Dreamers of a New Day (26 page)

Christine Frederick

If the nineteenth-century efficiency experts had turned the housewife into an engineer, trained to operate her own modern equipment, and the arts and crafts enthusiasts had promoted her to the status of creative artist, Christine Frederick and Lillian Gilbreth re-designated her as a manager. Frederick’s
The New Housekeeping
was subtitled
Efficiency Studies in Home Management
. The housewife was expected to assemble ‘Fuel-Savers’, ‘Time-Savers’, ‘Labour-Savers’, ‘Step-Savers’ and ‘Businesslike Equipment for the Home’ such as ‘The New Housekeeping Filing Cook Book’.
⁶⁹
According to Gilbreth, the role of the housewife involved breaking down every necessary domestic operation, along with a knowledge of technology and scientific buying. It required combining an engineer’s understanding of how to use resources such as gas and electricity, with a psychologist’s skills in judging people. Gilbreth gave the housewife the managerial job of dividing and allocating work in the
home, rather than attempting it all herself. She should assess all family members as producers and consumers. ‘Father turns in money, the boys cut the lawn, the girls wait on table. Bill plays for the family singing. The baby gives everyone a chance to wait on her and admire her.’
⁷⁰
The Gilbreth home of twelve children was indeed an efficiency laboratory – and yet they employed a small army of servants, to enable them to pursue their own work! Two of their children wrote a memoir about their curious upbringing, ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’, which also became a film. The British middle class with their servants restored were slower off the mark; but a variant of time management appeared in
Good Housekeeping
in 1925, when Hazel Hunkins admonished women to ‘Keep a Budget’, telling them that ‘The main thing is the elimination of “hand to mouth” management, and the recovery of control over one’s time, energy and money, that we may get out of life those things we really value’.
⁷¹

Household management and housekeepers’ control transposed the promise of the good life into individual households. The Taylorist efficiency experts believed that their systems made for less effort. ‘Let gravity work for you,’ urged Lillian Gilbreth, explaining how dirty washing could be rolled downstairs to save energy in carrying it – apparently forgetting that it had to be picked up.
⁷²
An obvious hitch in all these theories of household management was that time saved in labour was offset by time spent in planning and administering. Likewise, the ideal of shorter hours was thwarted by growing anxieties about germs, along with an elaborated housekeeping which required knowledge of buying as a science, balanced diets and new electrical equipment.

An awkward ideological aspect of the Tayloristic drive to reduce time on housework was that it undermined more traditional ideas of the noble art of housekeeping. One solution was to graft the ‘dignity of labour’ inherent in the arts and crafts movement onto the new housekeeping. In the midst of her discussion of kitchen utensils, Christine Frederick invoked ‘The oft-quoted saying of William Morris that the home should contain nothing that is not at the same time useful and beautiful’.
⁷³
Morris would have been bewildered to find his ideas propagated by household efficiency experts. But there are some intriguing connecting threads. The efficiency experts regarded objects as socially constructed, to be adapted according to either aesthetic or functional requirements, while the relationship of design to functional use had been present in the arts and crafts movement. Thus the kitchen in the early 1900s Hartley-Dennett arts and crafts home had been carefully planned
for efficiency, while the popular magazine
House Beautiful
announced itself as ‘The Only Magazine in America Devoted to Simplicity, Economy, and Appropriateness in Home Decoration and Furnishing’.
⁷⁴
Simplification fused aesthetics with improved working conditions for the home-maker. When British women’s labour organizations such as the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the Women’s Labour League sought working-class women’s views on the design of housing around World War One, simplification and housework efficiency theories combined. The Women’s Labour League sent out a detailed questionnaire canvassing for proposals to improve housing, and the results were discussed at meetings of the organization. Their aim was to eliminate unnecessary work such as climbing up and down stairs, heating water and bringing in coal – a working-class version of Lillian Gilbreth and Christine Frederick.
⁷⁵

In the early twentieth century, arts and crafts, which had started on the radical margins, passed into middle-class culture. The social quest for simplification was transposed into an individual assertion of good taste invested with moral qualities. According to the American writer on design, Mabel Tuke Priestman, artistic houses in which ‘superfluous ornament and drapery are done away with’ were ‘conducive to plain living and high thinking’.
⁷⁶
The arts and crafts conviction that furnishings and design marked the inner personality ramified into new ways of delineating social class by ‘lifestyle’. Middle-class reformers, imbued with the moral aesthetic of simplification, disdained immigrant working-class fondness for net curtains and loud clothes. The pejorative association between women and consumption expressed in Thorstein Veblen’s influential
Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899) was a recurring trope. In 1902 Mrs Henry Wade Rodgers fretted in
House Beautiful
magazine about whether the aesthetics of simplification were genuine or ‘but a pose, a mood of our complex life?’ and was anxious lest middle-class women backslide by burying themselves ‘under trivial obligations and possessions’.
⁷⁷
Even after arts and crafts had been overtaken by the postwar enthusiasm for design based on the latest technology, an evangelical anxiety that women might consume the wrong kind of household objects persisted, while any lingering resistance to consumption left over from old aspirations to the simple life was interpreted as requiring more consumer education. Books by writers like Frederick, women’s magazines, and the Good Housekeeping Institute all eagerly publicized new products while advocating scientific management in the home.

