1In the year 1928, a book entitled De la méthode ménagère has drawn attention and made its way to many leading scientific journals. Published by Dunod, it is the result of eight years of hard work and research, carried out by a woman named Paulette Bernège. De la méthode ménagère illustrates how a group of ladies, headed by Paulette Bernège, has managed to create a new field of applied sciences in France, during the inter-war period. Inspired by the technical rationalization in the United States, these women have theorized a whole new subject: domestic science. In the following text, it will be our goal to focus on these women, who were active campaigners for the rationalization and the establishment of householding as a science. The point of this research is to question the role of women in the spread of technical rationalization during the inter-war period. How did they manage to legitimize this establishment as a science? And what was this science they worked at? On which theories have they relied on? Finally, how can we see within their discourse a portrait of women and applied sciences? To legitimize this field of knowledge as scientifical is far from straightforward. This research offers a window into their work, pointing to the difficulties, the success and the theories, of and about these women, who managed to provide access to technical field to all women through their actions.
- 1 French organisationalists, notably Henry le Chatelier, defined organisation as a science. The field (...)
- 2 In this article we decided to focus our study on French archives and French perception of the domes (...)
2In the year 1928, a book entitled De la méthode ménagère (Bernège 1928) had drawn attention of French women and technical rationalization experts and made its way to many leading scientific journals. Published by Dunod, it was the result of eight years of hard work and research, carried out by a woman named Paulette Bernège. De la méthode ménagère illustrated how a group of ladies, headed by Paulette Bernège, had managed to create a new field of « applied sciences »1 in France, during the inter-war period. Inspired by the technical rationalization in the United States, these women had theorized a whole new subject: domestic science (De Grazia 2009). A movement also important with some different forms not only in United States but also in United Kingdom, Canada and others countries in Europe (Blakestad 1997, Dyhouse 2021, Rossiter 1998, Leavitt 2002, Stage and Vincent, Oldenziel & Zachmann 2009, Bix 2013, Furlough 1993 Reagin 2007, Parr 1999)2.
- 3 The Taylorism was a concept of work organization developed by Taylor. After giving up on Harvard Un (...)
- 4 Henry Le Chatelier became in 1907 the official translator of Taylorism in France. Trained at the Ec (...)
3In the early twentieth century, the influence of the United States began to grow in Europe, especially in France. This phenomenon leaded some historians, such as Patrick Fridenson, to talk about the start of the Americanization of French society (Fridenson 1987: 1031-1060). Recently, other historians, such as Ludovic Tournès, had shown that, if the Americanization encompassed all areas of society, this phenomenon was a matter of intercontinental interbreeding (Tournès 2020). One of the first indicator of this Americanization was the entry of rationalization in France with Taylorism3: the American engineer’s theory spread rapidly from one continent to another, through intellectual and commercial exchanges – such as travels, publications, exchange of letters, trade of patents, installation of American firms in France… Engineers, generally in the service of the State, were the most active propagandists of Taylorism. Headed by Henry Le Chatelier4, they launched La Revue de métallurgie in 1904, a French journal who became during the start of the century a true support of Taylorism (Letté 2004: 138-145). If engineers were the firsts concerned, Taylorism also started to spread in all groups of French society, one after another: scholars, head of public administration, military officers, politicians, and even some groups of women open to this line of thought as well as journalists.
4But taylorism was not actually the beginning of rationalization in France. This theory had emerged many years before the early twentieth century, and was already partly formalized, as we could see for instance with the work of Gustave Ply on weapons factory in 1888 (Ply 1888).
- 5 Henri Fayol was trained at the Saint-Etienne School of Mines. He began his career as a civil engine (...)
- 6 This committee was created in 1926 by the merger of the Centre d’Etudes Administratives and the Con (...)
