A cake to bake and a floor to sweep,

And a tired babe to sing to sleep.

What does a woman want but these&endash;

A home, a child, and a man to please.

Today’s Children, January 8, 1934, episode 401, pg.4; July 28, 1935, episode 800, pg.4; June 19, 1936, episode 1039, pg.6

 

The leading industrialists of this country seem

to have an extraordinary common denomination.

They all have good wives….

The woman behind the man IS a very important

ingredient in his success…

Dexter Yager. Don’t Let Anybody Steal Your Dream, pg. 88, 90-91.

As we have begun this journey into the Wide World of Amway, it has become apparent that Amway products, such as SA8® of the preceding chapter, must be understood as signifying something much deeper than merely use-value. The numerous commodities and services available through Amway’s catalogs come to embody not only "the quality and service" provided by the Amway Corporation, but more critically, come to signify an entire way of living and/or commitment to Amway ideals ("free market capitalism," "family values," American "freedom").²⁴ While the importance and value placed upon these products is by no means reserved to a especial arena of daily living, they appear to exert a particularly significant role in the homes of committed Amway distributors. In this regard, I have decided to analyze The Amway House, web-site which can be accessed through the Products section of the Amway-USA web-site. While The Amway House is merely a fictional representation of an Amway distributor’s home, such a fictional model may draw out vital clues into many aspects of life in the Amway Corporation as it is constructed out of the company’s particular world-view and business ideology. In addition, The Amway House offers an invaluable look into not only the construction of "proper" gender roles in an Amway home, but indeed within the larger corporation itself. Upon examining the images that are to be found in the following pages, I will attempt to highlight some of the internal contradictions within The Amway House piece itself and how these contradictions may themselves inform our understanding of wider socio-economic relationships in relation and opposition to consumption more generally.

As I began the research that informs this present study, I began to explore the Amway Corporations web-sites. During this rather informative process, I happened upon the "Product" section of www.amway.com/usa.²⁵ One of the features of "Products" was a link entitled The Amway House. Not having noticed this particular link on my previous wanderings through the "World of Amway" I clicked on to this icon with no small sense of curiosity. Within a few seconds I was greeted with an image of a rather typical suburbanite home placed on a slight hill, surrounded with green lawns and blue sky, and in the process of being "settled." The image to which I am referring follows below:

The house as drawn does not really strike the viewer as anything out of the ordinary. The truck in front appears to be a moving truck of sorts, yet no people are present. This it appears is left to our imagination as no humans will ever appear in the tour of the house. However, this in itself may have a purpose&endash;-perhaps it is "we" who are to imagine ourselves living in the house. As the blue highlight on the bottom of the picture clearly states, the house is "(Almost) Completely Furnished by Amway." The house, as will become quickly apparent, becomes the repository of the various Amway products, which can be viewed at the Amway web-site. Perhaps the house is meant to grant the visitor an "inside glimpse into "life" as it may or "could be" by not only becoming an Amway distributor, but indeed even in the act and practice of buying Amway produced and supplied commodities and services.

Beginning Amway distributors are often faced with some interesting challenges in regard to their private home life. In particular, distributors are "encouraged" to not only change a few items in their household, but also indeed "convert" their home to all Amway products. Lester observes:

Distributors are encouraged to begin to use Amway products to the exclusion of all others from the time they join the business, because "You can't have a successful business unless you're really committed to these products." Early in his career in Amway a distributor who does not conform to this expectation may be sharply reminded of the importance of commitment, for when some sponsors go to a new distributor's home to help with an opportunity meeting, they excuse themselves and go to the bathroom to see if there are any non-Amway products in the cabinets. If such are found, the sponsor will pile them on the toilet seat, return to the living room and say to the distributor, "There's an emergency situation in the bathroom--you'd better go see about it." This is an extremely embarrassing event in a distributor's career, and happens to no one twice. [Lester, 1974: 27-28]

The emphasis on converting "the old" to "the new," if you will, is publicly expounded as one of the principal ways in which new distributors can insure a positive attitude towards the business and their potential for success. However, this process also develops and shapes the consumption habits of new distributors. Not only are old needs forcefully removed from the home-space, but also new consumption needs are concurrently cultivated.

