This first book-length treatment of the life and work of Christine
Frederick (1883-1970) reveals an important dilemma that faced
educated women of the early twentieth century. Contrary to her
professional role as home efficiency expert, advertising
consultant, and consumer advocate, Christine Frederick espoused the
nineteenth-century ideal of preserving the virtuous home -- and a
woman's place in it. In an effort to reconcile her desire to
succeed in the public sphere of modernization and consumerism with
the knowledge that most middle-class Americans still held
traditional beliefs about gender roles, Frederick fashioned a
career for herself that encouraged other women to remain at home.
With the rise of home economics and scientific management,
Frederick -- college-educated but confined to the drudgery of
housework -- devised a plan for bringing the public sphere into the
domestic. Her home would become her factory. She learned how to
standardize tasks by observing labor-saving devices in industry and
then applied this knowledge to housework. She standardized
dishwashing, for example, by breaking the job into three separate
operations: scraping and stacking, washing, and drying and putting
away. Determined to train women to become proficient homemakers and
efficient managers, Frederick secured a job writing articles for
the Ladies' Home Journal. A professional career as home efficiency
expert later expanded to include advertising consultant and
consumer advocate. Frederick assured male advertisers that she knew
women well and promised to help them sell to "Mrs. Consumer."
While Frederick sought the power and influence available only to
men, she promoted a division of labor bygender and therefore served
the fall of the early-twentieth-century wave of feminism.
Rutherford's engaging account of Christine Frederick's life
reflects a dilemma that continues to affect women today -- whether
to seek professional gratification or adhere to traditional family
values.
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