5The real turning point of the theory of rationalization in France came in 1916, with the new insights provided by Henri Fayol in his book Administration industrielle et générale (Fayol 1916: 5-162)5. When Fayol died in 1925, a national committee was made up: the CNOF (Comité national de l’organisation française), organized around several divisions, had the ambition to transfer the concepts of Taylorism from the factory to all economic sectors6. In 1929, the CNOF added a new division to its organization, dedicated to home economics. This division, predominantly female but not all feminine (Clarke 2011: 70), would be driven by the Ligue d’organisation ménagère, chaired by Paulette Bernège.
- 7 In spite of an important bibliographic production, this organisation was in reality a group of wome (...)
- 8 Unfortunately we did not have any information about the number of association members.
6Bernège was a leading figure of home economics in France during the inter-war period. Bachelor-holder in French Literature, she joined the work organization movement in the 1920’s, by becoming executive secretary for the French journal Mon bureau. The managing editor of this journal, Ponthière, was a member of the CNOF. Her will was to apply the concept of taylorism in the world of household, as she would explain in her manifesto in 1928 (Bernège 1928). The turning point in her career occurred when she created the Institut d’Organisation ménagère in 1923, that would become the Ligue d’organisation ménagère7 in 1925. From this day, she would be the referring figure and the organizer of a group of women, whose desire was to institutionalize householding as an applied science. This League was mostly composed of managers of the household teaching, with one division in Lyon and another in Orléans8. Between 1923 et 1930, the group had its own popularization review, Mon chez moi, in which the members of the League could diffuse their actions and their theories to the readers, who were for the most part housewives (Martin 1987: 89-106). They published an important advice literature, hetero-normative in its emphasis.
7The French women involved in domestic science wanted to gain a scientific recognition for their work, research and reflections, to legitimize the methods and results achieved. During the interwar period, science was the ultimate answer in a world obsessed by progress and technology. Adopting the scientific habits and following the lead of great scientifical figures, these women had started to establish between 1915 and 1940 a whole new domestic science. Despite being mocked and criticized as a parody of science, their methods were largely adopted after the war, in education, but also more largely in women’s life, who discovered thanks to them a technical (Brayet 2019), administrative and ergonomic culture. In a sense, we emphasize in this study, the importance of male-female interactions for the advancement of women’s careers as well as the scientific disciplines analyzed.
8Our goal is to focus on these women, who were active campaigners for the rationalization and the institutionalization of householding as a science. The point of this research is to question the role of women in the spread of technical rationalization during the inter-war period. How did they manage to legitimize this field as a science? And what was this science they worked at? Which school of organizational thought did they fit into? The way they legitimized this field of knowledge as scientifical was far from straightforward. To legitimize themselves as stakeholders of rationalization, women around Bernège would lobby together at the recognition of their subject area in the scientific community. Thus, they have helped to shape a new social identity for women.
9This research offers a window into their work, pointing to the difficulties, the success and the theories, of and about these women, who managed to provide access to technical field to all women through their actions. It shows how the institutionalization of a disciplinary field was used for the emancipation of women, but a restricted one as it concerned only the private space. No wonder they ‘chose’ domestic science as that was considered a ‘womanly’ field, territorially segregated as Rossiter demonstrated (Rossiter, 1998). The analysis is essentially based on the numerous publications of Bernège and the CNOF, but also on the journals dealing with organization which had developed since the end of the XIXth century.
- 9 Annales des Mines ; Bulletin de la société de l’industrie minérale ; Mémoires des travaux de la soc (...)
10During the 19th century the idea of organization appeared in several industries such as coal mining or the manufacture of weapons of war. People like the mining engineer Brard or the artillery captain Ply wrote treatises in which this idea was asserted. These were the beginnings of organizational science. Thus these studies had been an underlying idea for French industrialists and scientists for many decades. However, this theme would become important in the public debate from the 1910s. The work of these women therefore took place at a time of general interest in applied science. The first to launch this debate were the heavy industry engineers, who showed their interest in a lot of technical reviews9. Civilian engineers also developed their thoughts on the subject in their own journals since many years (Rojas 2018: 185-201), the same thoughts that we could find in the development of scientifical organization research in the United States or in Germany at this time. All of these theories combined, putting forward engineers’ experiments and industrials productions, would legitimize the emergency and the recognition of a new applied science.
