CHAPTER XXXV.

WOMEN’S WORK IN THE TREASURY—HOW APPOINTMENTS ARE MADE.

The Scales of Justitia—Where They Hang and Where They Do Not Hang—The Difference Between Men and Women—Reform a “Sham!”—The First Women-Clerks—A Shameful and Disgraceful Fraud—What Two Women Did—Cutting Down the Salaries of Women—The First Woman-Clerk in the Treasury—Taking Her Husband’s Place—Working “_in Her Brother’s Name_”—A Matter of Expediency—The Feminine Tea-Pot—The Secretary Growls at the Tea-Pots—The Hegira of the Tea-Pots—Thackeray’s Opinion of Nature’s Intentions—Blind on One Side—In War Days—General Spinner Visits Secretary Chase—“A Woman can Use Scissors Better than a Man”—Profound Discovery!—“She’ll do it _Cheaper_”—“Light Work”—“Recognized”—Besieged by Women—Scenes of Distress and Trouble—Hundreds of Homeless Women—After the War—How the Appointments were Made—Creating an Interest—The Advantages of the “Sinners”—Infamous Intrigues—The Baseness of Certain Senators—Virtue Spattered with Mud—A Disgrace to the Nation—Secret Doings in High Places—New Civil Service Rules—Sounding Magnanimous—Passing the Examination—The Irrepressible Masculine Tyrants—The New Rules a Perfect Failure—Up to the Mark, but not Winning—An Alarming Suggestion—Men _versus_ Women—Tampering with the Scales—How Much a Woman Ought to be Paid—Opinion of a Man in Power—Interesting Description of an Average Representative—“Keeping Women in Their Place”—Getting up a Speech on Women—The Man who Stayed at Home—Generosity of the “Back-Pay” Congress—What Women Believe Ought to be Done.

On the carved cornices which surmount windows and mirrors in the spacious Office of the Secretary of the Treasury may be seen, equally balanced above its keys, the scales of Justitia. Would that they symbolized the equal justice reigning through the minutest division of the great departments of the Government service.

Weighted with human selfishness, perhaps this is impossible. Majestic in aspect, great in magnitude, in energy and action, they will never be morally grand till they are established and perpetuated in absolute equity. In that hour the scales of Justitia will hang in equal balance above the head of the masculine and feminine worker. Whatever _their_ difference, there will be no disparity in the equity which shall measure, weigh and reward equal toil. To-day the departments of Government teem with kindness and favoritism to individual women. What they lack is justice to woman. This they have lacked from the beginning. What a comment on human selfishness is the fact, that with all the legislation of successive Congresses, the employment of women in the departments of the Government is to-day as it was in the beginning—perpetuated in favoritism and injustice. Civil Service Reform, as carried on, is a mockery and a sham. Nowhere has its hollow pretence been so visible—so keenly felt—as in its utter failure of simple justice to the woman-worker in the public service.

From the beginning, when her work has been tacitly recognized and rewarded as a man’s, her sex has been proscribed. The first work given to women from the Government was issued from the General Land Office, as early, if not earlier, than President Pierce’s administration, and consisted of the copying of land warrants. This work was sent to their homes. They received it in the name of some male relative, and for that reason were paid what he would have received for doing it, viz., twelve hundred dollars per annum. One lady supported a worthless husband (the nominal clerk) and her two children in this way, doing all his work for him. Another supported herself, her two nephews, and educated them out of the same salary.

During Mr. Buchanan’s administration, this work was taken out of feminine hands, to a very large extent, and the few allowed to retain it were paid only six hundred dollars. Somewhere in this era the first woman clerk appeared in the Treasury. She was a wife who, during her husband’s illness, was allowed to take his desk and to do his work, for his support and their children’s. This she continued to do until her second marriage; but it was _in her brother’s name_. She copied and recorded, did both well, and was paid—not because she did well, but because she did her work in the name of a man—sixteen hundred dollars per annum. Thus, while this lady performed the work of a man, and performed it in his name, as a woman her presence at the desk was a subterfuge, and her official existence ignored.

Without recognition or acknowledgment, the woman-clerk system in the Treasury Department is an outgrowth of expediency. Like many another fact born of the same parentage, it soon proved its own right to existence, and refused to be extinguished.

By the time that Secretary McCulloch made his advent, the feminine tea-pot had invaded every window-ledge. The Secretary complained of the accumulation of tea-pots in the Treasury of the nation. They vanished, and ceased to distill the gentle beverage for the woman-worker at her noonday lunch. “Nature meant kindly by woman when it made her the tea-plant,” Thackeray says. The presence of her tea-pot was made a mental and moral sign, by political philosophers, that woman was unfit for Government service. Nobody ever heard that the costly cigars and tobacco which filled the man clerk’s “nooning,” to the exhilaration of his body and soul, was a like sign of his inability to perform prolonged service without the aid of stimulants.

