ABSTRACT
The existential contest of wills that Robinson describes is also endemic to more familiar types of house cleaning. In the process, domestic power relations are almost completely inverted, as the two women become increasingly dependent on each other. Domestic reformers in the 1840s placed far more emphasis on how things were cleaned and kept than they did on things themselves, unless it was to describe them as objects of temptation. The Frank B., Jr. Gilbreths’ approach may have anticipated the appetites for rupture, but it was pursued in the service of care. The same was true for the Gilbreths, though by the early twentieth century the motivation had changed. Speed became the driver, its effects portrayed as variously comic, benign, and rewarding in their domesticated version of industrial time saving. The Gilbreths may have made it child’s play at home, but in their work as professionals, they would have operated on the principle that time equaled money.