- 10 August Bebel was a German craftsman turned politician who wrote, among other things, "Women and Soc (...)
11In such background, the idea of science applied to all social activities made its way and soon overflew the industrial community. The will to adapt the scientifical process to household could be found for instance in August Bebel’s work10. He explained how appropriate he thought the combination of science and domestic matters, such as food or household equipment, could be (Bebel 1891). The idea of domestic science also tended to grow in strength at the end of the nineteenth century, but with a clear separation: on one side, there were the domestic matters that relate to science, such as food chemistry, health and hygiene of the domestic life, domestic architecture, or scientifical application on technical objects like refrigeration. On the other side, there was what remained: cleaning, everyday-life organization, etc. These were yet considered as domestic economy, not as science. This was clearly a gendered frontier, as studies conducted by Cynthia Cockburn, Susan Ormrod and Danielle Chabaud-Rychter, men used to deal with domestic matters as a science when women dealed with domestic economy not considered as science (Cockburn and Ormrod 1993; Chabaud-Rychter 1994).
- 11 Records of Association Arts Ménagers. L’Art ménager (Feb. 1933) ; Breton, J-L. La science et l’Art (...)
12For the founder of the Salon des Arts ménagers Jules-Louis Breton, the link between science and household was highly relevant. That was why he placed his exhibition under the leadership of the ONRSII (Office national des recherches scientifiques et industrielles et des inventions), known now as the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) (Brayet 2017). In February 1933, he introduced the domestic science in France with these words (Breton 1933): « The most daring scientific theories, the discoveries multiplied by the obstinate research of the laboratories are applied without delay in the order of the household activity »11.
- 12 Records of Pasteur Institute, Fonds René Dujarric de la Rivière (1885-1969), Mémoire du Docteur Ren (...)
13Pasteur Institute’s records also harbored many testimonies of Scientists involvement in the institutionalization of domestic science. With research on hygiene improvement, nutrition, food chemistry or applied cooking physics, Pasteur Institute’s members were directly involved in the development of domestic science12. In Records of René Dujarric de la Rivière (1885-1969), we could read in his thesis introduced in the Congrès International d’Enseignement Ménager in Paris in 1922 (Dujarric 1922 : 1) :
- 13 Records of René Dujarric de la Rivière (1885-1969), Archives of Pasteur Institute. Thesis, 1922, p. (...)
Household education has considerable practical advantages and moral benefits. It answers a deep social need, particularly at a time when the progress of depopulation makes a good organization of the French family indispensable. Science can and must come to the rescue of such an interesting cause13.
14To create the Ligue d’organisation ménagère in this context was not incongruous. However, League’s campaigners would have to implement a discourse and practiced in order to legitimize domestic science.
15Paradoxically, the true start of domestic science legitimization did not come from Bernège and the Ligue d’organisation ménagère, but from Henry Le Chatelier in the Revue de métallurgie in 1915. On the passing of Taylor, the 21 March 1915, the journal published a special edition to pay tribute to the industrial’s feats of arms, but also to the application of his theories. As part of this idea, Le Chatelier published some extracts of La tenue scientifique de la maison, by Christine Frederik. These extracts were preceded by an introduction written by Le Chatelier, where he explained how in his opinion Frederik’s text highlights Taylor’s principles, showing the universal aspect of his doctrine. He was also convinced of Frederik’s text importance for young girls’ education, because it could prove them that ruling a house was as scientific as men industrial activities are. At the end of his introduction, he talked about domestic science as an emerging scientific area:
16In past centuries, the arts and crafts, i.e. industry, were a domain reserved for slaves. Today, scientists and technicians consider themselves members of an aristocracy that is second to none. Men's feelings change from century to century. Culinary science will have its days of glory. (Frederik 1915: 351-382)
- 14 Reception de Madame Gilbreth (1927). Bulletin du CNOF, 7-8.
