Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth

Introduction

Lillian Evelyn Moller Gilbreth (May 24, 1878 – January 2, 1972) was an American psychologist and management consultant who brought the study of individual workers into industrial engineering, and is widely described as the first industrial-organizational psychologist. With her husband Frank Bunker Gilbreth she developed motion study, the analysis of work into its smallest elements, and she supplied the psychological half of the method: attention to fatigue, skill acquisition, motivation and the person doing the job. After Frank's death in 1924 she ran the consulting firm alone, taught for thirteen years at Purdue University, and applied the same principles to kitchens, rehabilitation and household labor. She later became famous to the general public through Cheaper by the Dozen, the 1948 memoir by two of her children, a book that made her famous for the wrong reasons.

Early Life and Education

Lillian Moller was born in Oakland, California, the second child and eldest surviving of nine born to William Moller, a builders' supply merchant, and Annie Delger Moller, both of German descent. Her maternal grandfather Frederick Delger was a German immigrant who became one of the wealthiest men in Oakland. She was taught at home until the age of nine, then entered public school, was promoted rapidly, and finished at Oakland High School as vice president of her senior class in 1896.

Her father opposed higher education for daughters, but she persuaded him to let her try one year at the University of California. Her grades were near the top of her class, and he let her continue. She commuted from home by streetcar, helped her mother with the house and her siblings with homework, majored in English with additional work in philosophy and psychology, and earned a teaching certificate. On May 16, 1900 she became the first woman to speak at a University of California commencement, delivering an address titled "Life: A Means or an End."

She enrolled at Columbia University intending to study literature with Brander Matthews, who did not admit women to his classes. Instead she worked with George Edward Woodberry, and she took up psychology with Edward Thorndike, then newly appointed at Columbia, whose influence she acknowledged for the rest of her career. Illness with pleurisy sent her home, and she completed a master's degree in literature at Berkeley in 1902 with a thesis on Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair.

She then began doctoral work at Berkeley but paused in 1903 for a European trip; en route, in Boston, she met the building contractor Frank Bunker Gilbreth, and they married in Oakland on October 19, 1904. She completed a dissertation in 1911 but Berkeley declined to award the degree because she had not satisfied its residency requirement; the manuscript appeared in 1914 as The Psychology of Management. After the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, she enrolled at Brown University and earned a doctorate in applied psychology in 1915 with a dissertation on eliminating waste in teaching, which made her the first of the pioneers of scientific management to hold a doctorate.

It is worth stating plainly what she did and did not hold. Her degrees were in English literature and in psychology. She held no engineering degree. Purdue University, where she taught from 1935, awarded her an honorary Doctor of Industrial Psychology when she retired in 1948, and she received many other honorary degrees from institutions including Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, Smith and Michigan.

Academic and Professional Career

The Gilbreths ran a management consulting firm together, published books and papers together, and taught summer courses on scientific management. Lillian was frequently omitted from the authorship of joint work, sometimes appearing only as "L. M. Gilbreth" because publishers were wary of a female name on an engineering book, and Frank, who never attended college, was often taken to be the sole author.

Their relationship to Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management was critical rather than derivative. They argued that Taylor's system failed on the shop floor because it neglected the human element, and they added rest periods, better lighting, suggestion systems, and the study of fatigue to the engineer's toolkit. In 1911 Lillian introduced the case for applying psychology to management at the Dartmouth College Conference on Scientific Management.

Frank died of a heart attack on June 14, 1924. Most corporate clients did not renew with a woman consultant, and she kept the practice going by turning toward areas where her expertise was considered legitimate for a woman: household work, home economics, appliance design, and rehabilitation. She founded a motion study institute based in her home and wrote for women's magazines. In 1935 Purdue University appointed her professor of management, the first woman to hold a professorship in its school of engineering; she was promoted to full professor in 1941 and retired in 1948. She remained active as a lecturer into her nineties.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Motion study and fatigue

The Gilbreths filmed work with motion-picture cameras, recorded the paths of illuminated hands and tools as chronocyclographs, and broke tasks into seventeen basic elements they called therbligs, a rough anagram of their own surname. Lillian's distinctive contribution was to insist that the unit of analysis was a person whose effort, learning curve and fatigue had to be measured, not a machine cycle. Fatigue Study, published with Frank in 1916, is regarded as a precursor of ergonomics, and their argument that reducing unnecessary motion reduces wear on the worker rather than merely raising output was a departure from the prevailing efficiency literature.

