes me feel an embarrassing mix of pity and shame. But driving around here, I get it.
Of course, she's hustling. I would be doing it too.
Around here, you've got to try something.

Speaker 2 And King's Corner Market used to be called Quick Check. They'd let me buy beer for my parents there when I was like 10.

Speaker 2 And now I see Amy's house.

Speaker 2 It's yellow.

Speaker 2 So like I say, Amy is who I want to talk to first. My Aunt Amy is my dad's youngest sister, and she grew up next door to us on the farm with my grandparents.

Speaker 2 Amy has a lot of MLM experience, yes, but she's also been a successful hairdresser, an MMA fighter, a wife thrice over, and she's currently the high school swim coach and drama club director.

Speaker 2 They're making me nervous.

Speaker 8 Yeah, they make everybody nervous. They get so close to the board that the whole audience goes,

Speaker 8 and then I laugh.

Speaker 2 She was just six when I was born. The generations in my family are very, very short.
Babies having babies and whatnot. Amy and I were super close growing up.
I idolized her.

Speaker 2 She was my very favorite playmate. And she has memories of going to direct sales parties at our aunts' and cousins' farmhouses back in the 70s and 80s.
Mostly Avon, but there were others thrown in.

Speaker 8 I remember for the jewelry parties, I remember it still smelling like an Avon type of situation where they all were wearing Avon.

Speaker 8 And then the heavy eyeshadow and like the heavy liner and that sort of thing. And then the hairspray.

Speaker 8 You could always smell the hairspray because it was always some form of like the Aquanette or something, some form of an inexpensive hairspray and tons of it.

Speaker 2 Sarah Coventry was another big direct sales company with our extended family.

Speaker 2 Sarah Coventry was a jewelry brand, one of those party-based ones where a bunch of women get together in a house and look at catalogs, kind of like a Tupperware party.

Speaker 8 They would have just a few pieces of jewelry that were still, you know, in their boxes and they would pass them around, basically.

Speaker 8 I think probably most of them didn't have enough money to really invest in like the display part of it. And there was always some food, usually a lot of jello.

Speaker 2 I remember the jello a lot.

Speaker 8 And then like those little roll-up hors d'oeuvres with the cream cheese and the meat and the blah.

Speaker 8 i what i remember too is that like our house was conservative as far as decorating was concerned and these other ladies lived in houses that were gilded

Speaker 8 and they have a lot of mirrors and a lot of the sculpted shag carpet in very deep and odd colors.

Speaker 2 I remember faux flowers kind of around the room, a lot of faux ivy, things like that.

Speaker 8 Yes,

Speaker 8 a lot of the faux flowers, a lot of

Speaker 8 black velvet paintings. Yes, black velvet paintings of horses.
No clowns, though.

Speaker 2 Actually, there was a clown. There was a clown out of my babe's house.

Speaker 8 Yes, it was at Aunt Babe's house and she had red carpet.

Speaker 2 I'd forgotten some of this. Yes, people join MLMs out of desperation to try to restart their lives, but also they join to have fun.

Speaker 2 These were wonderful gatherings, big to-dos in a town where there wasn't much to do. And everyone looked forward to getting together.

Speaker 8 I remember one time they were all together at one of these parties and the one lady comes in and, because she was the one that was there to sell stuff.

Speaker 8 She had gone to someone's house to have a party, but she was standing at the front door and ringing the doorbell.

Speaker 8 And they used to wear nylons inside their pants, like their polyester pants.

Speaker 8 And I was, at the time, it didn't make sense to me that you would wear a pair of control top top pantyhose underneath your polyester pants.

Speaker 8 I thought that that not only does it sound weird when you walk, but it would feel really awful, you know?

Speaker 7 Like spanks, you mean?

Speaker 8 Uh-huh.

Speaker 8 So I think that that's what these ladies did was use the control top panties or control top pantyhose as like spanks.

Speaker 8 So her story was that she was standing at someone's house middle of the day or whatever, and she was ringing the doorbell.

Speaker 8 And so she realized that there was a pair of pantyhose stuck inside her pants between her pantyhose and the pants.

Speaker 8 She bent down and took a hold of the pantyhose toe and then started pulling it out like a magician.

Speaker 2 Wee!

Speaker 8 And so when the person answered the door, she's standing there with these pantyhose in her hands and her pant leg halfway up and she's still pulling pantyhose out of her pants.