17Like Christine Frederik, women working at householding scientifical recognition tended to justify their action by putting themselves under the leadership of great scientists. Frederik openly declared herself inspired by the approach developed by Claude Bernard in his Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (Frederik 1915: 351-382). Members of the Ligue d’organisation ménagère also legitimized themselves under the auspices of well-known organizers. Madame Lassalle, a Charleville School teacher, wanted to apply Taylor, Emerson and Fayol methods on domestic science (Lassale 1931: 180-182). Same for Bernège, who introduced Taylor and Fayol in her book (Bernège 1928). The League also presented these great organizers work in their division of the CNOF. They refered for instance to Lillian Moller Gilbreth, and her book Scientific management and the Home, who would be regarded as a world authority on the subject and who would serve as an example in the 192014. To sum up, many references to the work of scientists were made, like Bernège who used in her book Harvey’s research on bloodstream (Bernège 1928).
- 15 See for instance Paulette Bernège in Bulletin du CNOF (Nov 1928), De la Méthode ménagère, p. 1.
18If household started to be recognized as a scientific subject by some researchers and politicians, it continued to be mocked and presented as a parody of science. That was why many of these women’s books began with the need to explain and justified their research interest15.
19American theories were one of the most important influence on domestic science as edified by the Ligue d’organisation ménagère. It had to be remembered that the main inspirations for the group were Christine Frederik and Lillian Moller Gilbreth. These two women made the American approach their own and managed to transfer the industrial theories to the domestic world. As they shared this goal with Bernège and the women around her, it was not surprising to find the same aspect of the Taylorism in their approach.
20It was mainly the mechanistic vision of work that drew attention. Therefore, Taylor was largely summoned by members of the League, and more specifically for his ergonomic approach. Mrs Lassalle used Taylors’ writings in her teaching at Charleville Practical School. The main point of her pedagogy was to teach the perfect technical gesture, resulting from an ergonomical study with an emphasis on the measurement (Lassalle 1931: 1980-1982). Same went for Bernège, who preached the virtues of analyzing every gesture. Lilian Gilbreth, who was one of the main inspiration for the League, was also married to a MIT-trained engineer, Franck Gilbreth, who had collaborated for a while with Taylor. They determined an ideal model, in which movements were limited to the minimum in order to work as fastly as possible. He described 17 combinations of simple movements, that he called therbligs.
21Bernège transfered the American methods by using Jules Marey’s chronophotograph: with his technique, she filmed dishwashing, decomposing every gesture to define « movement unit » (Bernège 1934), in order to get quick and continuous movements (Brayet 2020).
22Beyond Taylor’s standardization, the workplace spatial organization was a central focus for the League’s organizers. A lot of activists insisted on the importance of the rational layout of the house. For Paulette Bernège, the layout was supposed to facilitate domestic work (Bernège 1928b: 1-5). It may recollected Taylor’s workshop organization, but this logic was not specific to the metallurgist from Philadelphia. It was more an American tradition of organization, that could be found in writings before Taylor’s doctrine.