Furthermore, Amway distributors are encouraged to become the ultimate Amway consumers: members of some groups are encouraged to purge themselves of all "poison products" from their homes&endash;i.e. those not available through Amway. Distributors often point to with pride to their attire reassuring their potential recruits that all items on their body are available from the Amway catalog. "If Amway doesn't sell it you don't need it." [Connelly, 1997: 373] (My emphasis)

However, the process does not appear to end solely with those consumer items, which will make up the interior/exteriors of the distributor's home, car, or wardrobe. Indeed, some of the commodities available through Amway are food, beverage, and/or vitamin products. In a sense, then, commodities quite literally become part of and sustain the distributor's body. 

Amway distributors are encouraged in other ways to believe in the products, especially the organic vitamins (Nutrilite). One extremely successful distributor remarked in a speech, " I just love these products, especially the Nutrilite, because now I can eat my PV [Product Volume--a scale used to determine bonuses]." New distributors in particular are reminded to "eat your Nutrilite." This emphasis on oral incorporation of the products is a striking parallel to the Direct's frequent statement that "We got in Amway 18 months ago; Amway got in us14 months ago." [Lester, 1974: 28] (My emphasis)

This phenomena necessitates closely looking into the "world of Amway" by looking at the home itself. In order to better familiarize the reader with the "world" to which I am referring I have decided to provide here a tour of the house. I include along the side margins selections of the explanations provided on the web-site (A selected number of items in each room can be clicked on and a commentary is provided on a separate frame -- for further explanation, refer to http://www.amway.com/usa/products/house/). Due to the limitations imposed by the scope of this paper I include only the commentaries most pertinent to my analysis. The questions I am addressing here are: How are the Amway products represented? What do these images convey? And lastly, to whom might these images appeal?

EDITOR'S NOTE: The bound printed version of this document includes Amway's cartoon vision of fourteen spaces in and around their ideal house. In each section there is a drawing of the space and alongside it the commentary with arrows pointing to the objects being spoken about. However, because of Amway's reputation for litigation at the drop of a hat, we have decided to leave these out of the internet version. Compounding the evidentiary problem here, Amway has since removed these materials from their website so that the reader who follows the address above will be denied.

Several ideas and themes consistently recur throughout these images. While this house is held up as the "model" Amway home, it is interesting to note that it is (aside the Exercise Room) very typical, the house conforms closely to the stereotypical suburbanite dwelling. Even if one did not know that the products inside the house had been acquired through Amway, it is doubtful that many of us would have been able to distinguish the house from any other middle-class home. Granted, some of the Amway products like SA8®LC, SATANIQUE® shampoo²⁶ or Glister® Toothpaste could arouse some curiosity, yet aside from these specifically Amway products, most everything in the house is not "foreign" or amazingly "modern." Indeed, the master bath, for example, by no means embodies current architectural trends and design&endash;it almost appears to resemble a 1950s bathroom interior. And yet, the house holds a prominent place on the Amway "Products" web-site. I believe this may in some sense be intentional. The house is so constructed that a portion of "Middle America" can not only identify with this, but also, even find it appealing. The house represents both a moderate level of material wealth as well as a sense of functionality. What is intriguing, however, is the ways in which the products are themselves represented. They are, as I have mentioned earlier, not "out of the ordinary" in any sense of the word, yet by looking at how they are represented it is clear that particular notions of women’s and men’s work are being embodied in The Amway House.

