Let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we? It sucks that we’re 11 episodes in and I’m only now putting the spotlight on women. It sucks further that I’m lumping a whole bunch of them into one episode, rather than making each one the star of their own show.
Of course I’ll be digging deeper into some of the people we talk about today, and there’s one notable exception from my list I want to give the full Undo treatment. But the reality is we know less about these women than we do a lot of the others I’ve covered. So, at risk of belabouring the point, I’m not doing a Women’s History Month episode and calling it a day. The more I learn about the amazing women who got stuff done throughout history, the more I’ll share their stories with you.
And with all that prevarication done, I now have to talk about women and the home.
Turning goals into tasks
Christine Frederick was a teacher. She had a thing for efficiency and an interest in advertising. She was born in 1883 and married in 1907, giving birth to four kids and cofounding the Advertising Women of New York, in response to the fact the men’s one wouldn’t let her in.
She studied Taylorism and wanted to adapt this scientific method of productivity to the home. Here, we’re talking productivity in the capitalist sense, and if you’re unfamiliar, Taylorism is how places like MacDonald’s can churn out the same food to the same standard wherever you go in the world, because each step in the assemblage of your burger is a low-skilled task that doesn’t take much training.
Frederick wanted to make kitchens more efficient, and took a scientific approach to household jobs, publishing papers and journal articles on saving time and reducing repetition in the home.
She opened the Applecroft Home Experiment Station in her house in New York, where she tested nearly 2,000 different appliances. Bearing in mind this lady had four kids and this was the early 20th century, I’m trying to figure out whether those kids ate really well because she was constantly chopping and frying and chilling and baking… or if she got home from a hard day in the test kitchen, basically threw down a ham and said “Fend for yourselves”.
Either way, we’ve a lot to thank her for. For one thing, she’s kind of the reason most kitchen countertops are the same height, and she’s also the grandmother of the galley kitchen, a style of kitchen you’ll have seen if you’ve ever lived in a small apartment or a terraced house.
The Taylorist approach she took meant finding the “one best way” of doing a particular task. She kept experimenting with various methods to break tasks down into their smallest component parts, so something that felt tricky could be made simple.
This puts me in mind of the English comedian Jimmy Carr, who for a while spent time looking into the shortest joke possible. His four word joke “Venison’s dear, isn’t it?” is his best example, a four word pun that delivers with maximal efficiency. He then followed that up with the more efficient, but less effective “Dwarf shortage”. Proof perhaps, that something can be too efficient.
Now let us meet Lillian Moller Gilbreth. Like Christine Frederick who I was talking about before you distracted me with Jimmy Carr puns, Gilbreth was a home economist. She was also a psychologist, and was described as a “genius in the art of living”.
Like her slightly younger counterpart, Gilbreth took her work home with her, conducting time-and-motion studies to keep their busy household on track. But if Frederik was somewhat ruthless in her pursuit of scientific management, Gilbreth took a slightly more humane approach.
The problem with Taylorism, as she saw it, was that it did a pretty shit job of looking after the human behind the labour. Taylor believed in paying workers well for their work, because he assumed that was pretty much the only thing that was important to them. He also believed that if you didn’t do a great job, you were either fired or paid so poorly that you’d want to quit. Passive-aggressive much?
Gilbreth, pioneer that she was, believed that workers needed things like breaks and decent lighting. She and her husband created their own form of Taylorism and advocated for workers to have free books to read. They also rigged up cameras so they could watch workers performing tasks, looking for signs of fatigue and finding ways to improve systems.
What we can learn from these two ladies – and their contemporary Mary Parker Follett, who we’ll meet later – is quite simply that when we break complex tasks into smaller ones, we make them dirt simple to accomplish. And when we take breaks, we can go for longer.
That idea of breaking tasks down is great if you’re cooking or coding, but what do you do if you’re a writer? Well, Dorothea Brande and Virginia Woolf have got your back.
How we structure our time
Dorothea Brande wrote essays, short stories, and books from 1917 to 1944. In 1934 she wrote a book for aspiring writers called Becoming a Writer, of which there are still a few copies knocking about.
She rejected the myth of the “born writer”, and believed that in order to make creative work happen, you had to put the time in. Literally, put it into your calendar, just like our discussion on time-blocking from last week.
Brande advocated for setting a specific time of the day to get your writing done, and turning up no matter whether you’re overflowing with inspiration or you’re creatively constipated.
If you’ve done any kind of writing you’ll know that some days it’s like you’ve been gifted the energy of a thousand artists and great ideas tumble forth like water cascading down a lush and verdant waterfall… while on others it’s like trying to come up with a really good metaphor for why something is very, very hard.
The point is she was strict about her writing time. She shares this philosophy with writers like Jack London, Stephen King, and Sarah Waters, all of whom committed to some sort of daily writing goal of at least a thousand words a day… even if those words were shit.
Another proponent of protecting your time was Virginia Woolf. Hailing from Kensington in the UK’s fashionable London, Woolf was a pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness writing style. English students of a certain age would have been made to read books like To the Lighthouse or The Voyage Out. When I was at college it was Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. Nowadays I suspect it’s Zendaya’s Instagram caption or some such bunkum– yes we get it, I’m old.
Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?
Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.
Damn, I need to up my writing game. That there is a short segment of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay A Room of One’s Own, which itself was based on some lectures she gave in the late 20s.
I want us to park our bums here for a bit, because there’s something very specific Woolf says in her essay that relates to a lot of self-help and productivity literature we come across today.
