Fig 1: Plan your day to prevent fatigue. Lillian Gilbreth sits at a desk she designed to help homemakers plan their days, weeks, and months. [Photo: Gilbreth files, Purdue University Library]

The first decades of the twentieth century saw the pace of business, industry, and society accelerate with the introduction of new technology. The adding machine, motorized factory equipment, the assembly line, and the automobile--all of these inventions urged people to pick up the pace of daily life and work. Even the home, the "haven in a heartless world," was not a shelter from time-saving technology. Middle-class homemakers eagerly followed the twentieth-century trend and modernized their homes, but soon realized that they had to learn to adapt their daily routines to the unforeseen changes that new technology brought.

With the introduction of gas- and electric-powered appliances such as ranges, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines, the modern woman's workday necessarily changed. Like contemporary workers in modernized factories, homemakers were under pressure to speed up their work and do more than before. They sought advice on how to make the transition to the world of modern homemaking.

But, homemakers were not the first to seek advice. The profession of the efficiency expert, or scientific manager, arose at the turn of the century specifically to address the problems that new technology presented to industrial labor and the corporate world. These experts were, for the most part, self-employed consultants, who were hired by businesses to improve efficiency in their factories and, sometimes, their offices. The most famous efficiency expert was Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose hallmark scientific management techniques showed how a worker on an assembly line might work more quickly. The technique was to watch the motions of the worker. Did he or she need to walk a distance to pick up a part from another workstation? Or, was the worker standing in the wrong place in relation to the machinery and consequently having a difficult time seeing what was being done? For Taylor, finding the optimum arrangement of worker and machine would keep the process of work going smoothly, thus maximizing the output of the worker and factory. This was good for the company's bottom line.

Frederick Taylor had several consultants working for him. One of them was Frank Gilbreth. Gilbreth came up with a few ideas of his own and broke away from Taylor. Then, with his wife Lillian (Fig. 1), he set up an independent consulting business, Gilbreth Inc. In the years of their marriage, from 1904 to 1924, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were efficiency consultants to business and industry. Like Taylor, they were interested in speed, but they added an element to the practice of efficiency: reducing fatigue. They believed that fatigue slowed a worker down.

In the years of their marriage and business partnership, the Gilbreths were hired by many organizations, from the United States Army to the American Heart Association. All wanted advice on how to maximize efficiency and reduce fatigue in a variety of work situations.

Industrial work had been a lucrative source of income for the Gilbreths. Companies that hired them were willing to invest in consultants in order to increase efficiency and boost profits. But the Gilbreths were believers that their ideas of efficient work were for everyone, not just big business. Their goals and beliefs were very fitting for the Progressive Era, of which they were firmly a part. They practiced what they preached. They worked out of their home in Montclair, New Jersey and used their household as a laboratory of sorts. Anyone who knows the popular story entitled "Cheaper by the Dozen" will know that the Gilbreths believed efficiency should start at home! The story, which was made into a movie, was written by the Gilbreth children and told how every household activity became a study in saving time and energy, from taking a bath to packing suitcases for vacation.

When Frank Gilbreth died suddenly in 1924, Lillian Gilbreth faced a desperate situation. The couple had eleven children, ten of whom were living at home. Because of their large family and because they constantly put money back into the business, Lillian could not retire upon Frank's death. She decided to forge ahead with the efficiency business. She continued to seek clients in industry, but also employed her scientific management expertise in a more freelance way by writing advice manuals for women about household work.

Fig 2: Lillian Gilbreth advised the homemaker to create a detailed schedule of her day's activities, using a form like this one. This was the type of form that the Gilbreths advised their industrial clients to use. From Lillian Gilbreth, The Home-Maker and Her Job (New York: D. Appleton, 1927)

Lillian had a wealth of experience and case studies in household efficiency. A businesswoman, a trained industrial engineer, and a Ph.D. in management psychology, she had an unusual but handy combination of skills and experience. While she was not a member of the home economics profession per se, she ventured into that territory with the publication of her first household advice manual, The Home-Maker and Her Job in 1927. She wrote her book for middle-class homemakers of the 1920s who faced the dual realities of having no hired household help but a heap of new labor-saving appliances. In The Home-Maker and Her Job, Gilbreth sought to inspire homemakers to think of their homes also as workplaces and to plan their space and their time accordingly. Essentially, she urged them to employ some of the same measures that the Gilbreths had implemented in their factory consulting work.