Speaker 8 And they had all found this so hilarious that they were all laughing so hard they were crying.

Speaker 8 And I just remember sitting there and watching all these women in this state of like hysteria because of the story and like how warm that was.

Speaker 8 Like, that was one of the things that was really cool about those parties: they were always really warm and really happy.

Speaker 8 And then I've never experienced that again with any of the parties that I hosted or anything like that. They just were that group.

Speaker 8 And that's one thing that, like, that makes me a little bit sad because they, they're like, almost all of them are dead at this point but

Speaker 8 but that one it makes me want to cry even they were so sweet and so fun

Speaker 2 we kids we loved these women loved the excuse to hang out and laugh as opposed to sitting in a basement shucking black walnuts which is something else women around here gathered together for my great grandma maxine amy's grandma started selling avon in the 50s and you could always rely on grandma max for some sort of direct sales product in your stocking and leftover samples she'd leave for the kids kids, which piled up in a drawer over generations.

Speaker 2 They've only recently run out after Amy's own daughters used up the dregs.

Speaker 8 I always wanted to play makeup. So when you were born, you were like this doll that I had to play with and you were always willing.

Speaker 8 So when we would play makeup, it was like the makeup that we got from grandma. Most of the time, it was just the little teeny tiny lipsticks.

Speaker 8 And so that made it more real because our hands were little and and our faces were little so it felt like we were using like big things they felt good and they smelled that certain smell and i'm not sure if it was because they were getting old or if they all smelled that way and i remember we always ended up with the ones that were kind of the tan or beige color being left over because we didn't want those we wanted red lips anyway they made everything seem real.

Speaker 2 But we actually took this one step further. We weren't just makeup artists.
We were businesswomen.

Speaker 2 I remember playing like store too because we could use the catalogs and the and the order sheets and stuff and like setting up a desk with the phone. Yep.

Speaker 8 Yep. And we were Avon ladies.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 8 And we would call and make sure that everybody was, you know, good on their orders.

Speaker 2 Amy's mom, my grandma Ruth, was not really into the makeup and jewelry scene. Grandma Ruth is, in a word, frugal.
Some might say miserly. Others might say she's a hoarder.
I say she's all three.

Speaker 2 One direct sales company in particular was completely blacklisted in Ruth's house.

Speaker 8 We didn't do Tupperware parties. We didn't go to Tupperware parties.
We didn't purchase Tupperware. We didn't, we didn't have any Tupperware at the house.
She used, reused old containers.

Speaker 8 So that was Tupperware was a waste of time to her and money.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 storage containers are free because all your food comes in a storage container already.

Speaker 8 And she could just wash it and reuse it because she still does that with like Ziploc bags.

Speaker 2 And tin foil.

Speaker 8 And tin foil. Yep.
So.

Speaker 2 She's not wrong.

Speaker 8 No, she's not. So, and she's very efficient and has a lot of money, I think, to show for it because of those behaviors her whole life.
So

Speaker 2 she was right about all those things.

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Speaker 4 Grandma,

Speaker 4 Naka.

Speaker 2 Did I take my shoes off?

Speaker 2 No. Okay.

Speaker 5 Don't get up.

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Speaker 2 I'm visiting my grandma Ruth to ask her about her mom's time as an Avon lady.

Speaker 2 Ruth doesn't really wear makeup or get gussied up for anything other than church, so it's always been funny to me that her mom was so into it.

Speaker 2 There are two houses on the property, a quarter mile apart, along with a couple of barns. Both properties are quite modest.

Speaker 2 The one we're in, my Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Bill, who now sits in the living room with dementia watching Bob Ross, They built this house as teenagers when they first started their family.

Speaker 2 They put the basement in first and lived in it with their growing brood, which would eventually number six kids while they finished the upstairs.

Speaker 2 Can I have your name?

Speaker 6 Ruth Golenbiski, thank you.

Speaker 2 Can you just tell me a little bit about yourself? I know a lot about you because you're my grandma.

Speaker 6 I live in Corona, Michigan. I've been mostly a stay-at-home wife, although there was a stint when I did some truck driving.

Speaker 6 And I'm 81 years old and I enjoy everything and I love every morning.

Speaker 2 Even for Ruth, direct sales were a part of daily life for as long as she can remember. And she says it was for one reason, the same one MLMs count on to power their sales.