Books like Atomic Habits and even the much-lauded 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, have a tacit, sexist underpinning that assumes that while the men are off achieving and mastering and thrusting out into the world, there’s someone at home – probably a woman – taking are of the kids, cooking the meals, doing the dishes, and generally taking care of all the life stuff.
I’m being a little disingenuous here, but honestly not by much. It’s like that thing they say about jazz, in that you have to listen to the notes they’re not playing. Self-help books on time management and productivity show you the notes to play when it comes to how you spend your time, but they’re oddly silent on the topi of how one fits this into their life if they don’t have someone else to pick up the slack.
I would love someone to have told Virginia Woolf she has the same number of hours in the day as Beyoncé. I doubt that person would’ve escaped excoriation.
Anyway, Woolf pressed upon writers – women writers especially – the need to have time for themselves if they were to write fiction. Somewhere away from the ongoing demands of daily life. And of course this is useful whether you’re writing fiction or not, and regardless of your pronoun.
So, these women can help show us there’s a time and a place to do productive work, but it’s something we have to find for ourselves. Frederik and Gilbreth show us the importance of breaking bigger jobs down into smaller ones. That takes care of the doing, but what about the doers who are doing the actual doing?
Taking care of the mind and body
Florence Nightingale was a nurse, a wholistic health advocate, and a great big nerd. You probably already know the headlines – pioneered nursing, improved hospital standards in general, advocated for patients, opened the first nurse training programme yada yada – but did you know she was a big data geek? So much so, in fact, that she kind of invented the pie chart.
She got her knack for numbers from her dad, and as a kid would make notes on the plants she was growing in her garden, which gave rise to her love of statistics. As someone who has a Notion database to keep track of his vinyl collection – which, to be fair, is pretty meagre – I can dig it.
When the Crimean War broke out, Flo-Ni was on the frontlines as a nurse. When she first rocked up at a hospital in Germany, she was appalled by the state of the data as much as the state of the place itself. She made a pact to improve the standards of the hospital, using statistics to prove that poor conditions led to higher mortality rates.
It’s insane to think that before then, people had no sense that living your life covered in shit could lead to disease.
To be fair, the idea of germ theory was still relatively new, this being the mid 19th century and all.
There’s a couple of things we can learn from Ms Nightingale, I think. One of them being she was a stone-cold badass; a wealthy Victorian woman who chose not to marry, and dedicated her life to helping others. Actually that one’s just a bonus. What we really get is twofold:
- the importance of using data for decision-making
- the need to look at the problem – or in her case, the patient – as a whole, not just a sum of disparate parts
Let’s look at the data first. Not only did Florence keep track of important numbers, she also made them easily readable for anyone. We’ll probably do an episode on time tracking at some point. It’s a little like eating your broccoli before you can start on the chocolate cake, but the point is, that meticulous data gathering helps you see patterns and trends you never knew were there. And when you visualise them, you make them so much more tangible and understandable.
And as a nurse working in a war zone, Florence saw first-hand – using her data – how caring for the whole person was vital. She took good care of her own mind and body, wrote regularly in her journal, got enough sleep, and took regular walks in nature.
To be honest, I could probably do a whole episode on Florence Nightingale, and I daresay I will further down the line. But for now, let’s leave her and our focus on the self, and finally turn to working with other people.
Working with others
Emily Warren Roebling was a New Yorker, born in 1843. Her husband Washington put the Roebling into Emily Warren Roebling, and was the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. When he became bedridden from decompression disease, Emily took over the project, liaising with the construction workers and relaying messages back to her husband.
But she wasn’t no mere go-between, no siree Bob. Every inch the engineer herself, Emily dealt with politicians, fended off other engineers, and built up such a good rep that people started to assume she designed the damn bridge herself.
After the bridge project was finished, she studied law and campaigned for women’s rights. Those of us who’ve had project managers in our careers can only dream of working with someone with such a steel trap for a mind and such a wealth of curiosity. She was an early STEM legend and I salute her.
And while we’re saluting, you may remember I mentioned one Mary Parker Follett earlier. Let’s finish up by meeting this so-called “invisible leader”.
If Mary Parker Follett had been around when Michael Scott was running the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin, he would have had quotations from her pinned on his wall. For it was she who brought us the idea that compromise is a great way for everyone to not get what they want, and instead we should look for integration, where each party sitting round a table is equally in charge of the problem, and has an equal stake in co-creating the solution.
Her credit is notably absent from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which, given the low-level sexism in that book is hardly surprising. But her idea that people’s differences actively contribute to projects, rather than hinder them, is a lesson we’re still trying to learn now.
Even as parts of the western world are scrubbing from walls the achievements of women, transgender people, the disabled, and indigenous folk, we have here hard evidence that when we bring disparate people together to achieve a goal, we end up achieving that goal with greater success.
What we’ve learned
So in this all-too-brief whistle stop tour, we’ve looked at productivity through four lenses: goals, time, the self, and collaboration.
We learned that we can break big goals down into small, repeatable tasks, and that we need to dedicate space and time to get our important work done… even at the cost of other commitments.
We’ve seen the importance of using data to tackle a systemic problem, of looking after yourself, and of bringing people together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts. And you’ve left me wang on about sexism and spout off clichés like “greater than the sum of its parts”, an indulgence for which I remain supremely grateful.
We’re living in strange times. Times where history is literally being erased, at least in public property. But you and I and every other right-thinking person knows that when we share knowledge like this, we’re able to store them somewhere no-one – not even the most ardent fascist – can erase.
Go deeper
Christine Frederick - Wikipedia