Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth--A Life Beyond Cheaper by the Dozen

Few people are so emblematic of the social revolutions of the 20th century as the subject of this engaging biography. Admired by both Herbert Hoover and Lenin, Lillian Moller Gilbreth was a psychologist and engineer who, along with husband Frank, put a human face on the scientific management movement by emphasizing congenial work environments, ergonomic equipment and production processes, and training and incentive schemes that elicited employee participation in the drive for business productivity. She was equally influential, in both her professional and personal lives, in spreading the cult of managerial efficiency to the intimate sphere of home and child rearing. The mother of 12 children (immortalized in the classic Cheaper by the Dozen), the perpetually pregnant engineer demonstrated that, with the Taylorite organizational methods she pioneered on the factory floor (and the assistance of live-in relatives and paid help), women could combine career, marriage and family on an epic scale. Historian Lancaster (Inquire Within) has penned an absorbing, psychologically acute biography that links Gilbreth's career and embrace of""the strenuous life"" with the Progressive Era's conflicted ideas about gender and the rise of the""New Woman."" While she cultivated her Victorian domestic goddess side to ease the anxieties of a sexist business establishment, Gilbreth's work, and example, subtly challenged women's traditional roles even as it restated them in a scientific idiom. Bridging the contradictory roles of doting housewife, multi-tasking supermom, feminist trendsetter and industrial stateswoman, her life makes for a fascinating study in the transition to modernity. Photos.