Are home economists cheaper by the dozen?

Dear all: I had the good fortune this month to spend a week at the Purdue University Archives on a travel grant to research Lillian Gilbreth, a.k.a. the Cheaper by the Dozen mom. Gilbreth was a pioneering industrial engineer, psychologist, management consultant and ergonomics expert. But after her husband Frank died in 1924, she couldn’t get clients.

Home ec saved her bacon.

“Mother thought one way she might get motion study contracts was to apply timesaving methods to the kitchen. Manufacturers would listen to a woman, she believed, when the subject was home appliances,” her children Frank and Ernestine wrote in Belles on Their Toes.* “If the only way to enter a man’s field was through the kitchen door, that’s the way she’d enter.”

So she pulled together the material she and Frank had compiled on translating industrial methods to the home, published a book for housewives and began remaking her career.

Later on, women’s magazines would try to placate homemakers by calling them “household executives,” but Gilbreth meant it. She treated the home as a factory, with time sheets, printed task reminder slips numbered by basket (“Use basket number instead of name for fewest possible motions”), Simultaneous Motion Cycle Charts and an analysis of some family members as “one hundred percent parasites.” The goal, she wrote, was to maximize “happiness minutes.”

Gilbreth hitched her wagon to the right star. Home economics was at the start of a jobs boom in the business world as household equipment and utility companies began hiring professional women to liaise with Mrs. Consumer. (Iowa State College even managed to create an electrical engineering concentration in the guise of household equipment repair, as per Amy Bix.)

Probably most relevant for us today, Gilbreth is credited with inventing the efficient modern kitchen layout. (One of her sponsors was the woman-run!! Brooklyn Borough Gas Company.) Alas for Fitbit, 1930s home economists were all about reducing steps. Gilbreth's redesign cut the distance walked in making a lemon meringue pie from 224 to 92 feet. Here's a diagram from her archives.

Gilbreth was also lauded as a family expert, though her exceptionally systematic approach drew the occasional sneer. “Children born into a family who practiced what Mrs. Gilbreth preaches would never need perambulators: they would run on wheels,” Tess Slesinger wrote. George Currie's Brooklyn Daily Eagle review was subtitled “Mrs. Gilbreth’s Precepts for the Management of Children Are Admirably Adapted to the General Run of Youngsters but They Somehow Seem Not Quite to Fit One’s Own.”

Judging by Gilbreth's cover letters, she enjoyed writing about parenting. But nonetheless, except for a project on homemakers with disabilities, she pretty much abandoned home economics after the Depression—after then, her files are full of engineering and management material. Perhaps the field's utility had run its course for her.

As part of the fun of archives is turning up fascinating and unusable finds, I conclude with an absolutely useless piece of information: Gilbreth got Frank’s natal chart done posthumously by a children’s author who called his horoscope alter ego “Sagittarius Grex.” Imagine his podcast.

Recipe of the post

(Note: Home economics has always been about a lot more than cooking. But a 99-year-old "radio homemaker" says to always include a recipe, and thus I obey. More on Evelyn Birkby another month.)

Unsurprisingly, media coverage of Gilbreth usually emphasized her experience as a mom rather than as a scientist. Never mind that she grew up wealthy; as a mother she always had help; it was Frank, not she, who set up the kids’ famed chore system; she eventually spent three-quarters of her time on the road; and she told a businesswomen’s club, “We considered our time too valuable to be devoted to actual labor in the home”—still, she had to be portrayed as a homemaker. Thus, a 1959 profile in the Oakland Tribune entitled “She Also Cooks!” shared her purported “favorite recipe,” for coffee cake. I found it handwritten in the Purdue papers.

Guys, I spent five days in those archives and this is the only recipe of Gilbreth's I found. What are the chances it actually came from her kitchen? “Strangely, her sister, Miss Gertrude Moller, was at the moment whipping one up for her guest,” the reporter noted.

Anyway, here it is, as printed: “Cream 1/4 cup butter, melted, with 1 cup sugar, add 2 well beaten eggs, mix in 2 cups flour, sifted with 2 teaspoons baking powder, add 3/4 cup milk gradually to batter. Pour in well greased square pan, spread with melted butter, sprinkle with sugar and a little cinnamon, top with chopped walnuts. Bake about 20 minutes at about 375 to 400 degrees.”

In an attempt to turn this into something I might want to eat, I halved the sugar, used half whole-wheat flour (hippie alert), added 1/4–1/2 teaspoon each of ginger, turmeric and cinnamon and replaced 1/8 cup of the milk with rosewater. I also inadvertently browned the butter because I was doing too many things at once. If you bake either version, let me know how it goes.

Quote of the post

From Gilbreth’s 1927 report to Johnson and Johnson on maxipads: “We may start with the thought that all existing equipment is probably wrong.”

* What? You haven’t read the sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen?

Thank you again to Purdue Archives for the research support and permission to share these images.