Speaker 2 She'd rather buy from people she knows.

Speaker 6 I'm sure that when you go to the grocery store and you stand and you read about something,

Speaker 6 that you don't see the value that you can be introduced to by a salesperson.

Speaker 6 But I do know you can introduce yourself to products that do work, But I think that this other way is better because you have someone that educates you.

Speaker 6 And there are things you miss when you're just reading it.

Speaker 2 Thing is, my grandma Ruth never signed up to sell these things. Yeah, she didn't.
But she has signed up for the discount.

Speaker 2 She's careful and sentimental.

Speaker 6 And one of the companies that I remember when I was young was the Jewel Tea Company.

Speaker 6 And I remember that when I was a child, when they used to come to my grandmother's house, and they were a good company.

Speaker 6 I do have some pieces of

Speaker 6 haul dishware that came from them that I remember.

Speaker 2 So that was like a door-to-door kind of sales, kind of. Absolutely.

Speaker 6 And the gentleman that I remember selling it became a family friend.

Speaker 2 And so that made it kind of precious.

Speaker 2 This was 75 years ago, all this sitting around with the jewel tea guy. But I've eaten off those exact plates.

Speaker 2 And the reason my grandma still has those plates is because she learned the value of a dollar really early on.

Speaker 6 I went to work when I was nine years old the first time. I went to work at a neighbor lady's house.
She was crippled up with arthritis.

Speaker 2 She couldn't comb her own hair.

Speaker 6 And there were many, many things that I did for that lady that she just couldn't do for herself. And though I was very young,

Speaker 6 I could help her with her needs. I made a quarter, I think, an hour for the lady that I worked for.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 then from there, I went to work with another lady at another lady's house.

Speaker 6 And when I was 10 years old, I had gotten to the point where I was out picking strawberries in a patch from 8 in the morning, one hour off for noon, and 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

Speaker 6 If I had to pick strawberries that day, that's how the day went. So when you're poor like that, you learn to scrape money off the walls.

Speaker 6 And you know what's there if you're looking.

Speaker 6 When I was a child, I didn't think I was suffering, but when you wear cardboard in your shoes because you got holes in the bottom to school and your mother's cut off nylons for socks,

Speaker 6 and on Christmas you have hamburgers, but you're still happy. Your stomach's full and you're happy.

Speaker 6 I always told myself that I could do better with my money than some other people could without naming anyone.

Speaker 6 My parents had a difficult time.

Speaker 6 And I always felt like I could do better with my money, you know, as I got older.

Speaker 2 And she did. Ruth and my grandpa scrimped and saved, never spent a dollar they didn't actually possess.
Rumor has it, they're rich now. But you can't tell looking at them or the house or the yard.

Speaker 2 Ruth's parents, my great-grandma Maxine and her husband Leo, did have a difficult time.

Speaker 2 And I hope my grandma forgives me and her youngest daughter for elaborating here, but this part of the story is crucial in understanding why Avon entered our lives in the first place.

Speaker 2 Here's Amy talking about my great-grandma Maxine.

Speaker 8 She, when she was really small, she had quite a bit of money, and that's when she would wear the fur coats to school and whatnot.

Speaker 2 This is a common refrain when anyone in my family speaks of great-grandma Maxine. You know, Maxine wore fur coats to elementary school.
She wore fur coats to school.

Speaker 2 Do you know when she was little, she got to wear fur coats to school? If you don't know what to do with that information, neither did I as a little kid.

Speaker 2 Should I offer her Royal Highness more deference? Should I pity her that everyone around her thinks it's so crazy that she had a fur coat?

Speaker 2 These days, I think, yeah, I owed her both of those. So, okay, great-grandma Maxine.

Speaker 2 Apparently, her father was a successful veterinarian who doted on her when she was a very little girl, but then he left, abandoned the family. And a few years later, things got worse.

Speaker 8 She met

Speaker 8 Grandpa, Leo. They got together when she was 14.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And so he was like 21.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And so

Speaker 8 he and she had their first baby when she was 15, had their second baby when she was 16,

Speaker 8 and then had the third baby when she was 18.

Speaker 8 and were done having kids when she was 21. And so

Speaker 8 she literally was a child with children. And she was incredibly abused.

