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  • Domestic Novels of the 1920s: Regulation and Efficiency in The Home-Maker, Twilight Sleep, and Too Much Efficiency
  • Diane Lichtenstein (bio)

“When you consider for a moment the number of times you as a housekeeper go back and forth on the same line of travel, you will begin to appreciate that many household duties have never been carefully planned or ‘routed.’” So observed Alice M. Bradley in the first sentence of her article “‘Watch Your Step!’” which appeared in the April 1922 issue of Woman’s Home Companion. A sentence printed in bold under the title reads, “No travel in a backward direction is allowable in intelligent housekeeping.” Bradley, the “Principal of Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery,” urged her readers to use a pad, pencil, and watch to “work out the best method for doing each separate daily task.” As a preface to the actual routing, Farmer directed, “Try writing out your most common breakfast menus, and then putting down on paper the best and quickest method of getting the breakfast served. Pin this paper up on the kitchen wall where you can study it and work with it and change it from day to day. Try to save steps, motions, and minutes until the preparation of your breakfast is standardized. Then make it a habit” (47). In addition to “The Breakfast Route,” Bradley supplied step-by-step directions for “Clearing Away,” “Dish-Washing,” “Daily Cleaning,” and “Plain Cake.” The goal for all this planning was a reduction in the number of the housekeeper’s motions and condensing the space through which the housekeeper had to travel to complete her tasks—in other words, greater efficiency.

Bradley was one of many disciples of scientific management who attempted to adapt for a domestic setting the models and rhetoric of industrial efficiency [End Page 65] popular in the Progressive Era. Particularly in the first two decades of the twentieth century, scientific management “spread throughout the American business community and fueled a growing efficiency craze that upheld science and technology as the solutions for all sorts of physical, psychological, and social problems” (Graham 638). By the 1910s, “efficiency” was being “applied everywhere from Sunday schools to baseball” and “appeared in advertisements for dishwashers and touring cars” (Tichi 81). In Cecilia Tichi’s analysis, certain “moral terms . . . clustered around ‘efficiency,’” including “character, competence, energy, hard work, and success.” These “machine-based utilitarian values” were “greeted with optimism” in “Progressive politics” because, their advocates claimed, they would inform “social policy . . . formulated according to facts gathered systematically by experts” (Tichi 81). That policy would transform and improve American institutions such as schools, religious organizations, and the home.

Just nine months after the publication of “‘Watch Your Step!’” in January 1923, Woman’s Home Companion printed a didactic short story, “The Efficient Wife,” by Anne Lombard Byard, which openly challenged the “progressive” advice about the home. The Efficient Wife (Julia Farraday), who “‘wants to manage everything,’” seems to her young newlywed neighbor, Flossie Smith, to fulfill ideal expectations for the perfect wife (92). Early in the story, Julia explains to Flossie, “‘Now, cooking is really a very exact science. A housekeeper ought to regard her kitchen as a laboratory, and her cooking as a series of chemical experiments’” (30). Flossie worries that she is not “‘like Julia, always doing things right,’” although her husband prefers “clear blue eyes” and a “deliciously puckered little mouth” to “the most efficient graduate of a domestic science school who ever planned a menu” (30). As the narrative develops, readers learn that Julia has become an “efficient” and hardened domestic shop-manager who has “come to assume that she could control absolutely the circumstances of her life; all things were settled and assigned their proper places in the orderly routine of her existence” (32). But in the crisis of her husband’s “speculating” and losing ten thousand dollars, she has difficulty finding her compassion. The story conveys unambiguous and what were likely to have been reassuring lessons: cooking and other household tasks do not have to be executed as if they were a production line, and the best housewife is not necessarily efficient.

Woman’s Home Companion’s inclusion of both...

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