Lillian Moller Gilbreth.
Courtesy of Purdue University Libraries, Karnes Archives and Special Collections
Lillian Gilbreth—known as “Mother of the Year,” “the Greatest Woman Engineer in the World,” and “the Mother of Industrial Psychology”—was a towering figure in the public eye from the 1920s to the 1960s. But what the public didn’t know was that Lillian’s fame was thrust upon her: she was an extremely shy person and was doing what needed to be done to support her family of 12 children. The 1948 movie Cheaper by the Dozen portrays her exclusively as a doting wife and mother; in reality, Lillian had her doctorate and profoundly changed the way we interact with the spaces we live and work in today.
Lillian (Lillie) Evelyn Moller Gilbreth was born to German parents Annie Delger and William Moller. The Delger family came from Germany in 1847, eventually settling in San Francisco around the time of the California Gold Rush. The Mollers made their money by bringing their sugar-refining business from Germany to America.
Eldest son William became smitten with Annie, and they married. Annie immediately got pregnant, but lost the baby. Her second pregnancy was successful, and baby Lillie was born on May 28, 1878. Annie’s health was still fragile and a constant concern for William. When Annie would take short trips out of the house, William would pace the floors, leaving Lillie to wonder if her mother was coming back. Annie gave birth to eight more children; five girls, then three boys. Each older daughter had a crib in her room for the sibling who was her responsibility.
In her autobiography, As I Remember, Lillian describes herself as a shy child and easily frightened. She was uncomfortable going into town to buy clothes, meeting people, and being in social settings. For Christmas and birthdays, Lillie loved to receive books. Her collection was organized by color and size. To escape from her fears, she read; when she was reading, she was never lonely or unhappy.
Until Lillie was nine years old, her mother taught her at home. In the mornings, first came breakfast, then chores, then the day’s lessons. Once in public school, the principal placed her in first grade. Much older than the other students, Lillie was singled out due to her good grades and the responsibilities the teacher gave her, which earned her the “teacher’s pet” label. Lillie had few friends, so Valentine’s Day was the worst, most embarrassing day of the year. Her mother even tried to secretly send valentines to Lillie. One year, Lillie came home in tears because some boys sent her “comic” valentines teasing her as a “blue stocking”—a girl interested only in studying and books. When girls would come over to her house, they wanted to giggle and whisper, but Lillian showed them her book collection. She decided that if she couldn’t be pretty she had to be smart, so she poured herself into her studies.
When Lillian started at Oakland High School in 1892, the family moved to a house farther out of town, which meant Lillie had to ride the streetcar rather than walk to school. The change bothered her, because it was very important to her to be punctual. With her knack for time management and organization beginning to show itself, she would carefully calculate exactly how long the streetcar trip was from home to school.
Still shy but starting to fit in a little better, Lillie was elected vice president of her senior class, and her poems were published in the school paper. She concentrated on her classes and got all As her senior year. She had hopes of going to college like her aunt Annie Flo, and uncles Everett and David, but there was tension in the Moller house. Lillie wrote, “Mama was sympathetic to the idea—she always supported any plan to cultivate one’s self. Strangely enough, it was Papa—always so quick to give any child what she wanted—who opposed the idea. His reasoning ran like this, ‘Your mother, aunts, grandmothers, never went to college, [and] they are cultivated gentlewomen. Your place is here at home…. College is only necessary for teachers and other women who have to make a living. No daughter of mine will have to do that. I can support them!’”
Lillie’s father finally gave in on the condition that she could try it for a year. But Lillie excelled and her father soon relented. At the end of senior year, she was disappointed that she didn’t make the Phi Beta Kappa list, though she tied with another boy. As part of the 1900 graduating class, Lillian was selected to be one of the commencement speakers; the other two were men. Her subject was “Life—A Means or an End.” Her adviser, who had been her linguistics teacher, helped prepare her for her speech. Lillie wrote about his advice: “Don’t wear a stiff dress, wear one that is soft and has ruffles. Don’t scream…. Don’t try to imitate a man—speak as a woman.” Lillie, who now went by the more dignified Lillian, was the first woman commencement speaker at the University of California, Berkeley.