When the Gilbreths did work for industry, their results were easy to measure. A company would ask them to figure out how to produce more widgets per hour. Or, to design a work station that would eliminate leg or back strain. The result could be seen in greater factory output or fewer complaints of fatigue and fewer breaks or even sick-days.

It could not be debated that homemakers did work all day, but did they view their homes as actual workplaces? The question may not be how a homemaker could bake more pies per hour. Rather, could she finish her chores earlier in order to have more time to read to her daughter? Or, could she use time-saving appliances more efficiently to make fewer trips up and down the stairs? Were these workplaces inefficient? Did the new appliances help or hinder the work process? Was the work day unplanned? In essence, did chaos reign? If so, then the homemaker would likely feel stressed, fatigued, and out of control. What Gilbreth emphasized in The Home-Maker and Her Job was the goal of "happiness minutes"--moments when everything would come together and there would be a sense of peace and accomplishment.

In the home, on the other hand, the results could not be measured in the same way. Gilbreth summed up the goal of efficiency in the home as more "happiness minutes." This would have seemed silly to an industrialist, but Gilbreth could see no better way to measure the overall result of having a more efficient home. Happiness minutes occur when the homemaker is rested. When the household paperwork is organized and the bills paid on time. When meals are planned and not stressfully thrown together at the last minute. New time-saving appliances gave homemakers more freedom--the freedom to take on more jobs, to make cooking more complex, to make the house cleaner, but at a resulting price of having too much to do and fewer minutes of happiness.

Stepping back from the situation, one might point out the obvious solution: just do less. Let the dust build up for a few more days. Open a can of soup for dinner. Let all those expensive modern appliances do the work. But, Gilbreth or any woman picking up a household advice manual would recognize the note of surrender in these solutions. Their assumption was that mom could and should be able to do it all. And, they looked for the answer to the mystery of why those new gadgets did not make the homemaker's day effortless.

Historians have been searching for the answer, too. When electricity and gas were introduced into homes in the early twentieth century, they replaced elbow grease as the main power behind many household jobs. Yet, the appliances frequently meant that effort was expended elsewhere. For example, the cooking range replaced the wood or coal stove. This wonderful appliance eliminated the need to fetch fuel and refill the power source. It also made climate control in the kitchen a distinct possibility. However, with an unbearably hot kitchen with coal or wood burning in the stove, as was the old way, a homemaker might take some work outside--shelling peas, sorting beans, peeling potatoes--while sitting in a chair on the porch or in the yard to get some cool air. Importantly, she would be off her feet for a while and getting a job done at the same time. With climate control, it seemed more efficient just to stand at the sink in the kitchen and get the job finished. Ranges that allowed varying temperatures on various burners also allowed for cooking more complicated meals. Stew and soup were fine sometimes, but fancier dishes with individual components--separately cooked meats, vegetables, and of course desserts--became the standard in modern cooking. This meant more time in the kitchen, more preparation time, more standing at the range or countertop, not less. The vacuum cleaner was another thrilling invention that replaced the need to take out rugs and beat them. Of course, rugs were very infrequently taken out, as this was a time-consuming and difficult job. However, vacuuming could be done frequently, even daily. The vacuum was a very handy invention, but one also had to carve out time to complete this new household task. Technology in the home was, as it still is, a double-edged sword, cutting work time in some cases, while adding chores and strain in others.

Assessing the homemaker's situation, Gilbreth's advice was based on the primary belief that fatigue is what prevents people from working to their full potential. Disorder and the stress resulting from it, Gilbreth said, was the primary cause of fatigue, both mental and physical. It came primarily from two sources: a cluttered, disorganized home and a lack of a plan for activity. A new technology like an electric egg beater could be more fatiguing to use than a wire whisk if it was stored in the back of a cabinet and was hard to dig out and put away, or if it needed to be cleaned meticulously before and after every use. Too many appliances, cluttering a countertop, Gilbreth explained, would become counterproductive if they took away a workspace needed for chopping or mixing or if they just made it difficult to find things. Gilbreth suggested that all appliances may not be necessary. There was, she believed, such a thing as giving in to all the sales pitches out there too easily. If one bought and deemed an appliance worth keeping, only the ones that were used almost daily should be out in plain sight and reach.

