Taylorism in the Home: The Medical Profession,the Infant Welfare Movement and the Deskilling of Women

Abstract

Using the infant welfare movement as a case study, this article examines how doctors in early twentieth century Australia used the rhetoric of 'efficiency' to widen their labour market position by legitimating for them selves a supervisory role over mothers analogous to that of the manager in Taylorism. It is suggested that although the movement did not necessarily deskill women as mothers, its coercive and condescending rhetoric created a stereotype of women as specialised in function and incapable of unsupervised work, which helped deskill women by building moral and practical barriers to their participation in public life.

Look, woman, in the West, there wilt thou see

An amber cradle near the sun's decline:

Within it, featured even in death divine,

Is lying a dead infant, slain by thee.

(Lines from Meredith, quoted by Dr H. B. Allen in his Presidential Address to the Australasian Medical Congress, 1908.)