In war days, when tens of thousands of men were withdrawn from civil labor, and when one day’s expense to the Government equalled a whole year’s in the time of Washington, General Spinner went to Secretary Chase and said: “A woman can use scissors better than a man, and she will do it cheaper. I want to employ women to cut the Treasury notes.” Mr. Chase consented, and soon the great rooms of the Treasury witnessed the unwonted sight of hundreds of women, scissors in hand, cutting and trimming each Treasury-note sheet into four separate notes. This was “light work;” but if anybody supposes it easy, let him try it for hours without stopping, and the exquisite pain in his shoulder-joints and the blisters on his fingers will bear aching witness to his mistake.

Washington was full of needy women, of women whom the exigencies of war had suddenly bereft of protection and home. In her appointment at that hour, political differences went for nothing. Every poor woman who applied to the good General was given work if he had it. A pair of scissors were placed in her hands, and she was told to go at it. She had no official appointment or existence. During 1862, these women were paid six hundred dollars per annum out of the fund provided by Congress for temporary clerks. A year or two later the working existence of these women was recognized in the annual appropriation bills.

After that it did not take long to spread through the land that the Government Departments in Washington offered work to women. The land was full—fuller than ever before of women who needed work to live. Necessity, exaggeration, romance and sorrow, combined as propelling motives, and the Capital was soon overrun with women seeking Government employment. Then, more conspicuously than to-day, the supply far exceeded the demand. The disappointment, the suffering, the sin which grew out of this fact, can never be measured.

The war had torn the whole social fabric like an earthquake. Society seemed upheaved from its foundations—shattered, and scattered in chaos. Nowhere was this so apparent as in Washington. Women seeking their husbands; women, whose husbands were dead, left penniless with dependent children. Young girls, orphaned and homeless, with women adventurers of every phase and sort, all, sooner or later, found their way to Washington. The male population was scarcely less chaotic. Men, restrained and harmonized through life by the holiest influences of home, found themselves suddenly homeless, herded together in masses, exposed to hardships, danger and undreamed-of temptations. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” seemed to be blazoned on the painted sign-boards of the dens of drink and sin, and on the debauched and brazen faces of the stranger men and women who jostled each other on the crowded thoroughfares.

While thousands escaped unharmed the moral pestilence which brooded in the air, tens of thousands more were touched with its blight, and fell. Men and women who would have lived and died innocent, in the safe shelter of peace and home, grew demoralized and desperate amid the rack and ruin of war. In the hour when human nature needed every sacred safeguard, it found itself bereft of the sweetest and best that it had ever known. This was especially true of the hundreds of homeless women in the Capital seeking employment. Congressional appropriations made woman’s Government-employment at once a Congressional reward. Very soon, every woman’s appointment to work was at the mercy of some Member of Congress. Political or war-service might secure a man his, but what had the woman but her bereavements, or her personal influence? For the sake of the former, noble men, in many instances, sought and found honest employment for noble women, for women who had given their husbands, sons and fathers, their own heart’s blood, to their country, asking nothing in return but the chance to work for their own bread and their children’s.

In order to secure any Government position, the first thing a woman had to do was to go and tell her story to a man—in all probability a stranger—who possessed the appointing power, her chance of getting her place depending utterly on the personal interest which she might be able to arouse in him. If he was sufficiently interested in her story, and in her, to make the official demand necessary, she obtained the coveted place, no matter what her qualifications for it, or her lack of them might be. If she failed to interest him, by no possibility could she secure that place, unless she could succeed in winning over to her cause another man of equal political power. If the men who held her chance for bread were good men, and she a good woman, well; if they were bad men, and she a weak woman, not so well. In either case, the principle underlying the appointment was equally wrong.

It was this unjust mode of appointment which, in so many instances, especially through the years of the war, placed side by side, with pure and noble women, the women-adventurers and sinners, whose presence cast so much undeserved reproach upon the innocent, and who caused the only shadow of disrepute which has ever fallen upon woman’s Treasury-service. Even in the worst days this class formed the exceptions to a host of honorable and noble women, and yet the shameful fact cannot be wiped out that men, high in political power, because they had that power, made womanly virtue its price, and were meanly base enough to use the Civil Service of their country to pay for their own disgraceful sins. Because this was possible, pure women, working day by day to support themselves and their children, were covered with the shadow of unjust suspicion, while women, unworthy and profligate, were allowed the same positions, with equal honor and equal pay.

There could be no greater moral injustice to woman than to place her employment under the Government on such a basis. It put the best under ban, while it drew those whose steps pointed downward swiftly along the inevitable descent. There was but one redress that the State could offer to its daughters, that of making their chance equal to that of its sons. Then, if they failed, the failure would be their own; if they succeeded, they would not be defrauded by the Government they served.

The new Civil-Service Rules, whatever their impracticability in other ways, seemed to offer to the women-workers of the Government this redress. If education and fitness were to be made the standard of Departmental Service, alike for women as men, then the reign of favoritism and might must end. An idle woman, the pet of some man in power, would no longer receive all that was paid a woman filling the desks of two men. The woman who had proved, by years of efficient service at a man’s desk, that she was more than equal to the performing of his duties, would cease to receive for doing them the pittance of the veriest idler in the lobbies, and no more.