Speaker 8 And they had no money. And Grandpa Leo spent it all on who knows what.
I have a feeling he spent most of it on beer and

Speaker 8 just hanging out with his buddies.

Speaker 8 So that's the kind of life that Maxine had.

Speaker 2 Do you think that there was anything in grandma becoming an Avon lady that was like her chance to kind of like be fancy again?

Speaker 2 That's an interesting question.

Speaker 6 My mother was a pianist and she was good. And she taught our children and Jane.
And it was

Speaker 6 the poor girl never even had a piano. Now, my heart aches because my mother never had a piano in her home

Speaker 6 and she was such a wonderful pianist and it's just something that was gone out of her life. So yes, I think that selling Avon or eggs would have been an outlet.

Speaker 6 So I'm grateful that she had that opportunity. It may look like a small opportunity to some people, but for her, it was a way for her to use her graciousness and be able to communicate that.

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Speaker 2 It's that time of year again. The holidays are coming fast.
And if your kids are anything like mine, that wish list is getting pretty long.

Speaker 2 Let's be honest, some of the things on that list make us stop and think, like a smartphone. Do they actually need all that stuff to stare at? Well, no, they don't.
Just get them a gab.

Speaker 2 I got one for my kid. It has tracking, which I only look at every once in a while because I don't like to spy on her.
It has a phone number, very helpful.

Speaker 2 And it has a list of people you can text that I approve. Plus, I can spy on the text, which I don't do.
Haven't had to yet.

Speaker 2 But if something weird comes in on one of those texts, I do get a notification. And then I look and it's just some dumb YouTube makeup video that that the Gab phone doesn't let you watch.

Speaker 2 So win, win, win, win, win, win. I love it.
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Speaker 2 So get ready for a Christmas morning they'll never forget, the one where they get their first phone. And really, it's a gift for you too, because these kids phones will give you peace of mind.

Speaker 2 Visit gab.com/slash the dream and use code the dream for a special holiday offer. That's gabb.com/slash the dream.
Gab, tech in steps. Independence for them, peace of mind for you.

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Speaker 2 My great-grandmother was poor, overwhelmed, and life had decidedly decidedly not kept her in the state of fur-coated happiness she'd been born into.

Speaker 2 But I think she got a kind of independence through direct sales, through Avon in particular. And it turns out, that mix of entrepreneurship and escape, that appealed to thousands of women.

Speaker 2 A whole wave of women just like Maxine, who made the industry what it is today.

Speaker 2 You can hear how personal this all is for me. So I wanted some perspective outside my family.
Someone to answer a few basic questions about a town like mine. Questions like, why?

Speaker 2 Why us? Why here?

Speaker 5 My name is Tracy Deutsch, and I'm a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

Speaker 2 Tracy studies gender and capitalism, and she says this whole direct sales thing, especially women in direct sales, was the result of a few things.

Speaker 2 One, in the late 19th century, door-to-door salesmen had a bad rap.

Speaker 5 So paddlers and direct salespeople had a really terrible reputation in the late 19th century. They had, in some cases, a well-earned reputation as being swindlers and untrustworthy.

Speaker 2 They were itinerant. If you wanted to complain or return something, good luck finding them.
They were mostly male and some might have even been Jewish.

Speaker 2 Anti-Semitism, remember, was very hip at the time. So towns started making laws restricting door-to-door sales.

Speaker 2 At the same time, some companies that couldn't break into the mainstream marketplace, in particular black beauty products, found that women selling directly to other women in their homes was a way to get around both restrictive markets and inviting strange men into your house.

Speaker 5 I think that it was a way to bypass the politics of distribution that made it difficult to find products for people who were marginalized.

Speaker 5 So there weren't, you know, large department stores didn't carry skincare products or cosmetics for black women, but they could be sold through social networks.

Speaker 2 Annie Turnbull Malone and her protege, Madam C.J.

Speaker 2 Walker, both set up huge networks of female distributors to sell black hair care at the turn of the last century, and both of them became millionaires.

Speaker 2 Their innovation, their networking, helped develop a sales strategy that would later be emulated by countless companies, including Avon.

Speaker 5 Avon actually was founded in 1886. Wow.
And they, yeah, I know. And they developed this system of recruiting women to sell their products very early on.

Speaker 5 So by 1902, they had like 10,000 reps.

