It’s logistics.’ I often use this common phrase when planning and coordinating my everyday life. Work projects, social gatherings, medical appointments, household repairs, doing the shopping… Planning and coordinating such mundane tasks always takes up more of my time and attention than I would like. When I call it ‘logistics’, I tacitly acknowledge that everyday modern life is as complicated as shipping goods or positioning armies, logistics’ traditional tasks. And who shoulders most of these unpaid chores and labours of love? Across all demographics, it’s women. How did we get here? And how do we redistribute the burden? Suggestions lie in an unusual place: a women’s history of logistics.
It began in the 19th century, when the concept of logistics arose to explain Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. ‘Logistics’ became the science of supplying soldiers and moving them into strategic position on battlefields. Though the practice began before, under the Napoleonic Code of law, they were entitled to bring their wives, who were regarded as their legal property. Following behind the marching troops, wives supplied the little extras of life: tobacco, alcohol, clean clothes, sex. Some women even found themselves on the front lines, administering shots of brandy before a charge, then dragging the wounded to safety. The theorist Paul Virilio called this new figure ‘the logistical spouse’. As property of their husbands, these informal logisticians were obliged to follow them wherever they went.
‘As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house.’ This was the opening line of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), the bestselling manual and cookbook that served as a reference work for generations. As militaries modernised and the middle class grew, women became metaphorical generals of domestic operations. A counterpart of the male corporate manager, the bourgeois wife spent her husband’s income to keep the house well stocked and in good order. The book’s author Isabella Beeton espoused early rising, cleanliness, frugality, and the canny management of accounts and family entertainment. Most of her advice has endured the transitions from handmaking food and clothes to operating appliances like washing machines and, in the age of apps, ordering everything online. Though women gained civil rights, incomes and greater independence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and though men were more often opening sales territory rather than fighting to gain actual territory, women still did all the work of logistical spouses.
Large mid-century families gave them the chance to flaunt their organisational abilities, demonstrating how domestic efficiency mirrored industrial efficiency. No one reflected this synergy better than Frank Gilbreth, an industrial engineer, and his wife Lillian, an engineer and psychologist, who together invented the flow chart – and had 12 children, inspiring Cheaper by the Dozen, a 1948 autobiography and several film adaptations. The Gilbreths conducted motion studies on workers, breaking down tasks into numerous small movements to arrive at the most
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