In the spring of 1902, Lillian got her master’s degree in English from Berkeley. After her first year of studies toward a doctorate degree in English, Lillian decided to take a trip to Europe with two friends, Eva and Mary, and a teacher/chaperone, Minnie Bunker. At that time, it was fashionable for young women of social standing to travel to Europe before marrying, as part of their cultural education. Lillian and Eva left Oakland in June 1903. They joined Mary and Minnie in New England for some visiting with relatives and sightseeing.
At the home of Minnie’s Aunt Martha, Lillian met Martha’s only son, Frank Gilbreth. A self-made man, having worked himself up in the construction industry by implementing time-saving techniques, Frank was 10 years older than Lillian. The group went sightseeing in Frank’s Buzz-Wagon, an impressive red sports car. On the second day, the car broke down and needed a new tire. While the men were working on the car, several youngsters started to gather around and became a little unruly. The big sister of nine quickly got the children under control. On the way home, Frank was full of compliments for Lillian, having counted 42 children and one dog under her spell. Upon Lillian’s return from her European adventure, Frank proposed to her. They set their wedding date for October 1904, leaving 10 months for preparations. During their months apart, Frank sent Lillian manuscripts to edit and brochures to review, already involving her in his business. After their wedding in San Francisco, they took the train to their honeymoon spot, the World’s Fair in St. Louis.
Though Frank Gilbreth didn’t have any schooling past high school, he was considered the father of time-motion studies (the study of work habits in all sorts of industries to find ways to increase productivity and make jobs easier).
While working as a bricklayer, he had developed a system of building that radically increased the construction time of houses. At 27, Frank started his own engineering consulting company, Gilbreth Inc., which helped businesses implement efficiency strategies that increased productivity and saved time.
On the train the day after their wedding, Frank declared to Lillian, “I want to teach you about concrete and masonry.” Lillian had studied English and was planning on being an English teacher, and had taken very little math and science. She had not expected to be studying on her first day of marriage.
When Lillian was pregnant with their first child, she heard for the first time Frank’s vision for their family. Frank, always planning ahead, had decided that they would have six boys and six girls. Coming from a family of nine children, Lillian knew how hard living in a big family could be. However, Frank’s prediction came true. While spending most of their time living on the East Coast, Lillian gave birth to 12 children within 19 years. Anne was born in September 1905, followed by Mary Elizabeth, Ernestine, Martha, Frank Jr., Bill, Lillian, Fred, Daniel, John, Robert, and finally Jane in 1922. The Gilbreth household became their laboratory for time motion and efficiency.
The Gilbreth family moved to Rhode Island in 1910; at this time there were four children. The next year, Frank convinced Lillian to get her doctorate in psychology, which would help their time-motion consulting business. While Lillian was preparing her dissertation for her doctoral degree, Anne and Mary came down with diphtheria. Lillian and the other children were quarantined. Anne had a mild case, but five-year-old Mary was weaker and succumbed to the disease. Mary’s death hit the family hard.
Lillian submitted her thesis, “The Psychology of Management,” to the University of California for publication, but they required that she live on campus during the final year of her doctoral program. Unable to do that, Frank and Lillian finally found a publisher who would accept her thesis manuscript, but only if Lillian used her initials instead of her first name so that no one would know that it was written by a woman. Lillian refused. Brown University was the only large university that would give her a PhD in “applied management.”
Lillian had to write another dissertation for the new doctorate degree at Brown. She published her first dissertation on her own in 1914, but the work didn’t count toward her doctorate. The book, Psychology of Management, covered the psychological aspects of industrial management—the importance of human relations in the workplace and the importance of understanding individual differences among workers. Her book made her a pioneer in the field of what is now known as organizational psychology.
The large Gilbreth family functioned with the same systems that Lillian had learned while growing up in a family of nine children, while also implementing the time management techniques that Lillian and Frank were becoming known for. While working on her doctoral dissertation at Brown, Lillian also ran the business while her husband was away and wrote most of the many books and articles they authored. Frank created an instruction card that spelled out Lillian’s weekdays. With the help of her Grandma Martha, they would spend the mornings until 10:00 AM getting the children fed and dressed. Then, Lillian would spend two hours working, two hours with the children and lunch, take a 30-minute nap, spend 30 minutes with an infant, an hour working, an hour with callers, an hour with the children, 30 minutes on miscellaneous tasks, and then an hour for dinner.
