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At the turn of the century, Christine Frederick shared the new concept of ‘domestic science’, in 1912 writing ‘The New Housekeeping: Efficiency
Studies in Home Management’ in the Ladies Home Journal magazine. Overhearing her husband’s conversation with a colleague about ‘scientific management’ to
standardise some tasks performed by workers in factories, she applied this thought to alleviate the drudgery of housework. Her work specifically focused on middle class
women, not able to afford servants, who toiled day and night to keep the household running.
Frederick applied industrial system that was reshaping business and politics at the time to the domestic sphere. The housewife suddenly had
consumer power by purchasing (and being sold to) the first ‘kitchen gadgets’, which lessened her workload.
FIG. 1
Badly grouped kitchen equipment
FIG. 2
Efficient grouping of kitchen equipment
