Models for Modernity

Throughout the twentieth century, Americans have displayed a great propensity to worry about the state of their families. According to Jane Levey, the family crisis of the post-World War II period was perceived to be especially acute; questions about what was wrong with the family and how it could be "fixed" proliferated in the popular media. While there was no shortage of professional advice, Levey argues compellingly that "people were at least as likely (if not more so) to draw their 'designs for living' from [popular narratives about the family] as from expert pronouncements" (127). To demonstrate her point, she examines two such narratives, The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen.

One of the central themes that emerges from Levey's insightful analysis is the relationship between family life and modernization. The Egg and I, writes Levey, "celebrated modernization by painting its alternative as unattractive. Simultaneously, however, it explored the conflicts of modern life, and specifically of gender relations, from a nostalgic vantage point one step removed from it" (131). On the one hand, modern technological innovations could relieve rural housewives (the role into which MacDonald was thrust) from much of their drudgery, but on the other hand, this could entrap them in a cycle of "overconsumption." Similarly, modern life might provide more household privacy and comfort, but such settings could also prove isolating for women. Moreover, although MacDonald implied that modernization allowed women to gain their independence by providing opportunities to work outside the home, this was not necessarily an unmitigated good. Indeed, as Levey suggests, MacDonald's own trajectory from rural wife to urban divorcée could serve as a cautionary tale to women of the perils of modernity.

In Cheaper by the Dozen, the theme of modernization is both explicit and pervasive, as the two Gilbreth children recalled growing up in a household run according to the principles of scientific management. Although their tone is also nostalgic and humorous, the Gilbreths' embrace of modernization is, at least on the surface, less equivocal than MacDonald's. If anything, they seem to have wished for an even more thoroughgoing rationalization of family life, since that would have favored their mother's industrial relations-style of child rearing over the vestigially patriarchal methods of their father. Nevertheless, in Levey's reading of the text, modernization had clearly left its mark on the Gilbreth household, bringing with it unprecedented levels of intergenerational democracy and gender equality.

It is in her gloss on household scientific management that Levey is perhaps at her most original and suggestive. Commenting on the implications of the Gilbreth family council, Levey remarks that it brought not only democracy but also "work relationships into the domestic fold," rendering the boundaries between "home and work and public and private life . . . highly fluid" (141). Such values as efficiency and profitability became paramount, and "good performance was key" (142). Levey argues that for contemporaries, the Gilbreths' "upbeat" rendering of their attempts to domesticate a "managerial ethos" might have served to deflect the critiques of corporatism then emerging from the militant postwar labor movement (143).

Levey's reading is entirely in keeping with both her own focus on textual analysis as well as the historiography of the postwar period. Yet it might suggest to current readers another perspective on modern family life, namely the ongoing colonization of the home by the workplace that sociologist Arlie Hochschild has recently identified. ¹ For example, Levey recounts an anecdote from Cheaper by the Dozen in which Gilbreth père denounced a child who has become sick: "We don't have time for such nonsense. There are too many of us. A sick person drags down the performance of the entire group." ² For Levey, this would seem to be an instance of humorous recuperation of regimentation, but within the context of twentieth-century work-family relations, one could also read it as a portent of what Hochschild has called the "cold-modern" subjugation of nurturing parental relations to...