Christine MacGaffey Frederick wanted early-twentieth-century American women to embrace modernization. But she adhered to the basic premise of an ideology constructed in the previous century, the century into which she was born. To understand this dichotomy, one must understand the nineteenth-century view of women. A fitting protagonist of that view was a woman who lived with a similar dichotomy, a woman whose work shaped some of Christine Frederick’s ideas.

Catharine Esther Beecher was born in 1800, the eldest child of the prominent nineteenth-century Calvinist religious leader Lyman Beecher.¹ Although she remained single all of her life, Catharine Beecher defined the...

During Christine MacGaffey Frederick’s lifetime, significant forces that would shape twentieth-century society intersected to create the modern consumer culture. Relationships between government and society, capital and labor, manufacturers and consumers, men and women underwent upheaval and change. Conflict and contradiction were inherent to all these transitions.

White middle-class American women considered new possibilities for expanding their sphere, and as Christine came of age and began her career in 1912, educated women of her class faced a conflict of values. The first wave of feminism intersected with the emergence of a fully industrialized society that would depend on the development of...

So begins the unfinished autobiography that Christine Isobel MacGaffey Frederick began to write in the last year of her eighty-seven-year-long life.² The knowledge of her natural father’s disappointment that February morning in 1883 when he learned that his firstborn child was a girl, coupled with the memory of her mother’s subsequent trials as an untrained Victorian gentlewoman who needed to support herself, had a profound impact on Christine’s life. As a female child of the nineteenth century, she was reared to understand, as Catharine Beecher had taught, that woman’s place in life was confined to a domestic sphere. As a...

In 1906, baccalaureate degree and Phi Beta Kappa key in hand, Christine MacGaffey accepted a position teaching biology in the small town of Ishpeming, Michigan, far to the north, only twenty-five miles from the southern shore of Lake Superior. A small hamlet nearly four hundred miles from Chicago, Ishpeming was bitterly cold in the winter, and Christine learned to navigate the snowy landscape on skis. She would stay for only one year; when she left in 1907, she would never again think of school teaching as a career.¹

Before leaving Chicago, Christine had met a charming young “Pennsylvania Dutchman” who...

Christine MacGaffey’s scientific course at Northwestern did not, in fact, include very much science. Her emphasis was on speech, English, and writing. The only science courses she took during her four years of college were biology, problems in plant life, geology, and psychology.¹ Chemistry is conspicuous by its absence, in view of the fact that Christine’s later career would focus on women’s work in the home. Many early home economists began their training in chemistry.²

While home economics had made its way into thirty-six land grant colleges, primarily in the West and Midwest, by 1905, Northwestern did not offer such...

Among the purveyors of modern culture that J. George Frederick brought home to the Bronx apartment that he and Christine rented in the first years of their marriage were advocates of scientific management.¹ Hearing these men talk of the time saved by the efficiency of this system, Christine “had an intuition that perhaps in this new idea was the life-preserver” that would save her from her sea of drudgery.² Harrington Emerson, who had testified in the rate case, was one of those who discussed scientific management with her.³

Christine had two babies and “was struggling with young and inexperienced help”...

Christine Frederick and Charlotte Perkins Gilman both lectured for a course titled “Women in Industry: Her Opportunities in Business Today,” sponsored by New York’s Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations during the winter of 1915–16. The School of Commerce at New York University hosted the seven-month-long course. The school’s dean, when introducing Gilman as the first lecturer, told the attendees that “woman’s greatest need is the ability and the opportunity to earn a living independently of men.”¹ Four months later, Christine tailored her own comments to this audience of profession-seeking women by listing several paid occupations that training in homemaking might...

By 1917, Christine Frederick had developed a rather distinguished career as household efficiency expert and, by extension, adviser to advertisers and consumers alike. She achieved recognition in the beginning largely through the written word.

Christine Frederick’s first book, The New Housekeeping, was reviewed widely, went through several printings, and was translated into several foreign languages.¹ The Journal of Home Economics praised Christine for making “a strong stand for educating the housewife to demand good quality” and suggested that The New Housekeeping was a good supplement to books written by professional home economists.² The Bookman ran a portrait of Christine and...