Throughout the images it is interesting to note that it is the wife who is speaking. Her name is never given,²⁷ she is generic in some sense, irrelevant to the story line, a background person who comes to represent what a housewife in Amway can wish to aspire to. She tells us that she does the entire family’s load of ironing, cleaning, washing, and cooking at home (except that is, when Mary Anne is cooking a "gourmet" microwave meal for her "beau") and "when we travel." Connelly and Rhoton remarked upon similar levels of physical labor for women in their study of women in Amway. They note: 

Physical labor is more intense in the Amway organization: the product comes in larger quantities and larger containers, and distributors must pick up their orders at the home of the upline distributor. The order is broken down as downline distributors arrive to pick up their portions of the consolidated order, and this pattern is repeated until the product is delivered to a consumer. Within Amway "families," a standard pattern of division of labor exists in which these tasks are relegated to the wife. [Connelly, 1997: 372]

We are told that she and her husband have one 18 year-old boy, twin 16-year-olds girls, and a 2 year-old boy adopted from Yugoslavia. In addition, the visitor to The Amway House will also be perhaps interested to note that the apparently model Amway wife and daughters are careful to watch their nutritional intake and exercising regularly (in three rooms--Half-Bath, Master Bathroom, and Exercise Room&endash;a weight scale is admirably described and yet baned for its accuracy)&endash;"There’s no excuse." The gender implications of this emphasis on weight is quite telling, to say the least. It not only implies significant influence over what a woman does with her body, but also hints at the ways in which Amway ideology can come to affect personal and private areas of life. While The Amway Housewife’s husband, in the text at hand, does appear to contribute some to household tasks, these appear to be reserved to the garage (where he uses a wet and dry vac to "keep the cars and garage as clean as I keep the house") and the backyard (where Jeff "grills to perfection" her marinated "veggies" and has a new job description as the "Greenskeeper"). These clearly delineated gender roles not only point to what is stereotypically represented as "the typical suburban" lifestyle, but they also clearly reflect the ways in which separate spheres of work are constructed in order to maintain, or approximate as close as possible, the ideal Amway work/family arrangement. Dunn remarks:

A model of the perfect family unit is fostered by some of the more successful Amway groups. Their rallies and tapes presented the specialization of functions within the family unit as a requisite for success. The husband in such a family functioned in the public arena--charged with the tasks of presenting the plan and recruiting others. The wife in such a family functioned in the background. Ever supportive, she performed the "clerical" aspects of the work--did the bookkeeping, and moved the products through the various distributor channels. Although it was agreed that singles can do it too, the suggested route to success consistently portrayed this ideal family unit. [Connelly, 1997: 378]

Amway, Shaklee, and United Science of America distributors...follow a sexual division of labor. The husband shows the business plan while women sell vitamins or cosmetics to their friends and keep the books. [Biggart, 1989: 94]

Thus, the model Amway husband/wife team appears to be one in which a male distributor’s "...wife has joined the business as his partner, and the vast majority of distributorships are in fact jointly owned by husband and wife" [Lester, 1974: 23]. While the use of this term "partnership" connotes a possibly equal business alliance, it is quite clear that this is by no means the case. While extremely difficult to generalize about how particular distributors arrange their partnerships, it is apparent from The Amway House that there are quite different material representations for the male side of the partnership than for the female side. Butterfield comments upon the effects of these relationships in remarking that:

The soft-core sexism of advertising, the encouragement of psychologically destructive competition in fashion, the equation of excitement with money--Amway amplifies all these features of corporate capitalism, and worse: the wife belongs back in the home, ironing her husband's shirts so he can go out and Show the Plan. Her liberation is henceforth to keep the books, serve him coffee when he comes home, sell lipstick and foodbars to her friends, and, once a month, deck herself out like an expensive princess for the upcoming Rally to advertise and reinforce his success [I imagine this is reserved only to those few distributors who have been able to reach the high "jewel" levels of success in Amway]. Her name is on the bonus checks; "You can't get any more equal than that," said the wife of a Diamond from North Carolina. Equality is measured, not in rights, or wisdom, or access to politics and education, but in bonus checks [read consumptive power]. Betty Freidman, Kate Millett, Erica Jong, Germaine Greer--and even further back, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman ---never happened, or were all the result of Negative Attitude, and now we can wave them away like a bad dream. Mildred Cunningham in Happy Days is the model of what a woman should be. [Butterfield, 1985: 119] (My emphasis)

