The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink
When people asked, “What did you talk about with Amelia?” Dorothy would invariably say, “cabbages and kings.” Ever lean with her words and always to the point, Dorothy was secretive about her conversations with Amelia. Although in a 1999 interview on her one hundredth birthday, Dorothy revealed an intriguing tidbit: “[Amelia] was interested in a lot of things including extrasensory perception. She believed it was possible.”
“Cabbages and kings” is a phrase from the poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter” in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. The verse reads:
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”
Oh, to have been a fly on Dorothy’s wall, when she and Amelia ate waffles and talked of many things.
LILLIAN GILBRETH, THE ONE BEST WAY
THE SAME YEAR AMELIA EARHART became an advisor at Purdue, another famed woman came to campus—Dr. Lillian Moller Gilbreth. President Edward C. Elliott had heard Lillian speak at the same Women and the Changing World Conference where he had seen Amelia. Lillian and Amelia often found themselves in the same spheres, as both were admired around the world. They appeared together in Ida Tarbell’s September 13, 1930, “Fifty Foremost Women of the United States,” a list of women defined as having done the most to advance the country’s welfare. The list also included suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger.
Alas, most accounts of her initially focus on the number of children she bore, but Lillian, while loving and rearing her gaggle of Gilbreths, also birthed extraordinary milestones in engineering, even by today’s standards. Lillian would become Dean of Women Dorothy Stratton’s greatest influence.
Lillian was a model of acumen and caring as one of the world’s few female authorities in industrial engineering and management. She was internationally known for her contributions in the field of motion study, work simplification, and psychology as it applied in industry, the home, and the world of the physically disabled. Her quest—as she studied individuals’ actions in the workplace and the home environment—was to find “the one best way,” the most efficient time- and work-saving method to complete a task. This was breakthrough work that she and her husband had shared before his death.
“Anyone can make a problem complicated,” Lillian said. “The real achievement is to make it simple.”
The Gilbreths developed the concept of “therbligs,” a term that is “Gilbreth” spelled backward. Therblig is the name the couple gave to the smallest unit of work motion. For example, to check off a box on a form, you need to look for a pencil, reach for the pencil, pick it up, adjust your grip, move the lead to the paper, make a check mark, move the pencil to its resting place, and put it down. Each of these tiny steps is a therblig. The Gilbreths defined eighteen different therbligs, each with its own symbol and color, which they used to produce motion charts. They were the first to use motion pictures to study timed units of work and find ways to eliminate unnecessary therbligs from tasks.
In 1915, as a mother of seven children, Lillian earned a PhD in philosophy from Brown University. From 1911 to 1920, between having babies, she collaborated with her husband to write several classic books on management, which incorporated Lillian’s knowledge of psychology along with engineering, including Motion Study, A Primer of Scientific Study, and Fatigue Study. Frank shopped for publishers and resented the fact that the manuscripts with only his name were quickly accepted, but manuscripts with both his and Lillian’s name found no market. Macmillan finally published their co-authored books, provided Lillian’s name was represented only by initials and the publicity would not include the fact that she was a woman. In her book As I Remember, written in 1941 and published in 1998, Lillian wrote, “This disturbed feminist Frank more than it did Lillian.”
Lillian would be designated as the American Women’s Association’s “First Lady of Engineering” and “Woman of the Year” in 1948, and she was the first woman to receive the Western Society of Engineers’ Washington Award, given previously to such men as Orville Wright, Herbert Hoover, and Henry Ford. Lillian was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1965. Yet this scholar, industrial pioneer, and author, who was recognized by more than twenty universities with honorary doctoral degrees, seems today to be most widely known for one thing: she was the mother of twelve children. At age eighty-one, the Industrial Management Society named her “Mother of the Century.”
Lillian’s organized and regimented family life was humorously depicted in the book Cheaper by the Dozen, written by two of the Gilbreth children in 1948. The successful book became a movie two years later with Clifton Webb, an Indianapolis native, playing Frank Gilbreth and Myrna Loy portraying Lillian. A remake decades later staring Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt was radically different from the original best-selling book and charming film. Lillian’s accomplishments after her husband died unexpectedly in 1924 are only suggested at the end of the original movie.
Lillian was thin, yet vigorous, with red hair and an easy, compassionate smile. She met Frank while studying for a doctorate in psychology in Boston. They were married in 1904 when Frank, a mechanical engineer, was thirty-six years old and a prominent contractor-builder who had started as an apprentice bricklayer. He had already invented the gravity mixer for cement and the moving scaffold that keeps bricks and wall always in line. Today, Frank is considered the “Father of Management Engineering.”
In the first weeks of their marriage, Lillian became intensely interested in Frank’s work in time and motion study. Ever the planner and precision man, Frank spelled out to “Lillie” on their honeymoon what he wanted in offspring.
Lillian said, “When my husband first told me he wanted to have six sons and six daughters, I asked how on earth anybody could have twelve children and continue a career. But my husband said, ‘We teach management, so we shall have to practice it.’ Over a seventeen-year period we had our children—all planned, I assure you.”
Time management was instituted to raise the Gilbreth children. As Cheaper by the Dozen expresses so endearingly, at the “old but beautiful Taj Mahal of a house” in Montclair, New Jersey, where the family lived, there was a daily assembly call. On Sundays, “family council” was held to work out the collective budget and take offers from the children on who would perform household tasks, with pay to the child who submitted the lowest bid. When several of the children had tonsil troubles, the Gilbreths put efficiency into action, and all “twelve” of the children had their tonsils removed at the same time. Twelve was the operative word, yet the number is deceiving.
Everything about the book plays on the “dozen” theme, from the title, the jokes, the dialogue, to the symmetry—six boys, six girls. While Lillian and Frank did have a dozen children, there never were twelve children at one time. Mary died of diphtheria in 1912 at age six, five days before the sixth child was born.
There’s no mention of Mary’s death in Cheaper by the Dozen. Authors Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey tiptoe around mentioning the passing of their sister, and it takes an alert reader to notice. Perhaps Mary’s death is not mentioned outright because neither Lillian nor Frank mentioned it in real life. In Time Out for Happiness, Frank Jr.’s account of his parents, he wrote, “Neither Frank nor Lillie ever discussed Mary again, at least in the presence of the children.… For years thereafter, if one of the younger children asked Mother about Mary, she’d do her best to answer calmly, and then retire hastily to her room, with her shoulders shaking in sobs.”
In As I Remember,