Lillian’s second dissertation was “Some Aspects of Eliminating Waste in Teaching”; at 400 pages, it was twice the length of her first one. Frank, who was on a steamer crossing the ocean at the time, was unable to attend her graduation ceremony. Arriving home, and before the steamer even reached the dock, he was shouting, “Did you get it?” With the PhD behind Lillian’s name, she could now be listed as an author on their papers. They authored more than 50 papers in the following nine years. Previously, publishers wouldn’t print her name because she was a woman; they finally allowed her first book, The Psychology of Management, to be published under the gender-neutral L. M. Gilbreth, which was allegedly a compromise. While Lillian and her husband tried to convince publishers to use Lillian’s name, another work on the same topic was getting rave reviews. After two years of refusals from publishers, they decided that getting published with a gender-neutral name was better than not getting published at all.
Lillian, holding baby Dan, working at home surrounded by seven children, 1917.
Courtesy of Purdue University Libraries, Karnes Archives and Special Collections
In 1924, Frank was instrumental in launching the first International Congress of Management in Prague. On the way, Lillian and Frank had planned to attend the World Power Conference in London, where Kate Gleason would be the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ representative. Five days before they were to sail, Frank suffered a fatal heart attack in a phone booth while talking to Lillian. Several of her children were sick with measles and chicken pox, but Lillian handled all the business involved with the funeral in those five days and sailed to Europe to represent the both of them. Elizabeth (Libby) Sanders, a neighbor and Smith College friend of her eldest daughter, went with her as a companion and helper.
Not all of the husbands of notable women architects and engineers were supportive of their wives’ careers. Nora Stanton, granddaughter of early women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was the first woman admitted to the American Society of Civil Engineers, in 1916. A New York Times article titled WARNS WIVES OF CAREERS, said of Nora’s first husband, radio pioneer Lee de Forest, “His matrimonial catastrophe was due to the fact that his wife … had persisted in following her career as a hydraulic engineer and an agitator for the cause in which her grandmother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a pioneer, after the birth of her child. He took the position that a woman who had undertaken the obligations of a wife and mother was in duty bound to devote her time to her child or children even at the sacrifice of her career.”
Nora remarried and had two more children and enjoyed a successful career as an architect, designing dozens of homes on Long Island in New York.
After Frank’s death, Lillian immediately continued the work that she and her husband had started; she had a large family to support. In her research, she brought time motion and efficiency into the home and kitchen to find the one best way to perform household tasks. Among her many ideas Lillian implemented for aiding the handicapped, she designed an ideal kitchen layout for the disabled homemaker or veteran. Lillian and Frank were sensitive to the needs of the more than 13 million disabled solders who returned from World War I injured. (Frank had once been temporarily paralyzed while recovering from a rheumatism attack.)
In 1926, Lillian was named the first woman member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, based on her consulting work, research, publications, lectures, and workshops around the world that defined the area of industrial engineering. When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, Lillian supported him and served as president of the Women’s Branch of the Engineers’ National Hoover Committee. Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry, were both engineers. Lillian’s friend Kate Gleason was honorary vice president, and Mrs. Henry Ford and Mrs. Thomas Edison were officers. Lillian, Kate, and Lou Henry also founded the Engineering Women’s Club in 1928, with headquarters in New York City.
Then in 1935, Lillian became a professor of management at Purdue University and the first female professor in the engineering school. As at Gilbreth and Company, she worked with General Electric and other firms to improve the design of kitchens and household appliances. She even created new techniques to help disabled women accomplish common household tasks.
In 1948, two Gilbreth children, Ernestine and Frank, wrote a book about their childhood entitled Cheaper by the Dozen that includes humorous stories about the time and motion techniques employed in their large household. The book was an instant success, and Hollywood made a movie of the same title in 1950. The book and movie end at Frank’s death, and do not mention Lillian’s accomplishments before and after.
Despite that omission, Lillian gained fame as one of the world’s great industrial and management engineers, and traveled and worked in many countries of the world. She did not retire from professional work until she was in her 80s. In 1966, she won the Hoover Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers for distinguished public service by an engineer. She died on January 2, 1972, at the age of 93, the recipient of more than 20 honorary degrees, and she was the first female psychologist ever to have a United States postage stamp issued in her honor.
LEARN MORE
Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1948)
Lillian Gilbreth: Redefining Domesticity by Julie Des Jardins (Westview Press, 2012)