While this account can by no means be applied more generally in relation to Amway distributors (there are, over 2,000,000), Butterfield’s comments do indicate a definite conception or order of the family, one that can be seen reflected in The Amway House. As I remarked earlier, the wife in this home is primarily responsible not only for child-care but also for the many household chores (cleaning, laundry, cooking). While Mary Anne does appear to occasionally cook, Brian (who is 18) is represented as "majoring in mess" and working on his car, a Cutlass. We are led to imagine, however, that both he and his brother, Josh, will fulfill their roles by following in their father’s footsteps by taking on more and more "work" in the garage and backyard.

The girls, on the other hand, will likely follow in their mother’s footsteps learning to "save time" by shopping through Amway’s catalogs for household, nutritional, decorative, and beauty needs. Thus, "Like the adult female, the girl in commercials [or The Amway House] plays a stereotypical role. Girls are portrayed as more passive than boys. They are shown assisting their mothers in serving men and boys. They are shown learning household tasks and ways to become beautiful. They are not shown learning how to become independent and autonomous" (My emphasis) [(Courtney, 1983: 23) Quoted in Fine and Leopold 1993: 209]. While both are being socialized to acceptable gender roles, the emphasis is on a very particular conception of "femininity" and female gender roles. As Ferree and others have noted, these gender role enactments are critical to the process by which gender is enacted.

From the perspective of gender theory, the symbolic as well as structural association of housework as "women's work" is no longer taken for granted, but is treated as a social fact that needs explanation (Ferree, 1990), Hartman (1981) described the division of labor at home as one of the ways that our society creates gender. Berk considered the doing of housework to be so central to the process of dividing people into socially significant groups called men and women that she titled her book on the household division of labor The Gender Factory (1985). Understanding the allocation of housework as part of the social definition of womanhood explains why women's paid employment does not excuse women from this social demand (Spitze, 1988). Women are held responsible for doing housework themselves or seeing to it that someone else (husband, child, hired help) does it for them (DeVault, 1990). Using this gender perspective, researchers have increasingly been able to identify the ways in which women themselves incorporate the idea that housework is women's work into their own self-image and attempt to demonstrate that they are "good" wives by providing satisfactory housework²⁸ (DeVault, 1990; Komter, 1989). [Ferree, 1991: 161] 

Throughout the images, the wife tells the viewer that she travels but we do not know with whom. If one were to click on the golf clubs in the garage you would find out that she is trying to take up golf but finds it difficult to find the time. This would not be surprising given the number of obligations that tie her to the house. Even in exercising, we are told that she never needs to leave the house given that everything she needs is right there in the house. Her only outlet appears to be her computer which "opens doors to opportunities for education and entertainment." The world that her husband inhabits, on the other hand, is both within and across the public and private. This situation, as Amway presents it to the spectator, intrigues me. Why this portrait of a model Amway family/house? What in these images appeals to people (if, that is, they have come across them searching through the various web-sites at www.amway.com/usa/) What do they suggest about the role of commodities in the Amway home?

Looking back to the roots of Direct Selling Organizations (of which Amway is a prominent member), Biggart argues that the initial appeal of this type of organization lies in its "promise" to reconcile two conflicting worlds, that of wage-labor work and home/family.

