I Wonder if I Cannot Make Application for an Appointment Too

Chapter One explores how women came to work for the federal government. During the early years of the Civil War, different supervisors, scattered across various executive departments, created individualized and ad hoc policies regarding female employees based on their immediate labor needs, budget constraints, and personal views on the wisdom of female federal employment. The demographic information in application letters, employee files, and department ledgers, show that women across the country and the socioeconomic spectrum responded to the opportunity of civil service work in overwhelming numbers. The federal government hired African American women as manual laborers and clerks, though in far fewer numbers than it hired white women. Women’s letters reveal that they yearned for intellectually demanding and high-paying jobs in a land of limited options for female employment.

The Picked Prostitutes of the Land

Chapter 5 explores how conceptions of women’s sexuality complicated and threatened female employment. The national rumor mongering about female federal employees burst forth in newspapers from Maine to Hawaii after a scandal in the Treasury Department in 1864. That year, an investigation into fraud and counterfeiting in the department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing morphed into a salacious sex scandal that absorbed the country, even in the midst of a particularly bloody portion of the Civil War. The ramifications of that scandal plagued female federal employees for decades to come. By laboring as public servants in a mixed-sex workspace, female clerks were uniquely accessible to male attention and sexual harassment. While women were individually deprived of basic political rights, as a class their “respectability” became an exploitable political tool in the press and in Congress. Depicting female federal employees as either depraved prostitutes or noble widows complicated women’s entrance into the federal workforce by obscuring their identity as employees. Although supervisors were pleased with their new female employees and praised them in annual reports to Congress, the negative, national conversation happening in newspapers after the scandal threatened the experiment of female federal employment.

Telling Her Story to a Man

Chapter 2 examines how women applied for federal positions and details the criteria department heads used for selection. In general, supervisors were paternalistic, choosing female applicants who presented themselves as dependent and helpless over applicants who displayed independence and ambition. Supervisors gave jobs to women who had powerful men to advocate on their behalf, who appeared needy, and who were applying because some tragedy, often the Civil War, had removed their male support. While many women and their recommenders adhered to this narrative of dependence, women’s actions during the application process—including self-advocacy, working other jobs to stay afloat, and keeping abreast of developments in the departments—revealed significant independence and ambition. Julia Wilbur’s experience in obtaining a job in the Patent Office is detailed.

Introduction

The introduction explains how and why the Civil War era female federal workforce was an important, though often overlooked, cadre of labor feminists in the struggle for women’s rights in America. Labor feminism as used in the book is defined.

Teapots in the Treasury of the Nation

Chapter 3 addresses the types of work that women performed during the Civil War for the federal government and how they were received and regulated as employees by male coworkers and supervisors. Women’s labor in the federal government is examined over three broad categories: the types of jobs women performed (including manual and clerical), how supervisors regulated and viewed female employees, and women’s relationships with their coworkers and workspaces. Because supervisors enjoyed great autonomy and because clerical work in the 1860s was largely undifferentiated, supervisors, male coworkers, and female clerks had choices to make as to how to incorporate women into the federal bureaucracy. While some women were able to secure positions that were worthy of their abilities, traditional conceptions of gender ultimately hamstrung female clerks’ efforts to achieve the respect and advancement potential available to men.

Epilogue

The Epilogue details the plight of the Spinner Memorial Association to have a statue of General Francis Elias Spinner erected on the grounds of the Treasury Department. Three early female federal employees formed the Association to raise money to commission the statue to honor Spinner's decision to bring women into the Treasury Department. Repeatedly, the women were denied permission to place the statue at the Treasury. The saga of the Spinner statue is compared to women’s entrance into the federal workforce. It is argued that early female federal employees were labor feminists who did important work by serving as visible and constant reminders to politicians and the country that women were valuable workers, who were capable of intellectually challenging labor. In setting this example, early female federal employees began to dismantle some of the economic and cultural restraints that limited the opportunities of nineteenth-century middle-class white women.

What Makes Us to Differ from Them?

Chapter 7 explores the equal pay debates of the Civil War era. The government paid women less than it paid men, although many performed the same or equivalent work. Between late 1864 and early 1870, Congress received at least 740 female federal employee signatures on eleven separate petitions asking for greater pay. Some of these women argued that since they performed the same work as men, they should be paid the same. The efforts of early female federal employees and labor feminists to obtain equal pay for equal work engendered a precocious debate in Congress that almost succeeded in earning equal pay for women and forced Congressmen to engage in dialogues about gender equality and the role the federal government should play in society. Despite the exciting rhetoric of equality and justice in these debates, Congress did not set the standard of equal pay for women underscoring that although women had made much progress in federal work during the Civil War era, much work remained to be done. Surprisingly, petitioners did not receive much assistance from the women’s suffrage movement. The absence of the suffrage movement in these debates arguably disadvantaged both causes.

I Am Now Exerting All My Thinking Powers

Chapter 6 addresses female employees’ struggles to keep their positions with the federal government. The number and percentage of women in the federal labor force grew fairly steadily throughout the 1860s, but insecurity and volatility characterized the federal civil service. During the Civil War and immediate postwar period, departments coped with unpredictable workloads through unsystematic, non-uniform, rapid expansions and contractions of their workforces resulting in short employment periods. At the same time, the press of new applicants was unrelenting. Because much of the basic work women did could be adequately done with relatively little training, some supervisors saw female employees as interchangeable. This atmosphere of uncertainty discouraged collective action and forced female federal employees to utilize aggressive strategies to retain and regain the positions they had become reliant upon. In their attempts to remain employed, women demonstrated strength and self-confidence that seemed to have been gained through their federal employment.

A Strange Time to Seek a Residence in Washington

Chapter 4 describes the challenges and opportunities of life for women in the nation’s capital during the 1860s. During the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was on the front lines of the conflict. After the war, annual reports of the Board of Metropolitan Police to Congress make clear that Washingtonians continued to endure overcrowding, housing shortages, crime, and disease. Women not only survived in this chaotic context; many—including Patent Office clerk Julia Wilbur, whose diary offers an intriguing window into the everyday life of a female federal employee—thrived in this tough city, enjoying independence, filling their leisure time, and changing the demographics of Washington. For those who chose to do so, female federal employees’ salaries, newly acquired political knowledge, and personal associations provided them with the financial and practical wherewithal to participate in philanthropy and political movements, including the suffrage movement. Female federal employees were visible all over the city, helping to normalize the presence of middle-class women in the streets of Washington. In forming this new, conspicuous community of independent women in full view of the nation’s politicians, female federal employees became a part of the struggle for women’s rights, whether they intended to or not.