There is astoundingly little in this book about the substance of her professional work: neither psychology nor efficiency is actually discussed, though the work, pleasure and honor of developing industrial psychology and efficiency is regularly referred to. What is informative is what a respectable woman born in 1878 considers talkable. She doesn't use the first person (which is occasionally really odd, for instance, when she describes how much joking threats and classroom slights hurt her in childhood). It's possible that nothing more embarassing happened to anyone in her extensive German-American clan than finding one's life work and partner a little later than usual; she certainly doesn't mention it. The puzzling thing is that her children remember her as the flexible, modernizing, storytelling parent, in Belles on their Toes and Cheaper by the Dozen. Where did that go? Or was Frank Gilbreth even more efficient? Even if she wrote this autobiography for her children, why not discuss her work? They were famously involved in it as subjects and experimenters, and several went on to work in it as adults.
Was it also not worth discussion to be bilingual German American - so
much so that trips back to the old country were annual, for people who
could afford them - during WWI? In 1914 Frank Gilbreth is working in
Germany, and It was a satisfaction that neither company was
making anything that had anything to do with preparation for
war.
I suppose, before the acceptance of total war, that was a
reasonable statement, and would not have hindered his working for the
Allies three years later, as he did; but I am surprised that there was
no angst mentioned on the part of that extremely-German extended family.
Of course, a efficient, well-brought-up woman with religious faith is
reticent about griefs: she lost a child to diphtheria and descibes even
that in the third person.
good book