Network DSOs [Direct Selling Organizations] grew at precisely the moment when a family/work relationship predicated on a separation of spheres was under tension. Direct selling organizations offered an alternative vision of work and family to a population seeking new solutions: an integration of the domestic and economic spheres reminiscent of preindustrial America. Direct selling offers flexible work arrangements to women and sometimes allows them to work and care for children at the same time; it lets women "have it all." In network DSOs that attract both men and women [such as Amway], direct selling promises a shared work life and the emotional benefits to marriage that ensue from economic partnership. For women whose entry into a firm-dominated labor force has been less than happy, DSOs promise working conditions that emulate the nurturing character of the domestic sphere they are familiar with. The promise and the reality, however, are not always the same. [Biggart, 1989: 75-76]

Biggart is careful to point out, however, that while the roots of these organizations (such as Amway) may be in the pre-industrial production period of the United States, the present social arrangements within these organizations grow out and in reaction to current socio-economic conditions. She writes:

A quick look at network DSOs might lead an observer to conclude that they are an anachronism, a throwback to a pre-industrial model of social organization where husbands, wives, and children worked and played together. In fact, direct selling organizations are a product of today. They are a response to families' desire to be together in an economy that keeps them apart and to a world of work that disadvantages women in several ways. Network direct selling organizations [like Amway] are one industry's opportunistic response to the segmented and gender-divided arrangements of postindustrial society. [Biggart, 1989: 97]

And yet as Biggart noted, this "promise" does not always materialize. Indeed, in light of the previous discussion, it is apparent that these new "opportunities" only occasionally (for those lucky few) provide both the home time and the necessary cash flow to make ends meet (or ideally "succeed"). If, however, there is such a low rate of success within these organizations, and Amway specifically, what is it then that is appealing about the images that are presented in these images?

I think we can begin to deconstruct what’s cooking in The Amway House, if you will, by taking a quick look back into the 1930s. While this may seem a bit odd, I think that there can be made some useful comparisons. "The thirties witnessed the widespread want and deprivation associated with the Great Depression, and, at the same time, those years were the occasion of rapid advances in mass consumption" [Lavin, 1995: 75]. During this period companies were hard pressed to find methods by which they could get the consumer buying again. Given the desperate state of the economy and people’s unwillingness (inability) to spend the surplus cash they may have, corporations began experimenting with different forms of advertising. These methods would not only create a new kind of consumer but also help create new needs and gender stereotypes. One of the fascinating ways companies like Pillsbury were able to gain new customers was by means of a new form of information diffusion that linked diverse and widespread communities&endash;radio, and specifically soap opera. Beginning in the early 1930s and broadcasting from Chicago, Irna Phillip’s radio programs, such as Today’s Children and Painted Dreams, came to be known as the first soap operas.

Soap opera, one of the radio formats originated in the 1930s, was well suited to play an important role in encouraging mass consumption. First, serial programming turned individual housewives across the nation into a mass audience that faithfully tuned into each daily episode. Second, soap operas provided role models²⁹ of "real life" families who overcame adversity and successfully attained the American Dream of middle-class well-being and happiness. And finally, serial programming permitted the development of characters with whom the audience could identify and who could serve as trusted friends and experts. [Lavin, 1995: 76]

The development of soap opera proved to be quite successful attracting devoted listeners from across the country.³⁰

Many farm women eagerly sought expert advice as they learned to use unfamiliar technologies that represented major investments. The House Bureau, farm magazines, and vendors [and as Lavin has shown us--Radio also] were major sources of information. Aesthetic and organizational prescriptions came along with technical expertise. Principles of interior decoration were an integral part of lessons in how to use electric lights; window treatments went along with the refitting of rotten sashes. Fashion tips, including advice on how to make clothes to hide bodily "imperfections" (too much or too little weight in various places, curvature of the spine, and so on), went along with instructions in more efficient sewing techniques and the use of standard clothing patterns. Principles of saving labor and rationally organizing space and time were part and parcel of the instructions that came with the new technologies [and the accompanying commodities]. [Adams, 1993: 103]

