The Modern Interior

132
An ‘Efficient Grouping
of Kitchen
Equipment’ from
Christine Frederick’s
Efficient House -
keeping, 1915.
Catherine Beecher, who had first ‘made the art of housekeeping a scientific
study’. 5 In her 1869 publication The American Woman’s Home she
had declared her belief in the idea that a more rational way of working
would give Christian women pride and satisfaction in the creation of an
efficient home. She had also outlined the concept of the ‘rational kitchen’
which, at that time, was situated at the heart of the house. 6 Beecher’s
attempt to create new names for rooms in the domestic context also indicated
her desire to renew the meaning of the home and to rid the dominant
Victorian domestic ideal of its power to control women’s lives. 7 By
1912, the year in which Christine Frederick became the household editor
of Ladies’ Home Journal and started to publish a series of articles that
were published in book form the following year with the title The New
Housekeeping, the effects of scientific management were being directly
felt in the domestic arena. In 1912 Frederick documented the moment
when she made her decision to apply the new ideas she had been hearing
about efficiency in factories to the home. ‘After Mr. Watson had gone’, she
wrote, ‘I turned eagerly to my husband. “George”, I said, “that efficiency