ABSTRACT
Lillian Moller Gilbreth was born in 1878, barely a decade after the Civil War ended. She retired from active work in 1968, the year the Americans landed on the moon, and she died, at age 94, in 1972, at the end of Richard Nixon’s first presidential term. In nearly a century of productive years and selfless service, she forged a legacy as wife, mother, and scientist that is probably unparalleled in our time. During her lifetime Lillian Gilbreth was dubbed “the Mother of Scientific Management”; “the First Lady of Management”; and “the World’s Greatest Woman Engineer” (McKenney, 1952)—all of this before Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and the onset of the feminist movement in the United States.
