Читать книгу The Deans' Bible - Angie Klink - Страница 20

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, Lillian wrote that Mary’s death “was an experience an understanding psychologist might possibly have adjusted, but it was not adjusted, and left a permanent scar.”

In the 1949 biography Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: Partners for Life, Edna Yost wrote of Frank’s grieving, saying it “was not the normal reaction of a man to death, for this death was his first forced admission of failure in a project to which he had given his utmost.” A theme in Cheaper by the Dozen is that illness was considered a weakness. Thus, Frank headed illness off at the pass, and he had all the children’s tonsils removed at one time, even if all did not have tonsil plights.

Lillian wrote of her husband’s response to Mary’s passing: “Frank insisted on trying his techniques, but it was no use.… For the first time in his life [he] faced a situation which he could not master.”

The death of his daughter and his attempt to engineer his grief may have been Frank’s greatest perceived failure in finding “the one best way.”

FRANK HAD A HEART CONDITION and carried “stimulants” with him at all times in case he had an “attack.” Both he and Lillian were to attend conferences in Europe the summer of 1924, where Frank would speak: the Power Conference in London and the First International Management Congress in Prague. Three days before he was to sail to Europe, Frank walked to catch a commuter’s train for New York to update their passports. Before he left, Lillian brushed specks of dust from his coat, and Frank said in his usual chipper style, “The pat of finality!”

A short time later, Frank telephoned from the station. He had forgotten their passports. Lillian put down the phone to look for the documents. Frank said, “All right. I’ll wait.” When Lillian returned, the line was silent. She jiggled the receiver but heard nothing. Frank Gilbreth had collapsed in the phone booth and died.

Two days after Frank’s death, shell-shocked Lillian called a meeting of the “family council.” She told the children, who ranged in age from two to nineteen, that they did not have much money. Most of it had been invested in the couple’s business. The family could move to California to live with Lillian’s mother, or there was an alternative. If the children could pull together, sacrifice, and take care of themselves and each other, Lillian could go ahead with their “father’s work.” The vote was unanimously in favor of Lillian carrying forth the couple’s shared professional passion in the research of motion study.

In June of 1924, Lillian, age forty-six, sailed for Europe with a group of eminent American engineers and their wives. Lillian would give Frank’s scheduled speeches at the overseas conferences. Unlike the other women on board wearing their long white summer dresses, Lillian wore black. Her life had changed in a phone booth.

Lillian’s future floated on the waves before her. For the next fifty years, she would carry on the Gilbreth scientific mission of motion study, which dovetailed with family life.

In Cheaper by the Dozen, Frank Jr. and Ernestine wrote:

There was a change in Mother after Dad died. A change in looks and a change in manner. Before her marriage, all Mother’s decisions had been made by her parents. After the marriage, the decisions were made by Dad. It was Dad who suggested having a dozen children and that both of them become efficiency experts. If his interests had been in basket weaving or phrenology, she would have followed him just as readily.

While Dad lived, Mother was afraid of fast driving, of airplanes, of walking alone at night. When there was lightning, she went in a dark closet and held her ears. When things went wrong at dinner, she sometimes burst into tears and had to leave the table. She made public speeches, but she dreaded them.

Now suddenly, she wasn’t afraid anymore, because there was nothing to be afraid of. Now nothing could upset her because the thing that mattered most had been upset. None of us ever saw her weep again.

DURING HIS CAREER, Frank had been an occasional lecturer at Purdue University, invited to campus by A. A. Potter, dean of the schools of engineering. In the early 1900s while he was a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Potter began a friendship with Frank and Lillian that lasted a lifetime. Frank had built an MIT building in an unbelievably short time. Potter attended a lecture Frank gave on “the one best way” to lay bricks. In the following years, Frank would be a lecturer at Kansas State when Potter was on faculty there, and then at Purdue after Potter was hired as dean in 1920. Potter had joined the Gilbreths as guests at the White House. The three became personal friends of President Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou.

Lillian filled in for Frank as a visiting lecturer at Purdue after his death, and in 1935, she took the first salaried job of her life there. She became a full professor of management in Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering, the first woman in the United States to hold such a title. Perhaps because of the time commitment and her children, Lillian may have first said no to the position. Decades later Dorothy Stratton wrote to Ernestine and told of the day that she invited, yet again, another famous friend over for waffles—the woman she called “Dr. G.”

Your mother came to the Purdue faculty shortly after I became Dean of Women at Purdue. It was understood by me, although never mentioned by Dr. G., that Dr. Elliott had offered her the position and that she had refused it. I knew that Dr. Elliott would be decisively influenced in his opinion of me by what Dr. G. thought. I was new to the university circles as a staff member, new to Indiana, and to being a D. of W. I was also relatively young—34. And of course, I was overawed by your mother’s reputation.

In due course, I invited your mother to a luncheon. There were just four of us—my mother and father and Dr. G. and I. We were having waffles and bacon. Period. The waffles stuck (in the waffle iron). Cooking has never been my strong suit. I didn’t know what I was going to do. There was nothing else to eat. In desperation, I took the (waffle) iron to the kitchen, explained to it what the dilemma was, asked for its cooperation, brushed out the crumbs, uttered a brief prayer and took it back to the table. It worked. Throughout your mother chatted along as though unaware of any crisis. I still wonder what I would have done if the [waffle] iron had not cooperated.

