The Manufacture of New Tasks
The domestic scientists of the early twentieth century did not claim to have the last word on scientific cleaning, cooking, or any other task. If they did, housekeeping could be reduced to a mindless routine. On the contrary, Ellen Richards wrote, science transformed housekeeping into an endless adventure, a quest for new knowledge:
It is not a profound knowledge of any one or a dozen sciences which women need, so much as an attitude of mind which leads them to a suspension of judgment on new subjects, and to that interest in the present progress of science which causes them to call in the help of the expert, which impels them to ask, “Can I do better than I am doing?” “Is there any device which I might use?” “Is my house right as to its sanitary arrangements?” “Is my food the best possible?” “Have I chosen the right colors and the best materials for clothing?” “Am I making the best use of my time?”45
Simply asking such questions—perpetually re-examining one’s homemaking in the light of a continually unfolding science—was in itself “the best use of time,” and the first of the new “white collar” jobs which domestic science added to homemaking.
But domestic science’s major white-collar innovation was the task of management. In 1899 Frederick Taylor, one of the first efficiency experts, made history by inducing a Bethlehem Steel Company worker to load 47 tons of pig iron a day instead of his customary 12½, and the middle-class public became as enamored of “efficiency” as it was terrified of germs. The idea, as applied to industry, was to analyze each task down to its component gestures (lift the shovel, take three steps, etc.) and assign these gestures, rather than whole tasks, out to the workers. The premise was that no worker could comprehend the organization of his own work and that time could be saved by putting all thinking, down to the most minute decisions, in the hands of management.46
The new “scientific management” meshed immediately with the domestic scientists’ goals of eliminating (or redefining) drudgery and elevating housekeeping to a challenging activity. Ellen Richards hated “wasted motions,” but it was left to Christine Frederick, writing in 1912, to promote the full managerial revolution in the home. The promise was of course less work (which was especially appealing at a time when the “scientific” approach to cleaning was making more work), and every one of Frederick’s articles, serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal,47 began with a little box containing the pig-iron story, as if the housewife could also expect a fourfold increase in productivity. Much of what she had to say was useful, though hardly startling: ironing boards should be at the proper height to avoid bending; appliances should be chosen with care; schedules should be made for daily and weekly chores; etc. And certainly it seemed to many women that the principles of industrial efficiency could offer the possibility of more free time—without any sacrifice of standards. When Christine Frederick’s articles first appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal, a record sixteen hundred women wrote in for further information in one month.48
Actually, industrial scientific management techniques had almost nothing to offer the housewife. First, the scale of household work was much too small for the savings accrued by time-motion studies to mean much. The seconds saved by peeling potatoes with Frederick’s scientific method (“Walk to shelf … pick up knife …” etc.) might add up to something in a factory processing thousands of potatoes but would be insignificant in the preparation of dinner for four. Second, as later domestic scientists themselves realized, in the household, the manager and the worker are the same person. The whole point of Taylor’s management science—to concentrate planning and intellectual skills in management specialists—is necessarily lost in the one-woman kitchen.
For the homemaker, household scientific management turned out to mean new work—the new managerial tasks of analyzing one’s chores in detail, planning, record-keeping, etc. In fact, much of Frederick’s Journal series was devoted to the description of this new white-collar work. First, each task had to be studied and timed. (Frederick clocked baby bathing at a remarkably swift fifteen minutes.) Only then could precise weekly and daily schedules be devised. Then there was the massive clerical work of maintaining a family filing system for household accounts, financial records, medical records, “house-hints,” birthdays of friends and relatives, and (for what use we are not told) a special file for “Jokes, Quotations, etc.”—not to mention the recipe files and an inventory file giving the location and condition of each item of clothing possessed by the family.
Nevertheless, Frederick’s articles unleashed a near-frenzy for home efficiency. Domestic scientists set up “Housekeeping Experiment Stations” to discover the “principles of domestic engineering.” The scientific housekeeper now saw herself not only as a microbe-hunter, but as a manager operating on principles of industrial efficiency. In fact, by the nineteen thirties, domestic scientists considered “management” to be the major thrust of homemaking, practically eclipsing housework itself. Margaret Reid, an Iowa State College domestic scientist categorized all household work into “A. Management,” which included “choice-making,” “task, time and energy apportionment,” “planning,” and “supervision”—“B. Performance,” which included “housework.”49
The domestic scientists prepared themselves for the possibility that, despite all the effort scientific management involved, it might lead to greater efficiency and more free time to be filled. Mrs. Alice Norton addressed this problem in a talk at the 1902 Lake Placid Conference entitled “What should we do with the time set free by modern methods?” After tossing around the possibilities of “self-cultivation,” or just plain resting, she went on to say firmly that:
… if a woman undertakes homemaking as her occupation she should make that her business, and the possibilities of this today are almost endless … till more instruction is available to fit her for her business, she must use part of the time gained in preparing herself.50
In other words, she could use the time freed by domestic science to study domestic science! Christine Frederick also pondered the free time, but happily concluded that as housewives became more efficient, their standards would rise apace.51
And so the Domestic Void began to fill. Old work was invested with the grandeur of science; new work—challenging, businesslike—was devised. If homemaking was a full-time career, the Home would be safe, and the Woman Question would be answered.