Christine Fredericks early career as a home expert coincided with the Progressive movements that dominated American society for the first two decades of the twentieth century. Regulatory legislation, woman suffrage, municipal housekeeping, and feminism were but a few manifestations of Progressivism. Many of the movements’ leaders (although there were vastly different reform programs promoted by very different people) were, like Christine and J. George Frederick, white, middle-class, native-born, educated Protestants. And like many Progressives, the Fredericks adhered to old values regarding the family while believing that science, technology, organization, and management—in a word, modernization—would hasten society along the...

In June 1913, just after Christine had published The New Housekeeping, she was invited to speak before the annual meeting of the American Home Economics Association at Cornell University. Her topic was “The Best Way Yet,” “a discussion of housekeeping equipment and methods.”¹ Excerpts from this speech were printed a year later as “Points in Efficiency” in the association’s journal. It was in this early speech that Christine, having launched an extremely promising career herself, proclaimed, “Our greatest enemy is the woman with the career.”² She also hinted in this speech that the cultural activities of the club woman and...

Christine Frederick’s views about gender roles were squarely in the mainstream after World War I. The radical feminism that had sought to change the fundamental role of women lost ground in the twenties. Leta Hollingworth blamed biology for women’s failure to achieve equality and gave men credit for the progress women had made up to that time: “Men of science, inventors and philosophers were the real makers of the New Woman,” she wrote. Martha Bruère, who had been encouraged about women’s progress under the efficiency movement, wrote that even though women no longer judged their worth by their quilts or...

Christine Frederick’s optimistic view of business and her deep involvement in advertising, selling, and consumerism were a perfect reflection of the nation’s mood in the 1920s. Historians would later echo Christine’s husband’s label for the decade’s remarkable increase in production: he called it the “new industrial ‘revolution.’”¹ Production almost doubled; by mid-decade, Henry Ford could produce a car every ten seconds.

The Nation was becoming a culture of abundance thanks to this mighty production force and the technological ability to distribute its goods. The organizational model that J. George praised in his books and articles created the need for the...

A household writer who interviewed Christine Frederick in her home in 1925 reported that while she talked with the forty-two-year-old mother in the apple orchard, they heard “the merry laughter of the youngsters. . . through the trees.” Christine told her that she had plenty of time for her husband and children because she worked efficiently. “Her home,” the reporter marveled, “runs like a well-oiled machine.” But she also noted that Christine spent at least six hours a day, five days a week, in the “well-ordered” office over the garage.¹

Christine had never believed in hovering over her children, and...

By 1929 Christine Frederick had become intimately connected with business. Selling Mrs. Consumer, her third book, was the culmination of fifteen years of promoting advertising as the means by which the American home—and the homemaker’s life within it—might be improved through consumerism. She frankly marketed the book as a manual for advertisers and manufacturers. Promotional literature billed Christine as “‘the’ Mrs. Consumer” and the book as “the great standard reference work for all who sell to consumers.” Flyers claimed that “famous manufacturers” had “made a lot of money from her professional advice” and that others could “make money...

In the spring of 1935, Christine Frederick was honored at a dinner given by eighty of New York’s business and professional clubs in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor. Chosen as one of the “thirty most successful Career Women of Greater New York,” she shared the honor with cosmetics executive Elizabeth Arden, actor Ethel Barrymore, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, pilot Amelia Earhart, efficiency engineer Lillian Gilbreth, and artist Georgia O’Keeffe, among others. Writer Fannie Hurst and historian Mary Beard were two of the seven speakers at the event.¹ Christine received this tribute at the very time that her career was...

In the fall of 1949 it was clear that Christine Frederick’s visit to California would be permanent. At midcentury, California led the way in creating a new, postwar, suburban America. After a brief period of temporary shortages, the two-decade-long prosperity that characterized the fifties and sixties encouraged enormous migration to the Golden State. California’s population increased by more than half a million souls every year during this period, most of them young working families. During the quarter century that followed World War II, thirteen million new residents would need homes. The construction industry and the postwar tract developers that offered...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, American women have entered the public sphere to an unprecedented degree. Whether, in fact, there are still two clearly separate spheres represented by women in the home and men in the workplace is doubtful; in 2000, nearly 61 percent of all women over the age of sixteen were in the labor force, and increasingly, these have been mothers with young children. By 2000, 79 percent of mothers with children between six and seventeen worked for pay, and the Labor Department reported that 44 percent of all American workers were women. A sampling of...