"Moreover, soap opera sponsorship served not only to build product awareness but it also became an important means of directly stimulating product sales" [Lavin, 1995: 82].³¹ Given, the historical moment in which we are living is quite different, I think there are some connections with the present day Amway House. Throughout the images on the web-site there are constant references to the "origin" of the products that make up the house&endash;they all of appear to come from Amway. At some points the commentaries explaining a particular product are a bit thick, such as the references to "my grandma" who still uses a wringer washer and a treadle sewing machine. Now while using a treadle sewing machine may be not out of the ordinary, the wringer washer leaves one a bit perplexed. While certainly not to judge those who must use these machines³² for one reason or another, it is still a bit unbelievable. A large majority of households (both rural and urban) went through substantial household renewal or raising of standards during the 1950s. Thus the implicit assumption of transitioning to the modern, in contrast to "the traditional," does not hold the same weight or appeal as it may have in the 1930s. However, there it is on the web-site. This is in some ways puzzling in that advertising research indicates that these forms of marketing goods are no longer effective.

In short, despite the view of advertising as culturally in the vanguard in the way in which it presents images, it seems most likely that traditionally conceived advertising has persisted in ideologically obstructing the changing role of women, by continuing to portray them as sex objects or mothers. Although advertising has begun to respond by creating new images of glamorous, wealthy and independent women, this has much to do with the selling of convenience products and less to do with the direct portrayal of the more typical 'new women' who is liable to be using them--a mother returning to (part-time) work after her youngest child has begun school. [Fine, 1993: 209-210]

But most of the commodities that are most heavily advertised are purchased predominantly by women, especially those used on a regular basis in housework--such as food and cleansing materials. On TV, ads for these are directed at women both by their content and by the timing of their appearance (aired in the afternoon). Moreover, these ads rely almost exclusively upon the presumed effectiveness of male voice-overs to explain to a woman why she should purchase the product in question: [Fine, 1993:208]

If then this form by which Amway has decided to display its goods is not all that effective, then who are they trying to reach using it, and with what message (if indeed there is one)? I think that these issues bring us back to the presentation of the products with their accompanying story lines and commentaries. Could these represent an attempt to bring meaning and authenticity to these products? The commentaries all highlight, to some extent, the ways in which the products can be used, their functionality, as well as the leisure they apparently bring to the family due to their time saving qualities (although the narrator consistently refers to her inability to find time to do all that needs to be done or that she would like to have done). I would venture to argue that these portrayals are deliberately modeled along the same lines as the 1930s soap opera (although admittedly less creative) advertisements. They are not meant to appeal to everyone but to those who do identify with the "place" that is constructed within these images, a world well ordered, clean, a "home place," separated from the intense cultural and socio-economic contradictions of our late post-modern global capitalist economy. In a sense it’s represents the search for that good times of the mythical glorious American past&endash;a place to come home to. The images draw us into what Lefebvre argues is a pull into an imaginative world where "the ‘detached’ house is experienced by the inhabitant as something to which he has a chance of adapting, but also as dream and ideology" [Lefebvre, 1990 (1984): 89].

I believe it may prove helpful to revisit these images once more in an attempt to pull out some underlying tensions and contradictions that inhabit this The Amway House text. There is an overall puzzling presence of the piece where even in its style one is confronted with a cartoonesque quality fused with a graphic design which reveals as much as it masks in attempting to piece together a story and representation of The Amway House. Take the image of the house itself. We have a house situated on a hill&endash;there is perhaps a view of some mountain, a lake perhaps?&endash;yet in appearance it is alone, a house in the country or suburbs. Curiously, however, once inside the house there are repeat and confusing references to the outside world and homelife: the business of their lifestyle&endash;"All of us...have a pager"&endash;and the way in which Amway has eased their lifestyle by providing such "time-saving" and advanced technology, appliances, soap, etc. So here is a house in the country of a modest middle class style, functional but not extravagant. The family appears to have moved in recently indicating perhaps a modest advance in social status and financial resources. Yet from the narratives with which we have been provided their life by no means seems to reflect a life of luxury and ease.

