The Amway Opportunity: Gender and Direct Sales in Postwar America

Existing studies of direct sales have placed women firmly at the center of important narratives about gender, culture, and consumer capitalism in the post-WWII United States. Yet, in foregrounding the importance of female culture in the study of business, such works have tended to cast direct sales as a gendered aberration from rather than a constituent part of mainstream corporate capitalism. This paper argues, by contrast, that the decentralized structure, casual workforce, home-based business model, and social networking common in direct sales in fact exemplify the trajectory of advanced capitalism in the United States. Focusing specifically on the history of Amway in the 1960s and 1970s, I show how the Amway model – which encouraged husbands and wives to see a distributorship as a family business – drew on a long tradition of domestic economy that coincided with the rise of causal, semi-autonomous labor in the U.S. economy at large. A history of direct sales thus tells us much about the ways the late-industrial labor economy in the United States has drawn on models of precarious work long common in sectors dominated by women.