Reviews the book, Women at Work: Tupperware, Passion Parties, and Beyond by L. Susan Williams and Michelle Bemiller (2011). Women at Work considers the many in-home marketing plans directed at women. Using Dorothy Smith's The Everyday World as Problematic as their basis, L. Susan Williams and Michelle Bemiller examine the party plan economy as both a form of work and a form of consumption, and argue that the party plan economy genders us by eliciting our participation in the parties, work, consumption patterns, and lifestyles they generate. The authors frame the party plan economy as a "gender regime" and therefore also call these "gender parties" throughout the book. Some of the aforementioned parties are examined in this book by scholars other than the authors; their brief "case studies" are nested within some of the book's chapters. Bemiller and Williams describe their own experience of a Pampered Chef party (hosted by Bemiller and attended by Williams) to describe the way women get sucked into participating in such gender parties. The book is geared toward an undergraduate audience, one that has not considered gender before and that would have a limited tolerance for sustained arguments about theoretical matters. Williams and Bemiller include several personal anecdotes designed to relate to the focus of the book: why Williams's campus office bookshelves include personal items, and how she left her daughter on the curb as she attempted to juggle work and parental responsibilities; and how Bemiller's students sometimes share their stories of intimate partner violence. The authors' writing style and the book's layout are designed, I assume, to make the book seem down-to-earth and therefore readable for undergraduate students. Although an interesting and important topic to explore, this book does not put the many gender parties it mentions in an overall comparative perspective, offering only a superficial look at many such parties and ignoring some altogether. As such, its broad-brush coverage might serve as a useful springboard for those considering research on one or more of these parties. While its casual style might work for undergraduates in both marketing and gender courses learning about the variety of in-home party sales and the links between marketing and constructions of gender, the analyses will be seen as too simplistic by those seeking a serious scholarly study of gender and in-home marketing plans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved
