The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  Lillian Gilbreth, who first met Taylor in 1907, was pregnant with her fifth child when she attended that meeting with Brandeis in New York in October 1910. Taylor taught efficiency; Brandeis championed it; Gilbreth lived it.

  Born in Oakland in 1878, she graduated from the University of California in 1900 and married Frank Gilbreth four years later. They agreed to have twelve children, six boys and six girls, and to raise them by the most scientific methods. In 1800, the fertility rate among white women in the United States was over seven; by 1900, it was half that.33 The Gilbreths’ plan was, at some level, a eugenics project: the fit should have more children, and could have more children, if only they would follow scientific methods. In an era of rapidly shrinking family size, the Gilbreths’ household, a laboratory of efficiency, would show the world what economies of scale were all about.

  Between 1905 and 1922, Lillian gave birth thirteen times, at about fifteen-month intervals; one child died, at the age of five, of diphtheria. She breast-fed every baby. The zaniness of the Gilbreths’ family life was recalled by two of their children in Cheaper by the Dozen, published in 1948 and made into a film, two years later, starring Myrna Loy as “Boss,” which is what Frank called his wife.34 Lillian disliked the book and was embarrassed by the film, not least because both completely ignored the fact that, during those years, she ran a consulting business, became the first pioneer of scientific management to earn a doctorate, and wrote very many books.

  Admittedly, it’s hard to see past all those pregnancies. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, William Randolph Hearst offered a hundred dollars to anyone who had a baby in one of the city’s emergency hospitals. Frank, who was in the city courting building contracts, wrote to his wife, ribbing her, “I think there is a chance for it if you hurry.”35 He named their summer place the Shoe, after the woman with too many children who lived in one and didn’t know what to do. Once, when he told a colleague, “Lillie always feels better when she is pregnant,” the other guy shot back, “How the hell can she tell?”36

  It always bugged Lillian that lying-in hospitals took all her pencils and notebooks away.37 But once she was home, she got back at it. Frank considered postpartum bed rest wasted time (“Dear Boss,” he wrote, “MOTION IS MONEY”),38 so Lillian used the weeks after childbirth to edit her husband’s books, most of which she also coauthored—or, as some scholars believe, authored entirely, even when her name didn’t appear on the title page. (Lillian’s prose is distinctively “gabby,” as Frank put it.) In 1911, she edited Motion Study after giving birth to Frank junior, and it was likely Lillian, not her husband, who really wrote The Primer of Scientific Management.39 The next year, the Gilbreths moved to Rhode Island so that Lillian could enroll in a PhD program at Brown; there she studied psychology, which is what she thought was missing from Taylorism. (She wouldn’t have been able to go to Harvard, which refused to grant a PhD to a woman.) In Providence, the Gilbreths lived so close to campus, Frank joked, that Lillian “could go to class and if a child fell out of the window, catch him before he landed on the ground.”40

  Lillian kept what she called “Mother’s Daily Schedule.” It read, in part:

  5. Begin the day of work 10.00

  6. Work on book 10.00–12.00

  7. With children 12.00–12.15

  8. Lunch 12.15–1.00

  9. With children 1.00–2.00

  10. Nap 2.00–2.30

  11. With baby 2.30–3.00

  12. Work on book 3.00–4.0041

  Meanwhile, Taylorized workers kept complaining about being bone-tired. In 1912, molders at an arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts, refused to work under the eye of a timekeeper. During an investigation into the ensuing strike, it came out that Taylor had told his timekeeper not to bother too much with the stopwatch; better to simply make “a rough guess.” Pouring a mold and making a gun carriage usually took fifty-three minutes; Taylor’s timekeeper told the molders to do it in twenty-four. In a petition to their boss, the molders wrote, “This we believe to be the limit of our endurance. It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give the Government the best of what was in us. This method is un-American in principle.”42

  Taylor, plagued by controversy, grew ill. He sent Frank Gilbreth to deliver lectures in his stead. The Gilbreths, though, had misgivings about Taylorism. In 1913, when Frank was substituting for Taylor in Chicago, Lillian went along, with a nursing three-month-old. Onstage, Frank was challenged by Emma Goldman. He was pointing to a chart illustrating the hierarchical relationship between the foreman and the worker. “There is nothing in scientific management for the workman,” Goldman shouted. “The only scheme is to have the workman support the loafers on top of him.” Lillian leaned over and whispered something to Frank, who cheerfully turned the chart upside down.43 That was a cheap stunt, but Lillian had an argument to make, too, which she put forward in The Psychology of Management, published in 1914: “The emphasis in successful management lies on the man, not on the work.”44 And maybe even on the women and children, too.

  Gilbreth defended her dissertation in June 1915. Three months later, she fell down a flight of stairs, went into labor, and gave birth to a stillborn baby.45 Taylor had died that spring. After reading in a fawning biography of Taylor how much workers loved him, an appalled Frank Gilbreth scrawled in the margin, “But none came to his funeral, nor to his memorial service.”46 Brandeis was there, though, and delivered a speech, later printed in Harper’s under the title “Efficiency by Consent.” Brandeis’s ideas about management were actually far closer to the Gilbreths’ than to Taylor’s.47 Taylor thought men were mules. Brandeis advocated industrial democracy: workers must have a voice in how a business is run.48 One of the Gilbreths’ lasting, if futile, workplace innovations is the suggestion box.49 Taylor took nothing from the Watertown Arsenal strike except that it might be better “not to try to hurry task work too fast.”50 Brandeis insisted that for workers to enjoy sufficient leisure to participate in a democratic society, productivity had to be increased, but he also worried that, without unions, workers would be pushed past the limits of human endurance. That’s why unions, he believed, ought to consent to efficiency.51 The Gilbreths’ firm, Gilbreth, Inc., made a policy of requiring contracts to be signed by both shop bosses and representatives from organized labor.52

  The year after Taylor died, Brandeis was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court. His support of unions made the nomination one of the most controversial in the court’s history.53 The controversy, Brandeis observed, was because he “is considered a radical and is a Jew.” Harvard president Lawrence Lowell circulated a petition decrying Brandeis’s nomination, but when Lowell’s predecessor, Charles Eliot, sent a letter of support, a friend of Brandeis’s boasted, “Next to a letter from God, we have got the best.”54 Brandeis took a seat on the court in June 1916; he soon became famous for fastidiously revising his opinions, whose sole purpose, he believed, was to educate. “Now I think the opinion is persuasive,” he told one weary clerk, after the umpteenth draft, “but what can we do to make it more instructive?”55

  The year Brandeis was seated on the court, Lillian Gilbreth wrote a book called Fatigue Study while recovering from the birth of her ninth child. Taylor had written about fatigue, too, but exhaustion was Lillian Gilbreth’s specialty. The Gilbreths pioneered what has since come to be called “ergonomics.” They built, for instance, special chairs for different types of work and urged a consumer campaign called “Buy of the seated worker.” They even opened, in Providence, the Museum of Devices for Eliminating Unnecessary Fatigue.56 Taylor had studied fatigue, too (he had, after all, offered up that work-to-rest ratio), but Gilbreth had a different kind of firsthand knowledge of what it meant to be at the limits of physical endurance. She also shared Brandeis’s view that profit wasn’t everything. (“The greater productivity of labor must not be only attainable,” Brandeis said, at Taylor’s memorial service, “but attainable under conditions consistent with the conservation of hea
lth, the enjoyment of work, and the development of the individual.”)57 The whole point of efficiency, Lillian Gilbreth said, was to maximize “Happiness Minutes.”58 Happiness minutes? For Gilbreth, scientific management was a way of life, a habit of mind, and a religion, all at once. It was her science of human life. Happiness wasn’t a mansion anymore; it was a minute.

  In 1918, Gilbreth was invited to lecture about fatigue at MIT. She must have been practicing the talk at home. One night, the children invited her to play a game of charades. “What do you think the first one was?” she wrote to Frank. “Well, it was ‘Fatigue Survey.’ How is that for breathing it in?”59 The day of the lecture, she got five children ready for school, nursed her four-month-old, handed the two toddlers over to her housekeeper, and caught a ten o’clock train. In Cambridge, she talked for twenty minutes about the effects of fatigue and showed thirty-six slides (reporting to Frank that she tried very hard to speak like a scientist and “not like a Lady”), but when asked to stay late, she told her host that she had eight children to get home to. (“That seemed to interest him a lot,” she remarked.) She made it back to Providence for the six-thirty p.m. nursing.60

  In 1919, in childbed after delivering baby number ten, Lillian proofread the galleys of Motion Study for the Handicapped (the Gilbreths had worked with soldiers who had lost limbs; aiding the disabled was a long-standing Gilbreth motion-study specialty).61 And then, in 1924, Frank Gilbreth died at the age of fifty-five, leaving his wife with eleven children under the age of nineteen.62 Although she didn’t have much money, she was determined to send all of them to college. She tried, desperately, to drum up business. She had sometimes published as “L. M. Gilbreth.” After discovering that the president of Gilbreth, Inc., was a woman, the Johnson & Johnson company hired her to study menstruation, whereupon Gilbreth dutifully made a thorough study of the sanitary napkin. Many more clients, however, simply dropped their accounts.63 She scrambled. Finally, she decided to reinvent herself as an expert in a subject about which she knew next to nothing: housekeeping.

  Housework used to be everyone’s work; industrialization made it merely women’s work. Coal-burning stoves meant that men didn’t have to cut, haul, and split wood; women still had to tend the stove. That stove saved a man work; it saved a woman nothing. In 1841, in A Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catherine Beecher called housework endless; a century and a half later, it was still endless. Women complaining about exhaustion sound almost the same from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first: “I am daily dropped in little pieces and passed around and devoured and expected to be whole again next day.” That was written in 1888, but it could have been written a century before or a century later.64

  Progressives had the idea of making housekeeping a science and, therefore, efficient. The American Home Economics Association was founded in 1909, after some debate over whether to call the field “domestic science.” For a while, housekeeping, like business, aspired to be an academic discipline, and on no better grounds.65 In that effort, Gilbreth seems an unlikely figure. Her husband had always endorsed a three-man plan of promotion. There’s the guy at the bottom, studying to be the guy in the middle, and the guy in the middle, studying to be the guy at the top. “Don’t waste your time on housework, Boss,” he told his wife. “You’re studying for my job.”66 “She couldn’t cook, never had done any laundry, didn’t know much about sewing or knitting, and never had run a house of her own,” her children said.67 About kitchens, one of her sons wrote, “Stoves burned her, ice picks stabbed her, graters skinned her, and paring knives cut her.” Her housekeeper, an Irishman named Tom Grieves, did all the cooking. Gilbreth knew how to make exactly one meal, which she made on Grieves’s day off: creamed chipped beef. Her children called it DVOT: Dog’s Vomit on Toast.68

  Gilbreth might have gotten the idea for turning to the science of housework from Christine Frederick, a Long Island housewife who, in 1912, wrote a series of essays for the Ladies’ Home Journal that was published the next year as The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management and expanded, in 1915, as Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home. Frederick, who was married to a business executive, had overheard him talking about scientific management one evening after work and decided she could use the ideas of Taylor and the Gilbreths to manage her home. She eventually turned her Long Island home into the Applecroft Kitchen Home Experiment Station.69

  In the 1920s, Lillian Gilbreth engineered model kitchens—one was called the Kitchen Efficient—and purported to eliminate, for instance, five out of every six steps in the making of coffee cake. To make a lemon meringue pie, a housewife working in an ordinary kitchen walked 224 feet; in the Kitchen Efficient, Gilbreth claimed, it could be done in 92.70 The increasingly strange study of fatigue went on without her. In 1926, by which year Gilbreth had become the chief consultant for several American universities’ new departments of home economics,71 the Harvard Business School opened its Fatigue Laboratory: professors put students on treadmills, and kept them on till they dropped.72 A few years later, a team from the Fatigue Laboratory went to Mississippi to measure the sweat of sharecroppers (“colorfully-dressed, happy, and well-behaved negroes”) as against the exertion of mules.73

  In 1927, Gilbreth published The Home-maker and Her Job. The goal of homemaking, she explained, was to maximize Happiness Minutes for everyone in the family.74 A housewife should make a study of the science of dishwashing, so as to find the One Best Way. “In washing dishes, Mary may have the best posture, Mother may move her eyes and head least, Johnny may move his feet least, Sarah may make the best use of her hands.” The trick was to combine the best of everyone’s methods, and then Mary, Mother, Johnny, and Sarah could spend more time doing something other than washing the dishes.75

  In 1935, Lillian Gilbreth, who did not wash dishes, accepted a professorship at Purdue. Her appointment was divided between the university’s School of Home Economics and its sibling, the School of Management. Home economics and business management have Lillian Gilbreth in common, and a lot more, too. Scientific housekeeping, with its standards of spotlessness and shininess, was founded on no less a fudge than that 47.5 tons of pig iron.76 Tom Grieves was Gilbreth’s Schmidt. “Nobody but me never washed a Goddam tub around here in their whole lives,” Grieves once told Frank junior. “You know what a Motion Study is, Frankie-boy? You study how to get someone else to make all your motions for you, for Christ sake.” Grieves refused to work in the Kitchen Efficient. He didn’t want a rolling cart: “Hell, I ain’t going to be cooped up like a beejeezeley, sweet-smelling, bobbed-haired housewife, pushing a Goddam worktable around.” He complained about the old refrigerator—“the same Goddam kind of icebox that the Goddam Pilgrim Fathers had to use, for Christ sake”—but rejected a new one; he was unwilling to give up the sociable daily visits of the iceman, who was a good friend of his.77 Reporters who wanted to profile Gilbreth couldn’t go into her actual kitchen;78 they had to visit the fake one. About her domestic life, Gilbreth does not appear to have been sentimental. After Gilbreth’s youngest child left home, she had her house demolished.79

  Gilbreth tried to teach people to save time for joy, but not everyone wants to hurry a pie. Sometimes the best part is rolling the dough too thin so you’ve got some extra for jam tarts, and to play with. In the Taylorized world, something was lost. Neither unions nor businesses lived up to Brandeis’s optimism. “If the fruits of Scientific Management are directed into the proper channels,” he believed, “the workingman will get not only a fair share, but a very large share, of the industrial profits arising from improved industry.”80 That share went, instead, to shareholders and, later, to CEOs. Meanwhile, home and work, separated since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, began growing back together again. Efficiency was meant to make for a shorter workday, but in the final two decades of the twentieth century, the average American added 164 hours of work over the course of a year; that’s a whole extra month’s time, but not, typicall
y, a month’s worth of either Happiness Minutes or civic participation.81 Eating dinner standing up while making a phone call to the office, supervising a third grader’s homework, and nursing a baby—or pumping your breast milk—is not the hope of democracy.

  Lillian Gilbreth died of a stroke in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1972, at the age of ninety-three. She was cremated. The New York Times ran an obituary headed “Dr. Gilbreth, Engineer, Mother of Dozen.”82 She had always believed that what the world needed was “a new philosophy of work.”83 She never did manage to write it.

  [CHAPTER 7]

  Confessions of an

  Amateur Mother

  Sailing back from a trip to Europe not long after the First World War, George Hecht fell to chatting with a fellow passenger, a charming but fretful lady. “I have failed,” she confided to him, “where every woman wants to succeed: as a mother.” Hecht, who didn’t have any children of his own but who was keeping an eye out for business opportunities, found himself fascinated. When he got back to the States, he started reading child-rearing manuals. “They were all great big thick books,” he noticed. During the war, Hecht had served in the government’s Office of Public Information, where he’d helped found the Bureau of Cartoons. In 1918, he had published a collection, The War in Cartoons, a history of the war in one hundred cartoons. The year after that, he started publishing Better Times, “the Smallest Newspaper in the World.” Hecht wrote the whole paper, which was a weekly, and pretty good. He liked pictures; he liked little books. He got to thinking that what that lady needed, to learn how to be a better mother, wasn’t another great big thick book; it was a well-illustrated magazine.1

  The first American magazine for mothers, Mother’s Magazine, was published out of Utica, New York, in the 1830s and ’40s, a product of the Second Great Awakening. It was meant to help mothers by filling a “chasm in their library.” Its essays included “Family Worship” and “Habits of Prayer, Early Formed.” Mother’s Magazine was pious and evangelical; it was the periodical equivalent of the Mansion of Happiness, teaching mothers “the nurture of the soul” of the child “from its earliest watch over the cradle-dream to the full development of that mysterious being, whose destiny is immortality.”2