Applying psychology to management

Her 1914 book The Psychology of Management argued that installing a method of least waste requires understanding the mind that must learn and accept it: the psychology of teaching, of habit formation, and of consent. This framing, that management is a problem in human learning as much as in engineering, is the basis for her reputation as the first industrial-organizational psychologist, a field that Hugo Munsterberg was developing along parallel lines.

Domestic work and kitchen design

After 1924 she turned motion study on the household, aiming to cut the drudgery of domestic labor so that women would have time for what she called "happiness minutes." Working with Mary E. Dillon, she designed the Kitchen Practical for the Brooklyn Gas Company in 1929, which introduced uniform working-surface heights, a circular routing of tasks and an L-shaped arrangement. She is popularly credited with the foot-pedal trash can, refrigerator door shelves and similar fixtures. Her consulting also covered rehabilitation: with Frank she studied how people with disabilities could use kitchens designed for them, and she later designed a kitchen for the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center.

Major Publications

A Primer of Scientific Management (1912, with Frank B. Gilbreth)
The Psychology of Management (1914)
Motion Models (1915, with Frank B. Gilbreth)
Fatigue Study (1916, with Frank B. Gilbreth)
Applied Motion Study (1917, with Frank B. Gilbreth)
Motion Study for the Handicapped (1920, with Frank B. Gilbreth)
The Home-Maker and Her Job (1927)
Living with Our Children (1928)
Normal Lives for the Disabled (1944, with Edna Yost)
Management in the Home (1954, with Orpha Mae Thomas and Eleanor Clymer)
As I Remember: An Autobiography (1998, published posthumously)

Impact and Legacy

Gilbreth received the first of many professional recognitions in 1921, when the Society of Industrial Engineers made her an honorary member, and she went on to membership in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1926 and the British Women's Engineering Society. She became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1965 and the first woman to receive the Hoover Medal in 1966. In 1984 the United States issued a postage stamp in her honor in the Great Americans series, and she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995. The Gilbreth Engineering Library at Purdue is named for her and Frank. She died in Arizona on January 2, 1972.

Her popular image is the least accurate part of her record. Cheaper by the Dozen, written by her children Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr., depicts her as a retiring figure whose decisions were made first by her parents and then by her husband, when in fact she was a credentialed psychologist, a partner in an engineering firm, a designer of experiments and a prolific author. She approved the manuscript and said her marriage was the most significant part of her life, but she was reportedly unhappy with the 1950 film in which Myrna Loy played her.

Three substantive criticisms are worth recording. First, several specific inventions credited to her, including the pedal bin and refrigerator shelving, lack clear patent documentation, and the "work triangle" of kitchen design is more often traced to the University of Illinois school of architecture than to her; her demonstrable contribution is the Kitchen Practical and the general principle of routing work in a circle. Second, her domestic efficiency campaign cuts both ways: it treated housework as real labor deserving of engineering attention, and it also framed women's relationship to that labor as a problem of technique, an ambiguity one biographer captured through her longtime houseman's remark that she was trying to "make it easy for folks to work hard." She advocated a "50-50 marriage" of shared domestic work but retreated when the idea was ridiculed. Third, like many progressive-era rationalists she expressed sympathy early in her life for what was called positive eugenics, hoping that people of high ability would have more children; her biographer Jane Lancaster notes that she did not favor sterilization or coercion.

Defenders argue that the efficiency framing was the only vocabulary available to a woman who wanted household labor taken seriously, that her goal was explicitly to free time rather than to speed up housework, and that her advocacy for working mothers, for women's employment, and for disabled workers put her on the reforming side of every debate she entered. She also produced work that had no domestic equivalent, including an early large-scale study of menstruation and menstrual products in 1926 and a survey project in the early 1930s involving more than a hundred interviews and thousands of questionnaires on age and sex discrimination in employment.

Learn More

References

Gilbreth, L. M. (1914). The Psychology of Management. Sturgis & Walton.