Precious time Jane Lancaster chronicles Lillian Gilbreth’s ‘strenuous life’ BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ
	More than a mother   It seems unfair that a woman who so successfully demonstrated that family and career could be combined and who worked into her 90th year — more than three decades after her large brood of children had left the nest — should be remembered primarily as the mother of the Cheaper by the Dozen kids. Jane Lancaster set out to correct that injustice when she wrote Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth — A Life Beyond "Cheaper by the Dozen." This is a definitive biography of Gilbreth, beginning with her childhood in an upper-class household in Oakland, California, where she was born in 1878, and carrying her through three-quarters of the 20th century to her death in 1972. It’s a scholarly book, with prodigious footnotes, based on several years of research by Lancaster, and it lives up to its task of defining Gilbreth in terms other than motherhood. Gilbreth, the oldest of nine, seems to have always had a fierce determination to live "the strenuous life," as she termed it, by which she meant doing work that was fulfilling and significant. When she met Frank Gilbreth, a builder and contractor from back East, their conversations initiated a professional and personal partnership that produced some of the earliest time-motion studies in industry, on the one hand, and 13 children (one was stillborn, one died of diphtheria at 5), on the other hand. After Frank’s death in 1924, Lillian carried on the work begun by the two of them, delivering lectures in the male bastions of management engineering conferences and extending their principles of efficiency into female-dominated workplaces, including the home. The work that she pursued and the ideas that she put forth are still seen today in corporate concerns for relieving workers’ fatigue (e.g., coffee breaks); in efficient kitchen design, including a desk tucked into a corner; in ergonomic studies of what kinds of chairs, keyboards, etc. make office workers more comfortable and thereby more productive; and in adaptations of living and working spaces for disabled homemakers and veterans. Lancaster thoroughly documents the extent of Gilbreth’s accomplishments, including her work in the governmental arena, serving on presidential commissions on unemployment and women’s issues. Lancaster’s style, though dense with detail, is always fluid, as is the organization of her material. Though Gilbreth led such a full life that time periods overlap from chapter to chapter, Lancaster keeps the reader on track. Here and there, she inserts short tongue-in-cheek observations about the events she’s recording or the characters she’s quoting. Those bits of humor from the author, as well as hearing what conclusions she has reached about the voluminous data she has culled, are welcome interludes in the endless march of factual information. Granted, Lancaster skillfully weaves in comments from Gilbreth herself (and from her children) that lend a brightness to certain passages, but Gilbreth took such care to protect any future representations of herself or Frank that her own writing still keeps the reader at quite a distance. Lancaster does cite examples of Gilbreth using family anecdotes to get a point across in a book or lecture and one of the most memorable was her decision that ironing the boys’ shirts was a waste of time, since they’d look rumpled by the time they reached school anyway, and time was never to be wasted in the Gilbreth household. Lancaster is also to be congratulated for not falling into the trap that lures so many biographers: idolizing and/or idealizing their subjects. She gives us Gilbreth with her failures as well as her triumphs, her warts as well as her charms. And she succeeds admirably in correcting the public impression of Gilbreth. By the time you finish reading Making Time and have gotten to know Gilbreth as an engineer, a professor, a consultant, an advisor to presidents, and a world traveler, you could almost forget about all those children. Almost. — Johnette Rodriguez

Jane Lancaster was teaching history at Lincoln School, researching a history-of-women-in-science segment to present to her young female students, when she came across references to management engineer Lillian Gilbreth. "Isn’t that the mother in Cheaper by the Dozen?" was one of her first reactions, as it is for most people. But as she read further and realized how much Gilbreth had done in her professional capacity as a management consultant, in a career that stretched from pre-World War I into the early 1960s, she became determined to write a book about her.

Her best avenue for doing so was to enroll in a Ph.D. program at Brown University. She and her husband, both originally from England, settled in Providence 17 years ago, when he began teaching economics at Brown. Lancaster received her doctorate in ’98, after writing her thesis on Gilbreth. She spent another two years revising and augmenting it to become the recently published biography: Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth — A Life Beyond "Cheaper by the Dozen" (Northeastern University Press). She will present a lecture, reading and book-signing Monday, June 7 at 7 p.m. at the Weaver Library in East Providence.