Indeed, in many respects the family (aside from the fact that they buy almost all Amway products) gives the impression of the typical stereotypical middle-class home. The father, Jeff, is apparently away much of the time "Selling the dream" whilst the narrator-housewife (who apparently does not have an identity removed from her domestic activities) stays at home to care for the house. She tells us that she doesn’t even need to leave the house to exercise, she can shop for almost all household goods except some groceries via catalog, yet there are also references to having to travel considerably with her husband. While these oddities may appear to be rather banal phenomena, taken together they posit a rather peculiar thing, a representation given a prominent space by Amway, yet causing this reader at least to be disconcerted by the puzzling construction, imagery, and language used to represent the Amway products, specifically, the invisible housewife-narrator. While she may have no identity, could it be perhaps an acknowledgment of the importance of "...the household as a crucial site of power and information" as well as the role that housewives have in determining household consumptive choices the power thereof [Clark in Miller 1998: 73]? In effect, might the household and individual consumer represent something of new space of power, one that is both acknowledged (as in The Amway House) in advertising techniques, but that is also equally devalued (that is domestic/house-work)? Daniel Miller writes:

Of course there is a great variety of consumers divided by many social attributes. For the purpose of this polemic, however, I want to select one image to stand for the idea of a consumer. This is the First World housewife, such as from Western Europe or North America....[T]here are grounds for focusing upon this stereotypical figure. This is partly because in popular culture (from mysogynistic newspaper strip cartoons to television sitcoms) the mythic figure of the housewife dominates the image of consumption...I want to argue...that the housewife in many respects epitomises the contradictions of contemporary consumer power. It is by focusing upon the housewife as the global dictator that the ironies of power may be most directly confronted. It is ironic in the sense that the housewife is often stereotyped as herself both modest and denigrated. She commands little respect in the social world she inhabits. Her labour in shopping, her skills of thrift and comparative purchasing are largely disregarded and undervalorised. Yet it is she (or at least the consumption she stands for) who may have displaced the top-hat capitalist as the aggregate 'global dictator'. She thereby stands as the potential objectification of tremendous fear and power for the peasantries of the developing world, who are increasingly aware how far their life-chances are dependent upon her. [Miller 1995: 8-9] (My emphasis) 

While by no means resolving the contradictions or messiness of the Amway text, in looking to the ways in which this particular text may reflect on broader global politico-economic processes, Miller’s observation does go far in attempting to explain the significance of The Amway Housewife within the global context. Moreover, looking through this Amway text (as well as those which have been examined in previous chapters) we find that women consistently occupy an ambiguous relationship in the Amway world. While clearly their willingness to join and/or manage the business as well as buy/consume/market Amway products is critical to the success of the business, their presence is often relegated to the background supporter, authentic narrator-housewife voice, faithful supporter, etc. Belk remarks the following on the significance of the commitment to a particular line of products:

A more promising avenue of enquiry distinguishes between low- and high-involvement consumption and seeks to demonstrate that the personal meanings of consumption are greater in the case of high-involvement products. There is some evidence that enduring involvement with a product category is like automobiles or clothing results in greater use of such products to define the self (Bloch and Bruce 1984), although some types of product involvement appear temporary (Richins and Bloch 1986). Another line of enquiry suggests that certain types of consumer goods that are likely to be highly meaningful for the self have a secular sacred character (Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989). Such sacred things may become so through contagious contact with the numinous(e.g. relics of star musicians),...through ritual,...or through their singularity (e.g. quintessential brands, gifts from loved ones). These goods are retained and cherished because of their extraordinary status and their implications for self-definition. [Belk, 1995: 71-72] (My emphasis)

We may then argue that even though their role is not given the attention accorded Amway men (who typically show the Amway Sales & Marketing plan), women in Amway exert a crucial role within the Amway organizational structure. In assisting in the continued use and marketing of Amway products/services women in Amway help to maintain the high profits of the corporation. In essence then, and perhaps just as critically, women become important actors within the system who are socialized both to conform to and maintain a particular integration and organization of the social and politico-economic arenas of life. It is to a more detailed analysis of this subject, what I call evangelistic consumption, to which I now turn my analysis.