At Home with Avon: The Rise and Rise of Direct Sales

From Side Hustles to Empires - Histories of Women’s Working Lives, featuring a series of conversations between Dr Amy Edwards and a range of expert historians. This episode takes a closer look at the direct sales industry, from the vantage of the women who helped it boom. From Tupperware to Avon, Dr Amy Edwards will cover what it meant to set up as a doorstop saleswoman in the twentieth century.Amy EdwardsAmy is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol, where she has worked for the past 10 years. Her research focuses on how ‘ordinary people’ experience large economic changes and how people in the past worked, saved, spent, and invested their money. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? Told the story of how the worlds of business and finance became part of our day-to-day culture. It looked at things like the business press, financial advice columns, investment based boardgames, and the popularity of the filofax in the 1980s. But more recently she has been carrying out a research project that looks at the lives of self-employed women from the 1950s to the 2000s. Dr Sarah JonesSarah Jones works at the University of Bristol, where she researches and teaches histories of gender and sexuality. Her research has covered topics from Victorian 'free love' movements and transatlantic sex radicalism, to the role of science in shaping modern sex advice. She’s working on an upcoming article about sex advice quizzes in women’s magazines, and she also recently contributed to an exhibition on gender, identity and culture at Bristol Museum. When she’s not busy doing all of that, she researches how to make university-level teaching more inclusive, impactful, and engaging.See this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice