Making Time

Readers of "Cheaper by the Dozen" - and moviegoers - remember Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) as the nurturing mom who endured the antics of twelve children and an engineer husband eager to experiment with the principles of efficiency, especially on his own household. The innovators behind many labor-saving devices and procedures used in factories, offices, and kitchens, Lillian and her husband Frank Gilbreth tackled the problem of efficiency through motion study. The couple also developed the "Gilbreth family system," a model that allowed a mother to be professionally active if she chose while the parents worked together to raise responsible citizens. What readers today might not know is that Lillian was herself a high-profile engineer, and the only woman to win the coveted Hoover Medal for engineers. She traveled the world, served as an advisor on women's issues to five U.S. presidents, and mingled with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. When Frank died after twenty years of marriage, Lillian was left to raise their eleven surviving children, all under the age of nineteen. She put all of them through college while sustaining her remarkable career, retiring at the age of ninety. Lancaster confronts the complexities of how one of the twentieth century's foremost career women could be pregnant, nursing, or caring for children for more than three decades straight. Lancaster has woven into her narrative insights gleaned from interviews with the surviving Gilbreth children and from meticulous historical research into such topics as technology, family, work, and feminism.