A homemaker's daily and weekly plan for work was also turned on its side by the industrial age. Beforehand, Mondays were washdays, Tuesdays for ironing, and so forth because these were all-day activities before the washing machine. Now, the convenience of a labor-saving appliance meant that any day, any time, could be wash-day. Wash might be done more frequently than once a week. Mondays need no longer be set aside, so new activities could creep into the schedule. With the advent of the automobile, women also could dash out of the home on errands. This was convenient, but also made it harder to stick to a plan. So many possibilities, so many things to do. This was mentally as well as physically fatiguing.

To regain control, Gilbreth suggested that homemakers chart their daily, weekly, and even yearly activities and those of all members of their households. The family calendar, perhaps a staple of most households today, was a new idea in the 1920s, and was borrowed from industry, for which the Gilbreths set up schedule-keeping systems to keep track of deliveries, payments, contract obligations, and the like. In the home, Mother's, Father's, and each child's activities were to be noted so that Mother may be aware of everyone's activities and appointments because everyone's needs and activities affect the daily plan for the homemaker.

Difficult though it might be at first, Gilbreth said, the homemaker too must make daily, weekly, even yearly work schedules for herself. The homemaker had the advantage of being worker and manager. As such she could manage her time the way she saw fit, but it must be managed, or chaos and stress would result. Chaos and stress led inevitably to fatigue. Fatigue made happiness minutes impossible. A schedule would mean freedom from stress, rather than slavery to a deadline. Gilbreth instructed the homemaker to make a chart, like a page from an appointment book, and note everything she must do and at what time--rise and dress, cook, make beds, do laundry, all the way down to putting the children to sleep at night. The homemaker seeking happiness minutes would plan wisely--plan to do the heaviest jobs when she knew she would have the most energy. Unlike on the assembly line, in the household, there ought to be a buffer of time between jobs. Gilbreth wrote, "Most schedules have been discarded because their makers forced more things into them than they could be reasonably expected to contain." If the schedule did not work, either a homemaker was not allowing enough time to complete each task, or there were too many interruptions. A major culprit was the telephone. Gilbreth advised women to "disconnect the telephone." The telephone, she understood, was a technology to add to the vacuum, the egg-beater, and so forth that was a welcome addition to the household. It could be valuable as a time-saving device to relay a message. However, it could also be a terrible time-waster. Again, the homemaker had to eye this technology with suspicion and be aware of its double-edged qualities.

While chaos could be controlled and considerable mental and physical fatigue alleviated with a workable schedule, Gilbreth cautioned that boredom with tasks could similarly frustrate efficiency. Boredom could breed resentment, leading to mental fatigue. Once a schedule was in place, breaking it was fine once in a while, she explained, for the mental exercise and the fresh outlook on things it would bring. Or, quite simply, "for the fun of breaking the schedule." Once again, as manager and worker, the homemaker had the freedom to do this. Gilbreth wrote: "...efficiency is doing the thing in the best way to get the desired results. And these [results], we must never forget, are the largest number of happiness minutes for the largest amount of people."

When Gilbreth's book appeared, there was no shortage of advice for homemakers. The Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping offered wisdom and tips every month. Cookbooks crowded the shelves, exclaiming all of the fabulous dishes that could be prepared with modern cooking equipment. Magazines with ads for shiny new appliances promised happiness through more exciting menus. Yet, all of these fell short of what they promised. Owning more complex equipment or making a job last longer were taking the happiness out of a homemaker's day.

Gilbreth's book stood out because it went to the heart of the homemaker's situation: that modernization was making things more difficult. Through her explanation of fatigue and scheduling, Gilbreth showed homemakers why this was the case and urged them to reexamine the way they did work. With only possibilities but no plan, a homemaker could never feel as if she was getting her job done. But, when she knew her tools and how to use them, when she had a schedule and completed it, a homemaker could feel accomplished in her job. That sense of peace and satisfaction would help her be a more accessible wife and mother and a happier woman--if only for a few minutes at a time.

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