‘If You Desire to Enjoy Life, Avoid Unpunctual People’

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century domestic advice manuals applied the language of modern, public time management to the private sphere. This paper uses domestic advice and cookery books, including Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management to argue that women in the home operated within multiple, overlapping temporalities that incorporated daily, annual, linear and cyclical scales. I examine how seasonal and annual timescales coexisted with the ticking clock of daily time as a framework within which women were instructed to organise their lives in order to conclude that the increasing concern of advice writers with matters of timekeeping and punctuality towards the end of the nineteenth century indicates not the triumph of 'clock time' but rather its failure to overturn other ways of thinking about and using time.

Does time management work? A meta-analysis

“…The link between time management and performance at work can be traced historically to scientific management [60]. Nevertheless, even though modern time management can be traced to scientific management in male-dominated work settings, a feminist reading of time management history reveals that our modern idea of time management also descends from female time management thinkers of the same era, such as Lillian Gilbreth, who wrote treatises on efficient household management [43,61,62]. As the link between work output and time efficiency became clearer, industrialists went to great lengths to encourage workers to use their time more rationally [63][64][65].…”

‘Life will pass quickly for me’: Women, Clocks and Timekeeping in Nineteenth‐Century France

“…20 Greater awareness of timekeeping in language, scheduling and public architecture were all part of the emergent middle class's commitment to orderliness and self-control. 21 Increasingly, clock ownership was a sign of the cultural value placed on good time management practices. 22 But in many ways it was a symbolic commitment rather than one that led to the abandonment of other ways of marking time.…”