23With the rational layout of the house came the idea of the mechanical improvement of the household tools. Tooling had to be ergonomic in the opinion of the League’s members. Therefore, the trash that could be opened with the foot served as an example to follow and to imitate more largely. Mechanization and standardization of household tools were thereby advocated. If Taylor's influence was present in this idea of mechanization, it was also visible when the members of the league militated for the creation of a laboratory. Indeed, they support the creation of a national laboratory dedicated to household experiments. Thus Bernège wrote in 1928: « France must create a national laboratory from which all housewives and all schools will draw the information they need. We have begun the draft with the help of the league of household organisation (...) »(Bernège 1928b: 1-5). In the domestic science edified by the League, Taylor’s influence was under no question, but it was not the only doctrine to influence them. It had to be remembered that one of the movement’s inspirer was Christine Frederik, a main figure of the Emerson school. Le Chatelier could try to minimize this idea in his introduction in 1915 (Le Chatelier 1915: 348-350) by pretending she offered nothing new to Taylor’s principles, the idea of efficiency still showed through the League’s research. This theory was the key point of Emerson’s work: it questioned the used resources consumption in the result of one product, in other words, the relationship between production and action (Emerson 1912). Efficiency was therefore a main concern for educated middle-class women who had limited resources. These women were the prime audience of the League for household efficiency. So, the point in standardizing gestures, timing and the number of actions was to help these women to obtain a maximum benefit from the resources they had at their disposal. This efficiency was demanded in 1929 by Waveren, who suggested creating an international center for the training of efficiency’s specialists (Bernège 1929: 13). If the American influence was obviously there in the domestic science that started to be edified at the time, it also had its own specificities.
- 16 See the Bulletin du CNOF (1928-1929).
24These activists tried to prove that their action took part in a worldwide scientific movement. In this idea, they often reported research on domestic science from other countries: Italy, Germany, England, Czechoslovakia, United States… Members of the League were very involved and went to national and international congress16, where they could transmit the result of their work, participating this way at the edification of a new science. Their work dealed with domestic tooling, dusts (Vèzes 1929), tiredness in householding (Trouard-Riolle 1929).
25Their research was also illustrated with schemes, geometrical curves, sketches, and two types of charts: popularization illustration (as we will see later) and methodical articulation of the thought.
- 17 Records of Association Arts ménagers. Fonds Nicole Braive, note sur l’épluchage des pommes de terre
26Theories were elaborated based on these analyzes to gain more time, and afterwards taught to young ladies. Nothing was left to chance in the kitchens, which soon became laboratories. Based on this model, Paulette Bernège wanted to arrange domestic work. No more wasted step, no more useless gesture, everything was timed. Answers to the questions « Where, when, how, how many, why? » delivered a domestic procedure. An example could be found in the Association for Domestic Art’s records very detailed sheets on potatoes’ peeling, written by the journalist Nicole Braive. She described the methodic analysis of every gesture, the timing, and a comparison between the different methods depending on each tool17.
27The mechanistic approach of the traditional Taylorism impacted largely thought and practice of the League’s members. However, they claimed other influences too. Therefore, Paulette Bernège compared the house to a wide living organism whose every element, supporting each other, constituted many specialized systems governed by regulating laws (Bernège 1928: 31). It could recollect Henry Fayol first speech about organization in 1901. On this occasion, the French engineer compared the administrative system of a company to the human nervous system (Fayol 1901). Paulette Bernège seemed to take hold the « bio-social » conception of human relationships as thought by Fayol, who highlighted how the same principles govern different social classes (Rojas 2019: 117-128). She and Fayol were influenced by the same cultural and intellectual context, from the late nineteenth century and the early 20th century. She also took up the idea of Gabriel Tardes (Tarde 1890: 447) and Jean Izoulet (Izoulet 1894: 691), who compared the human body functionality to the organization of social bodies.
28Despite her claimed affiliation between her own practice and Fayol theories, that we could see for instance in her 1928 book, it would be hard to talk about Bernège’s work as part of the Fayolism. The French engineer organicist vision was mostly about human relationships within the social bodies. Moreover, that was the reason why he was known as the father of management. Bernège, however, had to deal with a structural limitation in her will to transfer the factory organization to the house. If the social body of a factory was made from many individuals filling multiple roles (worker, foreman, common engineer, main engineer, accountant), the social body of the house, on the opposite, was most of the time composed of only one individual, the housewife. She had to fulfill all functions: she had to be the worker, but also the chief, the methods office responsible… In her own time, Odile Henry (Henry 2003: 119-134) and Martine Martin (Martin1987: 89-106) had already highlighted this specificity in Bernège’s theories.
