This Grand Experiment examines the history of female federal employees in Washington D.C. during and after the Civil War. Hired first as a cost-saving measure, and later as war diminished the supply of available male workers, women became a vital and important source of labor power for the wartime government that continued into the peace. Through their competence and proficiency, women showed that not only could they perform government roles gender-typed as female—such as hospital work and basic clerical tasks—but they also took on, as they have in every war, work that had been assigned traditionally to men. Their value to the defense effort, and in government agencies such as the Treasury, the Government Printing and Patent Offices, and even the War Department, has historically been undervalued, in ways that were mirrored in women's lower wages. Still, women sought federal jobs through family and political connections, often playing on their own patriotic sacrifice—or that of male kin—in order to secure positions.
Federal employment was more intellectually challenging and highly paid than most other jobs available to women at the time, resulting in a flood of female applicants. Women most likely to be hired had to rely on recommendations from powerful men and the self-cultivated appearance of vulnerability and dependence. Thousands of female federal workers in Washington helped normalize the appearance of women in the public sphere and in public work generally, as American culture gradually transformed the “cult of true womanhood” into a more flexible but equally constraining gender order. Women's federal employment opened the door further, expanding clerical opportunities in the decades that followed. In teasing out the nuanced ways in which women federal employees went beyond middle-class stereotypes about women's proper employment, Jessica Ziparo augments the earlier work of Cindy Aron's Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Women and Men in Victorian America (1987). Ziparo's research locates female employees in a federal political economy shaped by partisan politics but also deeply conflicted about the role of government in supporting individual rights.
The structure of her book follows women employees through the process of seeking a federal job, subsequent life in Washington, D.C., and the women's efforts to stay in the positions and agitate for equal pay and greater opportunities. In a nod to current debates in labor history, Ziparo shows women federal workers as important but overlooked labor feminists in the struggle for women's rights. While they challenged expectations of women's abilities, they were, however, primarily not “consciously part of what historians usually describe as the women's rights movement” (p. 3). They were largely not suffragists, nor did they participate in the slender beginnings of the postwar labor movement.
The political origins and connections of many federal workers, and especially the women who were hired, brings us to the current moment in which nepotism, graft, and corruption have a renewed hold on our political imaginations. It's not that federal patronage jobs necessarily evoke the emoluments clause; rather, it's the pervasiveness of such connections in employment and in agenda setting. One only has to remember that shortly after the end of Ziparo's timeline (the book ends in 1871) Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883), which put constraints on favoritism, rationalized federal employment to a degree (in its nonpolitical lines), and limited the opportunities for corruption.
Ziparo contributes to our understanding of the cultural limits of women's work in the public sphere in the late nineteeenth century. Conceptions of women's sexuality complicated female employment in the period, with federal women workers seen as “depraved whores or noble widows” (p. 140). Political scandals involving infidelity and sexual harassment—even gendered violence—crept into discussions of women's federal employment. Indeed, a press corps bored with the tight restrictions on presidential coverage often sought out juicy tales of misdoings at the Government Printing Office or the Mint. Each time a scandal occurred, the familiar debate about the appropriateness of women's employment in the public sphere, the impropriety of men and women working in the same space, or indeed of male supervision of female subordinates raised red flags long before actual wrongdoing. In some cases, such impropriety led to dismissal and career-ending humiliation. For the women involved, the scandals provided reminders of how precarious federal employment could be.
Based on extensive research in federal records, This Grand Experiment of necessity focuses primarily on the white and literate middle-class women who found government employment. Despite scant evidence on minority and working-class women, Ziparo follows them as far as the sources allowed, highlighting a few cases among more than three thousand women employed by the federal government in her database. By focusing on the intimate connection between politics and federal employment, Ziparo gives voice to the women employed in the federal service. In seeking them out and tracking them across time—following their traces in newspapers, published and unpublished government documents, and manuscript collections—she shows readers the imprint left by these female federal employees on Washington, D.C., and in the process makes This Grand Experiment a good and informative read.
