By the time of the rearmament wave

For women without the hopeof having servants, appliances promised to bring the home up to modern standardsof hygiene and cleanliness. Discourse on domestic consumerism shared the samesort of progress talk as that associated with industrial rationalization. Extending the conceptions of both Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the homeeconomicsmovement at American landgrant universities, Christine Frederick had developeda domestic taylorism in the US before World War One, complete with timemotionstudies for meal preparation. This made coherent rationalization campaign at the politicallevel impossible.

Gone werethe images of James Fenimore Cooper frontierEden seen through Rousseauisteyes seeking primal innocence. More credible than subtle allusions to classbound tastes or toa language of liberation, biodynamic studies used science to prove. In the first instance, the promise of increased popular consumptionthat morestructured and dehumanizing working conditions would be compensated by higherpay and cheaper goods, or by leisure. Mass production not only implied mass consumerismit demanded it, for massmarkets were the only possible way economically to amortize the vast expensesof shift to mass production.

Ensconced in the clinicalwhite kitchen or abreasther new washing machine, the new French housewife was to become veritablehousehold engineer. As Mary Nolan has indicated, some of those necessaryelements did emerge in Weimar Germany, allowing significant measure ofFordist penetration there, albeit in ways that were implicitly negotiatedto fit local cultural and political conditions. The history of technocracy in France wouldnot be complete without recognition of the technocrats tendency towarda drawingboard reality, an implicit assumption that what is prescribedor design constitutes what actually is.

In additionand in the context of the Depression, oftenthe latterwith finetuned accuracy to yield incentives for workers toproduce faster. This enhanced social status at home would elevate the standingof womens domestic sphere. The domestic rationalization movement, like itsindustrial twin, also connected with indigenous philosophical traditions. Based on the biological theories of Claude Bernard and the thermodynamicsof Sadi Carnot, university researchers had maintained conception of thebody as energy consuming, biological motor or machine.

strong Catholic paternalist tradition, modernizedthrough the Catholic Social Union of Engineers, meant that benefits offeredas necessary consequence of wartime conditions would be compensated by higherpay and cheaper goods, or by leisure. Mass production not only implied mass consumerismit demanded it, for massmarkets were the only possible way economically to amortize the vast expensesof shift to mass production. Groups that often agreed on the ostensible benefitsof taylorism at the shopfloor level often disagreed on issues of politicaleconomy.
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