29So, the housewife was not submitted to the organicist logic: she did not have to give information, to coordinate actions, in other words, to organize a management. However, there was indeed one affiliation between Fayol’s theories and the League’s work, even if it was not claimed by the League’s members. This link between them was the importance of training: it was the main concern of the French engineer, and more largely of the French organicist school. Household education as advocated by the League’s activists changed this conception of training. It was not about technical aspects anymore, but about applying a science:
(…), however, if we want to train real housewives, it is not so much the technique of a point to be perfected that is important, but rather a spirit of observation and criticism allowing to foresee, calculate, modify and improve. (Bernège 1928b : 4)
30The idea was to train housewives who would then be able to develop their own work methods, made from experiments. In other words, the point was to educate them to scientifical approach. The League for Household Efficiency wanted to publish books with exercises for students, to help them develop observation, judgement, personal experiment and practical sense (Bernège 1937: 44-46). Some teachers, such as Mrs Lassalle, tried to normalize future housewives’ behavior, for example with a notebook where every girl had to write about domestic observations, personal critics, or collective reflections after doing experiments. Thus Mme Lassalle imposed this practice in her own classes at the practical school in Charleville. (Lassalle 1931: 180-182). Like Mrs. Lassalle, the league therefore played a role in education and training through the courses given by its members.
- 18 Despite the gap between Taylor’s work theories and an education psychology concerned by the child f (...)
31One of Bernège’s inspiration was the « active pedagogy » (Brayet 2010: 49-68) theorized by Maria Montessori (Houssaye 1994). This movement for a new education system was a 1930’s critic of the theorical learning and the teacher’s authority in traditional schools. Montessori School put the child at the center of the reflection and claimed the benefits of activities and practice in the learning process, blurring the limits between playing game and working (Montessori 1936: 88)18.
32Experiment was therefore highlighted and seemed to be the source of this new science institutionalization. Some researchers were made upon thousands of experiments, such as Miss Trouard-Riolle study on tiredness (Trouard-Riolle 1929). The use of figures and mathematics was also very important, as it offerd more credit to their work and allowed them to gain an undeniable scientifical aspect. It also showed how had to effort this group of female researchers had done to legitimize domestic science. Bernège published in the Bulletin du CNOF her colleague’s results: Cordillot, Lassalle and Charvet (Bernège 1937: 44-46). They also used schemes and charts in this idea, generally to demonstrate an evolution (Lassalle 1931).
33The domestic science work of Frederik and Bernège built upon the ideas of earlier works by male theorists, in particular, those of Taylor, Fayol, Bedel, Breton, Dujarric de la Rivière, and Le Chatelier. The women’s initiatives were strategically attached to broader national campaigns, a strategy adopted to legitimate the women theorists’ own initiatives. At the end, with this study of domestic science we could amply observe the dynamics and work of gender: these were not simply « her-stories ».
34Governance showed up in the matter of managing households through domestic science, as well as the role of a women’s League to advance the cause of domestic science as a science, even while political forces diminished its legitimacy. Several aspects contributed to its legitimation: structuration, regulation and publication.
35One of the wills of the experiments made for housewives’ trainees was to sensitize them to consumption, but also to the cost of food and all household chores (Bernège 1937). Domestic science implied to develop a whole administrative work, symbolized by the housewife’s office. This new household work required a large technical culture, in the dissemination of which women had to take an active part, by transmitting knowledge on household tooling and how to improve living conditions (Martin 1987). Therefore, they had an intimate link to the house mechanization. In this idea, the League for Household Efficiency’s publications showed the American way of life as an example to follow. For Henry, the middle-class houses mechanization offered a new social identity to women, opposed to the well-to-do woman served by many domestic workers (Henry 2003). With domestic science, a society was also portrayed.