During the course of extensive research, Lancaster consulted 44 libraries and archives, including the abundant Gilbreth Collection at Purdue University, where Lillian taught for many years. She visited the places where Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their large family had lived: New York City; Plainfield and Montclair, New Jersey; Oakland, California; and, quite conveniently, Providence, where six of the Gilbreth children were born, and where Lillian earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Brown.

In Birmingham, England, Lancaster located a report from the 1910 conference of the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers, at which the leading proponent of scientific management, Frederick Taylor, in his keynote address, mentioned Lillian’s significant contribution to the fledgling field. Lillian had already made it clear that she felt psychology had a definite place in the study of workplace efficiency.

"It was the double approach to management that made them [Lillian and Frank] more effective than some of the other people," Lancaster stressed during in a recent conversation in her East Side home. "There were other psychologists working on this and there were other motion study people. But bringing these ideas together and her modifying them to some degree, especially Frank’s rather confrontational approach, made all the difference."

This is quite clear in the book when Lancaster quotes the two of them during a study of typists at the Remington Typewriter Company. Frank all but contradicts the answers he gets from the young typists, and he later interrupts one of them to lecture her about eye-hand coordination. Lillian’s questions are much more diplomatic and her observations much more open to individual preferences and abilities. Lancaster found those exchanges from 1916 in an obscure typing manual published 20 years later: "That was a really interesting find — I suppose that’s one of the things about working on a project for a very long time."

Living in Providence was also a boon. As Lancaster researched the book, she met many people who remembered the Gilbreth children and/or their mother. The three oldest children attended Lincoln School for a short time, and a photo from that era is in the school archives. One of the Gilbreths’ earliest clients, New England Butt (for its production of butt hinges), had records at the Rhode Island Historical Society. During Lancaster’s research for a completely different project, about the African-American sculptor Elizabeth Prophet, an elderly East Side resident related a vivid impression of Lillian: "I remember Mrs. Gilbreth — she used to stride down the street."

"Nobody had said anything up until then about her walking," noted Lancaster, who had interviewed many of Gilbreth’s family members, friends, and acquaintances. "She was fairly tall and must have had a long stride, and I wouldn’t have got that image in any other town from someone who remembered seeing her physically."

What people did mention most often was an episode from Cheaper by the Dozen — not the recent Steve Martin film, which shows chaos, not efficiency, in a large family; but rather the book published in 1948 by Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and the 1950 film version. In this sequence, Frank instructs the children’s school principal in the most efficient way to use a bar of soap, and Lancaster interviewed people who told her they thought about that every day when they were in the shower. Just as memorable from Lancaster’s book is her account of Frank’s system of German language tapes in the bathrooms for the children to listen to as they did their morning ablutions and French language tapes in the bedrooms while they were getting dressed for school.

The Gilbreths touted their family systems as models of the efficiency and teamwork they sought to promote in the workplace. And after Frank’s untimely death in 1924, at the age of 55, Lillian became even more of an example of a superwoman who combined the demands of family and career. Yet, despite her shining example, from the 1920s and ’30s, when her children were still at home, through the ’40s and ’50s, when she was at the height of her professional fame, Lillian did not particularly inspire other women to take up the torch of working outside the home.

"I think that was partly because she did things in such a big way," Lancaster observed. "I think it’s upsetting to many women who hear about these women who are apparently doing it all, and they just give up. Nobody wants to have 12 children, and she did have quite a bit of help. She had her mother-in-law and a series of young women who lived with them.

"What came to me in the end was that the most important thing in her life was to be active, to be useful, and these things together became her work," Lancaster continued. "She found it very hard not to be doing something. Even in her eighties, she was an indefatigable traveler. She liked to be on the go. She just enjoyed the excitement of doing all this stuff."

From her own enthusiasm for traveling, research, and writing, it would seem that Lancaster has found a soulmate in Lillian. As she worked on the book, she recalled that she had once considered doing time-motion studies after college graduation, and she found herself re-organizing her kitchen after an intense stint in the Gilbreth archives.

In the two years between completing the Gilbreth book and its publication this spring, Lancaster published Inquire Within: A Social History of the Providence Athenaeum Since 1753, and she’s just completed a new edition of By Motor to the Golden Gate (1917), a cross-country travelogue by Emily Post, with extensive footnotes and an introduction. Lancaster also continues to spread the word about Lillian Gilbreth, hoping that readers will gain a better understanding of "a woman who lived through enormous changes in what women should be doing and contributed to some of those enormous changes." And did a lot more than just raising all those children.