Lillian also admitted she couldn’t cook. She spent little time in the kitchen unless it was to analyze therbligs to decrease the user’s motions and improve the layout of the galley. Lillian referred to Dorothy as one of “her girls.” Dorothy was special to Lillian, and she would give Purdue’s young dean of women much sage advice in years to come. The two women’s lives would intertwine in weighty endeavors until their deaths.

Lillian talked to her children about moving to West Lafayette, but they did not want to leave Montclair and their friends, so she went without them. It was Potter who suggested that Lillian become a staff member, and it was Elliott who arranged her salary and accommodations in the Women’s Residence Hall. Her son Bill was a student at Purdue during this time. When Lillian was told she would be working on the same campus as Amelia Earhart, Lillian said, “I’m so glad, because I’m one of her ardent admirers.”

Long before she, herself, became famous, Amelia was a fan of the Gilbreths. She had pasted a photograph of the couple in her 1924 scrapbook.

For two years, Lillian spent three weeks of every month during the academic year at Purdue. Lillian’s daughter Martha, age twenty-nine, ran the family on a day-to-day basis back home. Lillian supervised from afar. She once wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt on Purdue notepaper asking if her daughter’s middle school class could visit the White House during a field trip to Washington. Eleanor instructed her secretary to invite the class to tea. While at Purdue, Lillian also acted as a consultant at Duncan Electric Company in Lafayette. This was the company founded by Thomas Duncan, who gave the funds to build Duncan Hall, which had been the vision of Dean of Women Carolyn Shoemaker.

Dorothy said that Lillian’s hands were never still. “She was always knitting, crocheting, or tatting something for someone’s birthday or anniversary.” She kept an extensive birthday book and sent notes to an astonishing number of people. According to Dorothy, Lillian had a great capacity for caring. Perhaps the loss of a child and a husband, and loving a dozen children had increased her empathetic ability. Dorothy said, “Most of us have, I think, a limited capacity as to the number of people we can care for. Dr. G. seemed to be able to take a personal interest in and care for many. She could reach across educational barriers, social barriers, race barriers, sex barriers, age barriers, and find common ground. Some of my experience was too personal to be shared with the public. I am thinking of how Dr. G. visited my father when he was in his final illness.”

Amelia Earhart garnered much attention in the Women’s Residence Hall where Lillian also resided. Dorothy said that Amelia was “a glamorous figure to all, especially to the students,” and Lillian had a “sense of balance” about it. She continued, “Dr. G. took Amelia’s popularity in stride, went her own quiet way influencing many lives by her interest and wise counsel.” As director of the Women’s Residence Hall, Helen Schleman was in the right place at the right time to play the gracious hostess to two of the most prominent, enchanting women of the time. Helen said of Lillian: “Those of us who were lucky enough to be her fellow residents, or work closely with her on campus every time she came to Lafayette, loved her not so much because she was great, but because she was appealingly human.”

Lillian would rise early in the morning and send postcards to her children before breakfast. Students learned that they could enjoy time with her if they, too, arrived when the dining room doors opened at 6:30 a.m. Nearly all of her life she walked a mile a day. If Lillian met a student who wanted to talk to her in the Purdue Memorial Union, she said, “Walk with me. I need to pace my daily number of steps.” Lillian walked much, for she never learned to drive.

Dorothy talked of Lillian’s “intellectual curiosity” and the variety of departments she influenced on campus: “I think she probably saw a wider cross section of people than anyone else on campus. She met with professors from the School of Management, other Schools of Engineering, School of Home Economics, Division of Education, Department of Psychology, and with staff from the residence halls, Office of the Dean of Women, Placement Services for Men and for Women, and goodness knows how many others. At the same time, she kept up contacts with women’s groups in the town and often would speak with them and to them.”

It was not always easy for Lillian as the only female in Purdue’s male engineering environment. She collaborated with a younger professor, Marvin Mundel, who was an abrasive character. He repeatedly attempted to embarrass Lillian in front of other engineers, calling on her to complete mathematical calculations. Math was not her strong suit. Frank had always done the calculations needed for their motion studies. However, there may have been more personal reasons as to why Mundel caused difficulty for Lillian. She had liked Mundel’s first wife and was affronted by his divorce. Yet, on the whole, Lillian’s Purdue experience was a happy, successful one—so much so, that she donated her papers to Purdue University, where today the Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Collection is archived.

Lillian was an ambassador of feminine knowledge, compassion, and punctuality. A. A. Potter described Lillian as “a master of the art of conducting free discussion until mutual understanding was achieved.” Her natural gift of free discussion was recognized on a grand scale, as she would serve on presidential committees during the presidential administrations of Hoover, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. The committees included civil defense, war production, women in the services, aging, and rehabilitation and employment of the physically disabled. These committees and Lillian’s knowledge gathered therein would influence the lives she touched, from students to women like Dorothy and Helen.

Decades later, Helen gave a speech to honor Lillian at the 1978 Lafayette YWCA Salute to Women dinner. Lillian had passed away six years earlier. Helen said:

To me, one of the characteristics of a “good” feminist is strong support of other women. Too many of the relatively few successful women in the past have had a tendency to shrug their shoulders and say, “Oh, any woman can make it if she’s just good enough and is willing to work.” Dr. Gilbreth did not hold with this. She knew that it took caring, understanding, and support on the part of women who had arrived in the professional and work world of men to make opportunities for other women—if very many were ever to be successful at breaking the age old barriers. She understood “sisterhood” long before it was popular.