Jane Lancaster - Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth -- A Life Beyond Cheaper by the Dozen

Making Time

Lillian Moller Gilbreth~A Life Beyond Cheaper by the Dozen

JANE LANCASTER

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS Boston

Published by University Press of New England
Hanover and London

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by University Press of New England,
One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766
www.upne.com

2004 by Jane Lancaster

First Northeastern University Press / UPNE paperback edition 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766.

ISBNs for the paperback edition:
ISBN13: 9781555536527
ISBN10: 1555536522
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-55553-861-3

COVER ART CREDITS
Photographs (top) from the authors collection; (bottom, left to right) from the Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Collection, Purdue University Libraries; Business and Professional Women/USA; Dayton, Ohio, Journal Herald ( 1961); and the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lancaster, Jane.
Making time : Lillian Moller Gilbreth, a life beyond Cheaper by the dozen / Jane Lancaster.
p. cm.
ISBN 1555536123 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Gilbreth, Lillian Moller, 18781972. 2. Women industrial engineersUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
T55.85.G64M54 2004
658.54092dc22 2003021862

For Tony, who helped me make time

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

I would not have been able to complete this book without the help and friendship of members of the Gilbreth family. Robert Moller Gilbreth, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Daniel Bunker Gilbreth, Irene Gilbreth, Jack Moller Gilbreth, Lillian Gilbreth Johnson, and Jane Gilbreth Heppes talked to me and helped me round out a picture of their mother. My conclusions are, however, my own.

Many other people who shared their memories of the Gilbreths are listed belowmy apologies to any who are inadvertently omitted. I would like thank librarians and archivists on four continentsmy friends and colleaguesand, most of all, my family.

For permission to quote from published sources, I would also like to thank the Institute of Industrial Engineers; Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and Daniel B. Gilbreth for As I Remember; the Society of Women Engineers for The Quest of the One Best Way; and HarperCollins for Cheaper by the Dozen; and the Rhode Island Historical Society for permission to reprint material in , which appeared in a different form as Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Bring Scientific Management to Rhode Island, Rhode Island History 55, no. 2 (1998). The Gilbreth papers at Purdue University and the Ernestine Gilbreth Carey Papers and the Lillian Moller Gilbreth Papers at Smith College are copyright 2004 by Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and reprinted with the permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc. Belles on Their Toes is copyright 1950 by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, reprinted with permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc. I also wish to acknowledge, with many thanks, support given in the form of research fellowships at the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University and at the Newell B. Goff Institute for Ingenuity and Enterprise Studies at the Rhode Island Historical Society.

I talked to many people about Lillian. They include Edith Folger Andrews, Eileen McGrath, Jane Richmond, and Walter Boyd in Nantucket; Eddie Chen in Taiwan; Mary Sissons Barrett, Marion Dunlop, Jonathon Farnum, Anne Freeman Giraud, Louise Aldrich Hoge, Martha Mitchell, Sarah Morenon, Eleanor Peckham, Robert Piacitelli, Betty Selle, and Edward Winsor in Providence; Susan Englander, David Ferguson, William Roberts, and Bebe York in California; N. Wesley Haynes on the telephone in New Hampshire; Joseph Juran and Julie Johnson Lindquist in Connecticut; Mary Brown Lawrence both in California and on Prudence Island; and Peter Liebhold and Carlene Stephens in Washington, D.C.

I also want to thank the many friends and colleagues who read the manuscript, talked to me, and encouraged me. First on the list must be Mari Jo Buhle and Jim Patterson at Brown University, and Susan Porter Benson at the University of Connecticut. They taught me to be a clearer thinker and a better writer, and without them this book may not have happened. The process of turning a dissertation into a book (which was the original intention, but I got sidetracked) was helped by conversations with Gretchen Adams, Joyce Botelho, Laura Briggs, Elspeth Brown, Mary Anne Bruscha, Mari Jo Buhle, Bruce Bustard, Richard Canedo, Jane Civins, Chrissie Cortina, Donna deFabio Curtin, Tom DEvelyn, Anne Diffily, Eleanor Doumato, Susan Englander, David Ferguson, Sheila ffolliott, Gale Goodwin Gomes, Laurel Graham, Mary Hollinshead, Ulle Holt, Marita Hopmann, Janet Howell, Hester Kaplan, Susan Kepner, Christy Lamarr, Sarah Leavitt, Pam MacFarland, Laura Mack, Pam McColl, Joanne Melish, John Meyers, Carol Mills, Martha Mitchell, Marie Myers, Adam Nelson, Victoria Nelson, Janice Okoomian, Jeanne OMalley, Ann Parsons, Louise Poole, Mary Lynne Poole (who also provided invaluable technical assistance), Laura Prieto, Sarah Purcell, Cynthia Pyle, Ed Rafferty, Joan Richards, Eric Simonoff, Eve Sterne, Kathryn Tomasek, Julia and Bill Walsh, and Eileen Warburton.

Hidden in that alphabetical list are members of the Female Mutual Improvement Society, without whom I might not have survived graduate school, and the Biography Group, without whom Lillian might not have seen the light of day. They know who they are, and my undying thanks go to them. I also want to thank Elizabeth Swayze, my heroically patient editor at Northeastern University Press, who waited with me while a long, drawn-out permission process tried our souls.

Finally, I want to thank my family. My mother, who did not live to see the end product, read some of the early chapters in spite of her failing eyesight. I remember her sitting at a machine in my kitchen, reading the magnified type page by page. I want to thank my son Tom, who unearthed some important documents for me at Berkeley, my son Rob for his good humor, and especially my husband Tony, whose support kept me going through my long quest for Lillian, which, like any other biography, was also a quest for myself.

Introduction: Wasnt She the Mother in Cheaper by the Dozen?

Lillian Moller Gilbreth was a working mother on a grand scale. She was also one of the most celebrated women in America in the middle of the twentieth century. She was admired both as an engineer and for the way she seemed to combine marriage, career, and family into a seamless whole. Contemporaries honored her: universities gave her honorary degrees and engineering societies gave her gold medals. She was described in 1952 as The Worlds Greatest Woman Engineer because of her impact on management, her innovations in industrial design, her methodological contributions to time and motion studies, her humanization of management principles, and her role in integrating the principles of science and management. She appeared on numerous lists of the most influential women in America, and one admirer even suggested she was Presidential Timber.