There was a neat fit between domestic acceleration and the purchase of domestic commodities – the very things that were streaming out along the new assembly lines. Readers of
The New Housekeeping
were informed of the virtues of devices like the ‘Speedy Egg-Beater designed on the turbine principle’ or a ‘“Lazy Susan” – The Silent Waitress’.
⁷⁸
American corporations were quick to pick up on changes in consumer demands, and a two-way relationship developed between household advisers and the world of business. Companies producing household goods, such as Kraft Foods, Sears and Roebuck, and Piggly-Wiggly food stores, appointed home economists to promote their products.
⁷⁹
In 1914 the African-American reformer Blanche Armwood, a member of the local black elite in Tampa, Florida, persuaded the Tampa Gas Company to assist in forming the Tampa School of Household Arts (THSA), which trained black women to use the new appliances. Nancy Hewitt describes how she persuaded white businesses that black domestics needed training, and convinced the women that it was worthwhile attending the courses: ‘Adapting the language of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs – “Lifting as We Climb” – the TSHA class of 1916 chose for its motto “Lifting Labor from drudgery to attractiveness”’.
⁸⁰

By the 1920s the market for household goods in the US had expanded considerably – in contrast to Britain, where the impetus to buy new consumer durables was much weaker, partly for economic reasons, and partly because of domestic service. From the early 1920s US advertising and marketing firms were spending millions of dollars on promoting domesticity and persuading consumers to buy mass-produced goods.
⁸¹
This psychological pressure intensified over the course of the decade, carrying with it the promise of a better life. The bohemian impulse towards self-expression and the individualistic ethic of self-help merged to reinvent the home as a key aspect of the American economy. Vacuum cleaners symbolized control, cleaning products meant power, fast foods epitomized speedy convenience.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman had been among the first to theorize the interconnection between apparently isolated homes and the broader society: ‘Our houses are threaded like beads on a string.’
⁸²
Gilman had imagined that this would encourage changing the forms of domestic living. In claiming access to social resources, other women dreamers and adventurers had imagined an extension of social provision. Though both aspirations were partially achieved, the home was also reshaped by individual commodities. A new way of life was being initiated
which would eventually overtake the utopias of the adventurers. As the Muncie, Indiana Chamber of Commerce put it in the mid-1920s: ‘The first responsibility of an American to his country is no longer that of a citizen, but of a consumer. Consumption is a necessity.’
⁸³

7

Consumer Power

In retrospect the triumph of the Muncie, Indiana Chamber of Commerce might appear to have been preordained, but this was not how it seemed at the time. From the late nineteenth century, the alternative forms of cooking, eating, washing and living arrangements devised by housekeeping reformers, feminists, co-operators, socialists and anarchists, contributed to the reshaping and redefining of both private and social consumption. They also raised the need for new kinds of financial structures. Contests over consumption generated ingenious strategies of resistance, diverse forms of organizing and demands for social provision as well as cash payments from the state.

Food figured largely in schemes to alter consumption. Dolores Hayden relates how the founder of home economics, Ellen Swallow Richards, exhibited a model kitchen at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The ‘small, white clapboard house’ Richards displayed contained a startlingly modern ‘scientific laboratory designed to extract the maximum amount of nutrition from food substances and the maximum heat from fuel’.
¹
Excited housewives, women reformers and academics teaching the new subject of home economics ate healthy Boston baked beans on brown bread and prepared themselves to proselytize for public kitchens on the Richards model.

The kitchens, which aimed to provide good cheap food for the working class and were based on similar philanthropic kitchens in Europe, never proved very popular with the American immigrant poor. But they did inspire similar projects in Britain. ‘Distributive kitchens’ patronized by the middle class in the early 1900s in London were continuing to thrive in the 1920s, when feminist journalist Evelyn Sharp reported how food in aluminium containers was being delivered by tricycle from a
Bloomsbury basement. The service proved particularly popular among elementary school teachers.
²

One version of the distributive kitchen which did enjoy a degree of popularity with the working class was the cooked food shop, which pioneered cheap take-away meals. In 1902 Margaret Llewelyn Davies prodded the Sunderland co-operators to back a co-operative cooked food shop, the Women’s Co-operative Guild’s ‘Coffee and Cooked Meat Shop’. Working-class women supported the outlet, queuing for soup, pease pudding, boiled pork and other cooked meats. However, male cooperators were less enthusiastic about the extension of co-operative shopping to reduce women’s domestic labour. Communal eating was associated with hardship and distress, and they suspected that the Coffee and Cooked Meat Shop was a charitable soup kitchen in disguise.
³
Co-operative bakeries, however, met with less opposition, and several were established.

A few modern employers were beginning to introduce canteens, and these new commercial forms generated ideas for socially provided services. A speaker at the 1900 Conference of the National Union of Women Workers, urging the need to rationalize housework, pointed to the new works canteens in Colman’s factories and argued that municipalities could take on the responsibility for public kitchens.
⁴

Running parallel with the beginnings of mass Taylorized catering went a growing minority interest in what was called ‘Reform Food’. Alternative businesses sprouted as a result; in the early 1900s the Reformed Food Company in Victoria Street, Westminster, spotting a new niche market, developed a special take-away service for vegetarians.
⁵
By the early twentieth century vegetarianism was becoming increasingly popular in radical and progressive circles, because of ideas about animal rights and a search for healthier diets. Vegetarian cafés provided women with an acceptable meeting place and were popular among feminists. In 1909 Jane Hume Clapperton hosted a meeting of Charlotte Despard’s Women’s Freedom League in Edinburgh from the Cafe Vegetaria.
⁶
Leonora Cohen, a Theosophist and member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, was also a vegetarian, who in 1914 was running her home in Harrogate as a guest-house. Elizabeth Crawford records how Cohen advertised it in the
Suffragette
as ‘Pomona’, a ‘Reform Food Establishment. Excellent catering by specialist in Reform diets. Late Dinners. Separate Tables.’
⁷