Speaker 2 Avon was founded by a former door-to-door salesman, David H. McConnell.
He started out selling books.

Speaker 2 And this might sound a little creepy, it did to me, but at some point, David began concocting perfumes in his home and would offer tiny bottles as a free gift to women who opened the door. Hmm.

Speaker 2 Anyway, the perfume took off and eventually he dropped the books and put those women to work.

Speaker 5 It's really impossible to separate questions of gender from questions of business strategy, right? They weren't selling products. They were selling women's products.

Speaker 5 And they weren't just using salespeople. They were using women.
So every aspect of a lot of cosmetics firms, but especially places like Avon,

Speaker 5 was mindful of the gender politics of the time period. One reason that Avon turned to women was because they were selling perfume, but also because they wanted to sell perfume in women's homes.

Speaker 5 Having women come into other women's homes

Speaker 5 was more within gender conventions than having strange men come into your house, which could raise

Speaker 5 questions about propriety.

Speaker 5 It was also the case that,

Speaker 5 as is often the case, they expected that they would have to pay women less.

Speaker 5 Right? Yep.

Speaker 5 Being a traveling salesman was a career path for men in a way that women weren't expected to have careers that took them outside their areas of residence.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I suppose, yes, you could say, well, women can't travel, right? They have to stay home. So then they're necessarily valued less because they don't have the mobility.

Speaker 5 Well, it cuts both ways, right? On the one hand, women have to stay at home and so they're valued less. On the other hand, women are valued less, so they have to stay at home.
They don't have, right?

Speaker 5 They don't have the option.

Speaker 5 The assumptions that women are responsible for childcare and managing households also keeps them tied to one place.

Speaker 2 So this was back in the 20s and 30s when everyone had to be scrappy, you know, find a way to make ends meet.

Speaker 5 Unmarried women had often engaged in some kinds of wage-earning work, or they had supported their families through unpaid work, like caring for other children or elderly grandparents or parents or stuff like that.

Speaker 5 Married women typically had moved in and out of the workforce as household economies demanded it. When somebody was laid off for whatever reason, right? Yeah.

Speaker 5 Or they worked in what is, and this is really useful to understand,

Speaker 5 what's called the informal economy, which are jobs that are not regulated, often buying and selling products that are not regulated.

Speaker 2 What do you mean, like bake sales or?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I do mean bake sales. Oh, okay.

Speaker 5 Things like making food and selling it out of your house to neighbors who come by.

Speaker 5 It also is included what we would think of as homework. So, women who finished fabrics or textile or clothing in their homes and then brought it back to a central site.

Speaker 5 So, it's a term for economic activities that are actually often quite important, generate a lot of money for the economy, but aren't formalized in the sense that it's regular and regulated.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 5 So, and women had often engaged in that kind of money-making.

Speaker 5 Married women had begun to participate in what you might think of as like the formal economy in larger numbers than ever before during World War II.

Speaker 5 And they often wanted to keep doing that after the war because the money was more stable for all kinds of reasons, right, that you can imagine.

Speaker 5 But those jobs were less available to them in some ways.

Speaker 2 Well, because the guys were back.

Speaker 5 Because the guys were back and because

Speaker 5 the rigors of wartime no longer could excuse their employment.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 5 So one reason that they worked for companies like Avon

Speaker 5 was that they had been working, right?

Speaker 5 This was a job that they could get

Speaker 5 in the 1950s. And it was a job that often was understood to be one that could accommodate child care and husband care and housework and things like that.

Speaker 2 And it also

Speaker 5 furthered the ideology of domesticity because of the products that were being sold.

Speaker 2 Were people making money?

Speaker 2 The women?

Speaker 5 So interestingly,

Speaker 5 that's a really hard question to answer.

Speaker 5 Most of these firms kept and keep very tight control of data about how much money people made doing this.

Speaker 5 All the data that we have suggests that there's very little money that's made.

Speaker 5 What does happen at these companies, Tupperware jump-started this process of rewarding people socially for their successes. So what they get is a lot of affirmation.
They feel appreciated.

Speaker 5 And that, I think, should not be missed in understanding the appeal of these firms, that part of what they reward

Speaker 5 is

Speaker 5 the affective emotional labor and the social connections that many women maintain no matter what.

Speaker 2 My great-grandma was poor, but she didn't need much in terms of actual cash. She died in the same shack she'd raised her kids in and lived off social security and the kindness of her children.

Speaker 2 The thing that was most lacking in her life was love and self-esteem and adoration and confidence. And some of that stuff comes at a high price no matter how you go about getting it.

Speaker 2 Think about the cost of a beauty pageant or getting an Ivy League education, or your gym membership.

Speaker 2 In a way, Maxine was investing in her quality of life, even if the checks didn't cover her new siding or a better wheelchair.

Speaker 5 That's a common refrain among people

Speaker 5 who did MLMs in the 1950s and 60s and 70s: they felt special. They had access to this world that rewarded them.

Speaker 5 Not every part of people's experiences experiences in these companies is bad.

Speaker 5 They got social rewards. They often felt like they got, like your grandmother, right? That they got to participate in social interactions that were really rewarding to them.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 5 That made them feel good, that got them out of their houses and justified time at a party or spending it with other people.

Speaker 5 And we miss the significance of what these organizations are doing

Speaker 5 if we only look at them in financial terms.

Speaker 5 They did historically provide things that conventional formal economy does not provide, and it's a real problem.

Speaker 5 The rigidity of working hours, the lack of understanding about women's responsibilities at home, the need for social engagement and social relations to be valued.

Speaker 5 That's all something that these jobs provided.

Speaker 11 So anyways, I began to develop my team and we did things together. I had team meetings.
Everything that I did was for my girls.

Speaker 11 I mean, they were my heart.

Speaker 2 My team was my heart and I gave my all. Now it's about the culture, the community, the sisterhood that I'm experiencing and then being able to be

Speaker 12 something besides a wife and a mother. Now I'm contributing to the household.

Speaker 6 It's building my self-esteem.

Speaker 2 It's making me feel whole as a person.

Speaker 4 I really feel

Speaker 4 lucky, or as they say here in the South, blessed, that this came along because I really feel like everybody is

Speaker 2 rooting for you.

Speaker 5 And I doubted myself for a long time.

Speaker 4 I doubted myself for a very long time.

Speaker 10 But what I can tell you,

Speaker 2 I have met some of the most incredible women.

Speaker 10 And I've had so many people tell me

Speaker 10 you live in a fantasy world in your little makeup world.

Speaker 10 And I'm telling you, this has been my happy place.

Speaker 10 And this has been the place.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry.

Speaker 10 This has been the place that has gotten me through so many rough points of my life in the past three years.

Speaker 10 I owe my success

Speaker 10 to you,

Speaker 10 my team,

Speaker 10 the people that have believed in me, and the people that have made me start believing in myself.

Speaker 2 Next time on the dream.

Speaker 13 I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have about what we're doing before we get started, if you'd like.

Speaker 13 Yeah, the biggest question I had is:

Speaker 13 why?

Speaker 2 Why are you doing this? And what would have prompted such an endeavor?

Speaker 2 The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher. Written and reported by me, Jane Marie, Dan Gallucci, Mackenzie Kassab, Lyra Smith, and help from Claire Rawlinson.

Speaker 2 We are edited by Peter Clowney. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.
The Dream is executive produced by Laura Mayer, Chris Bannon, Dan Gallucci, and me.

Speaker 2 We appreciate you subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show wherever you listen.

Speaker 3 Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy.

Speaker 3 It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Speaker 2 Ah, really?

Speaker 3 Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply.
See capital1.com slash bank, capital One NA member FDIC.

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Speaker 4 Hey guys, it's Paige from Giggly Squad, and if you're anything like me, holiday shopping has officially started. And you know where I'm going? Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 4 They have the cutest gift sets right now, like the Sol de Janeiro, Shea Rosa, and Cheer Perfume Mist Trio. It smells so good.
I've been misting it everywhere. On me, on the street, on my pillow.

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Speaker 2 Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here. The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.
It's $5 a month. It's the only tier.
No commercials. Plus, bonus content.

Speaker 2 This helps keep us independent. And your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the dream.

Speaker 2 We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us. We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

Speaker 2 The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything. But I don't love rules.

Speaker 2 So what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

Speaker 2 And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping. And it's there.
And we're just going to talk about what we bought. It'll be fun.

Speaker 2 That's thedream.s-U-P-E-R-C-A-S-T dot com. Supercast.
Please, please go subscribe. It's five bucks.
It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles. See you there.