Feminism Embraces Domestic Science
The new science rapidly gained public recognition. It was, according to one high school educator, even something of a fad. By 1916 to 1917, 20 percent of the public high schools offered courses in domestic science, or home economics as it was more commonly called by that time. At the college level, home economics made spectacular gains: From a total of 213 home economics students in the nation in 1905 to 17,778 in 1916, most of them preparing to be home economics teachers.52 The Lake Placid Conferences expanded from a tiny in-group to a major professional organization, the American Home Economics Association, with 700 charter members in 1909. Everyone seemed to want to study home economics, or at least to make sure that the girls did. There had been a joke about the high school girl who reported to her father, “I have made 100 in algebra, 96 in Latin, 90 in Greek, 88½ in mental philosophy and 95 in history; are you not satisfied with my record?” To which the father replied, “Yes, indeed, and if your husband happens to know anything about housekeeping, sewing and cooking, I am sure your married life will be very happy.”53 Home economics was the answer: you could have your Greek and cake too.
It may seem ironic, in retrospect, that one of the most receptive constituencies for the new science was the women’s movement. The keynote speech at the 1897 meeting of the Woman’s Suffrage Association had been on the theme of domestic science, and the suffrage press provided a steady outlet for the ideas of the home economics leaders. If this seems strange, we should recall that the women’s movement at the turn of the century was hardly a feminist movement in the modern sense. The
ideology of the movement centered on domesticity: women deserved the vote because they were homemakers. The wide-ranging feminism of Susan B. Anthony’s generation had been abandoned for a single-minded focus on getting the vote and, secondarily, getting women into college. Domestic science was appealing because it provided a dainty cover-up for both activities. Take the argument that higher education would “de-sex” women. Domestic science had the perfect rejoinder: not only does higher education not destroy women, it makes them better women. Ellen Richards told the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1890:
We [college women] have been treated for some years to discussions from eminent men as to our mental ability, our moral and physical status, our predilection for matrimony, our fitness for voting or for the Presidency; but the kind of home we should make if we did make one, the position we should take on the servant question, the influence we should have on the center and source of political economy, the kitchen, seem to have been ignored.54
And it was in the realm of the home that college women were making their most significant contribution, she wrote in 1912:
It has required many college women (from some 50,000 college women graduates) to build and run houses and families successfully, here one and there another, until the barrel of flour has been leavened. Society is being reorganized, not in sudden, explosive ways, but underneath all the froth and foam, the yeast has been working.55
A writer in Woman’s Journal in 1898 lauded women like Richards for “… the very important part college women have played in making everything pertaining to housekeeping a definite science,” and concluded:
Surely studying what men study in men’s colleges, has not been able to turn these women out of their “natural sphere!”56
Domestic science became a way of justifying higher education for women. According to the Lake Placid Conferences the truly scientific housekeeper needed to have studied, at a minimum, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, and to refine her taste for interior decorating, she needed in addition an acquaintance with great works of literature and art. If one couldn’t demand to study such things for their own sake—and certainly not for the sake of a “male” career—all that was left was to demand them for the sake of the home.
As for the vote, domestic science had nothing to say about suffrage directly, but it did help to guarantee that even voting women would be acceptably housebound. In the Woman’s Journal, militant articles on suffrage were embedded in columns on homemaking techniques and ads for baking powder and stove cleaners. When women’s suffrage passed in Wyoming, a woman wrote to the Journal that, contrary to antisuffrage predictions, home life had not fallen apart in that state:
Were you to visit Wyoming, you would be impressed with the contented, happy expressions of the bread-winners, as they return from the cares of the day to pretty, attractive homes, to a bright fireside and well-ordered dinner, presided over by a home-loving, neatly gowned, womanly wife.57
As a matter of fact, there were very few appealing options for educated women outside of the home. For feminists, as for Ellen Richards herself, domestic science seemed to be the way to make the best of a bad deal. If it was impossible to enter a profession and join the public world inhabited by men, a woman could at least ask that the isolated, invisible activity of homemaking be considered equally professional. In an article entitled “Housekeeping as a Profession,” an editor of the Woman’s Journal pointed to the growing prestige of law and medicine and remarked:
So too, the creation of a body of graduates of Household Science and Art would lift the pursuit into appreciation and honor. Certainly it deserves to be as highly esteemed as medicine, law, or theology. What is so valuable as a good home?58
At the same time, from a middle-class point of view, domestic science offered a new approach to the perennial servant problem—another issue that came up frequently in the Woman’s Journal. Good servants were getting scarcer all the time, as more and more working-class women opted for factory work or nursing over the low pay and indignity of domestic service. Many middle- and upper-class women suspected that the “servant class” was germ-ridden and immoral. Now, thanks to the domestic scientists, housework was becoming too scientific and complex to be performed by uneducated women anyway. Helen Campbell laid out the problem:
The condition of domestic servitude allows only the development of a certain degree of ability, not sufficient to perform our complex domestic industries. So there we are. When we find a person able to carry on modern household industries, that person will not be our servant. And when we find a person willing to be our servant, that person is unable to carry on modern household industries.59
Thus the woman who could not afford, or could not find, a servant was not to be pitied—she had simply realized that this was a job which could no longer be delegated to her social inferiors.
But the feminist embrace of domestic science was not just a matter of sour grapes on the part of unemployed, servantless women. Better to be up and about, briskly scrubbing and organizing, than to pine away as an invalid! And how much better, how much more American, to strive for a single standard for home life: rather than indolence supported by the work of servants in one class, exhausting toil in another, there would now be a single ideal for home life, centered on the classless image of the housewife.
From a feminist point of view, there was something refreshing too about the resolute unsentimentality of the domestic science movement. The architects of domestic science were repelled by the cloying nineteenth-century romanticization of home and womanhood. Lace-bordered images of sweet “little” women placidly awaiting weary breadwinners filled them with revulsion. The home was not a retreat from society, not a haven for personal indulgence; it was just as important as the factory, in fact, it was a factory. One domestic science writer upbraided women for “soldiering” (the industrial term for working at less than maximum speed) on the job, for the home, she said, is “part of a great factory for the production of citizens.”60 Henrietta Goodrich told the 1902 Lake Placid gathering:
Home economics aims to bring the home into harmony with industrial conditions and social ideals that prevail today in the larger world outside the home. This end can never be accomplished till the home in popular conception shall embody something more than the idea of personal relationships to individual homes. Men in general must admit consciously that the home is the social workshop for the making of men. No home, however isolated, can escape the social obligation that rests on it.… 61
The home existed for the public purpose of “making men,” and the scientific home—swept clean of the cobwebs of sentiment, windows opened wide to the light of science—was simply a workplace like any other. No sticky dependencies held the scientific housekeeper to her home, only a clear sense of professional commitment.
But the advocates of domestic science had no wish to follow the logic of rationalized housekeeping through to its conclusions. If the activities of homemaking were indeed the substance of a “profession,” then why not literally de-privatize the home and turn its functions over to trained specialists? Ellen Richards and her colleagues agreed that soap-making, spinning, etc., had all been improved by their absorption into outside industry. Why not cooking then, or cleaning, or child care? Why, in fact, have “homes” at all? Of all the American critics of the conventional, unscientific home, only Charlotte Perkins Gilman took this step:
We are founding chairs of Household Science, we are writing books on Domestic Economics; we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of home industry—and we omit to notice that it is just because it is home industry that all this trouble is necessary.62
A social arrangement in which one person cooked or cleaned for three or four others was intrinsically irrational, she argued. No matter how much “science” was myopically applied to it, the very scale of the home precluded the rationalization of domestic work. As for the “making of men,” any home—scientific or otherwise—in which women waited upon
men was necessarily “a hotbed of self-indulgence,” “breeding [in men] a limitless personal selfishness.”63 Gilman pushed the “efficiency” argument to its logical conclusion: to abolish the home as it was, let people live in apartment communities with centralized, professionally staffed facilities for food preparation, cleaning, child care, laundry. The great majority of women would then be freed for productive work in the world on an equal basis with men.
In practice, many Americans were attracted to lifestyles not unlike that proposed by Gilman. According to Calhoun, large numbers of American families—large enough at least to excite the alarm of the clergy—seemed to prefer “promiscuous hotel [and boarding house] living to the privacy of family life,”64 apparently because it freed the women from cooking. There were even, in the first decades of the twentieth century, scattered experiments in communal living—among poor immigrant families as well as among the middle class.65
But to the advocates of domestic science, Gilman’s proposals could hardly have been more distasteful if she had thrown in a request for “free love” (which she emphatically did not). Yet she was only following their own logic. What prevented them from taking the same step was that their commitment to the home—the female-staffed home, that is—went far deeper than their commitment to efficiency or scientific rationality. According to her biographer and colleague, Caroline Hunt, Ellen Richards
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 20