Domesticating Efficiency: Lillian Gilbreth's Scientific Management of Homemakers, 1924-1930

Viewing the work of Lillian M. Gilbreth through the lens of critical biography

“…In fact, in the early twentieth century, "domestic employment was the single most important category of paid employment for all women in both Britain and the USA" (Butler and Watts, 2007, p. 148). However, the growth of manufacturing jobs in the USA had resulted in a scarcity of domestic workers (Graham, 1999;Krenn, 2011). Pattison (1913, p. 96) noted that:…”

“…The movement was fueled by articles published in the Ladies Home Journal, Outlook and The Modern Household, to name but a few. Household efficiency advocates such as Christine Frederick, Martha and Robert Bruere, Georgie Boynton Child and Mary Pattison promoted the use of scientific method to reduce the workload associated with household chores while at the same time maintaining the female sphere (Graham, 1999;Krenn, 2011). …”

“…Work of Lillian M. Gilbreth well as run a laboratory out of her home (Graham, 1999). Her first PhD dissertation was submitted to the University of California, Berkeley, but her request to graduate was denied because of a residency requirement at the university.…”

Investigating Family Labor in Communication Studies: Threading Across Historical and Contemporary Discourses

“…(Helen Reddy, 1972) Important transformations in family labor practices continued with the 20th century and alongside women's right to vote, including the emergence of the domestic engineer (Graham, 1999), the establishment of government-sponsored daycare centers to allow White women factory workers during wartime, and the rise of expert discourses of childrearing (Ehrenreich & English, 1978). And, as space constraints prevent a full accounting of these shifts in this introductory essay (see Coontz, 1988;Matthews, 1989;McKeon, 2006;Strasser, 2000), we flash-forward to the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1960s.…”

Picture This: Lillian Gilbreth's Industrial Cinema for the Home

“…In her writings, though, she was the enthusiastic proponent of the universal application of time-and-motion studies. 15 The second rhetorical mode in which the Gilbreth enterprise was described was relentless self-promotion. Beginning in the 1910s, the Gilbreths struggled to establish time-and-motion study as the benchmark approach to industrial engineering, competing with the popular "stopwatch" studies of F. W. Taylor.…”