It sounded well; magnanimous men and true women, yearning only for justice, and that it might be earned and won without ado, took heart. Educated women from North and South, East and West, flocked to the Capital to compete in impartial intellectual examination with men. Many of these were teachers—all women to whom self-support, or the support of others, were indispensable. The number of women who have passed the highest competitive examinations, is remarkable. Their life-long pursuits and intellectual training made it impossible that, in this regard, they should prove second to men. The number so great, that all could receive appointments was not probable.

In the face of so many new professions of equality of chance in the public service for women, the astonishing fact is, that while women pass the highest examinations with honor, it is men, with scarcely an exception, who pass into the highest places. With a mocking outcry of “justice and equality,” uttered to appease the universal demand, selfishness and might still prevail in all departmental appointments. Political and personal influence appoint women to-day, just as they did before one woman was summoned to compete in intellectual examination with men.

“You were fools to expect a twelve-hundred-dollar clerkship because you passed the examination of that class,” said a high appointing officer of the Treasury to two ladies, one who had come from a far Western, the other from a far Eastern State. Both ladies passed the highest competitive examination—both, after months of wearing anxiety and struggle, with the wolf at the door, received—a nine-hundred-dollar clerkship. Did they receive even that on the high merit of their competitive examination? Not at all; had their appointment depended on that, they would not have received one at all. Sick and worn out, they received it at last on the special plea of two men in office, each having political power in his respective State.

With such results, I ask, what is a competitive examination to women but a shame to the power that treacherously offers it? The man who passes such an examination cannot receive less than a twelve-hundred-dollar clerkship; the woman who passes triumphantly the severest intellectual test offered by the Government, cannot receive more than a nine-hundred-dollar position. Why? So many women came to Washington and proved, by actual mental examination, that they were fully competent to fill the highest civil offices in the departments, its officials became alarmed. “Taken on their attainments, they will push out the men,” they exclaimed, in alarm. Then straightway they fell back, as men in power always do, to carry their own ends on unjust legislation. They based their decision on the Act of Congress of four years ago, which fixed the salary of all women employed in the Government Departments at nine hundred dollars per annum.

The result of all the loud hypocritical outcry of civil equality to women is, that hereafter, no matter how high the competitive examination which she passes, no matter what the services which she renders, no woman is to receive more than nine hundred dollars per year for any appointment received after a certain date; and no man, no matter how low the labor which he performs, be it only as a messenger to run through the halls, is to receive less than twelve hundred dollars per annum.

Cast down your scales, O, Justitia, let them shiver to atoms on its marble floor for hanging in equal balance above the keys of the Treasury of the United States. They are a mocking lie. Beneath these desecrated symbols sits the Secretary of the Treasury, and to him a few shrinking, yet daring, women have appealed. “Four hundred dollars a year is enough for any woman to be paid for her work,” replies this accidental potentate, borne from obscurity to power solely by the “boosting” of a friend, who lifted him from his unthought-of “bench” in Massachusetts, with no guarantee of fitness from his past, to the chiefship of the Treasury of the Nation. “Four hundred dollars is enough for any woman to receive for her work, and more than she could earn anywhere else,” replies this man.

This one remark, pitted against the facts recorded in this chapter, proved the man who made it as too narrow-minded and unjust, too pervaded with the caste and selfishness of sex, to be fit to hold the appointing power over hundreds of women, in culture and intellectually more than his peers. No man whose spring of action is “might is right” has a right to rule.

To-day nothing could be more humiliating to a high-spirited, intelligent, honorable woman, than to sit in the gallery of the Hall of Representatives and be compelled to listen to a debate on woman’s work and wages going on below. Yet if she never heard the words uttered by men who claim to be the representatives of the people, and who make the laws which define her rights and decide her rewards, she could never realize how selfish, ungenerous, and unjust is the average man who assumes to represent woman, and to legislate for her welfare. These men, on the average, are fairly good husbands and indulgent fathers. They are anything but tyrants, personally, to the women of their families. But their personal relations do not prevent them from placing a very low estimate upon the powers, performance, place and prospects of women in general. Their caste of sex infiltrates through every word they utter.

The man who is “bound to keep woman in her place,” before he makes a speech to that effect, rushes into the Congressional Library, and asks Mr. Spofford to give him every book which will help him to prove that woman is a weak and inefficient creature. He then proceeds to “cram” himself with a crude mass of statements, which he extracts pell-mell out of a heap of books. This unassimilated and impracticable load he delivers, a few days later, to Congress, to the galleries, and to the _Globe_—to prove that—no matter what her qualities or qualifications, moral or mental—being a woman, for that fact alone, she must not be a clerk, but an “_employé_;” and no matter what she has done or is capable of doing in the service of the Government, for that service she must receive but nine hundred dollars, and the sum be fixed by law.

There are honorable exceptions—a few men in Congress who, in the broadest and best sense, are the friends of woman. They form a small minority. The majority, after having made woman’s very existence as a Government-worker to depend on their own personal favoritism or caprice, stand up in Congress and cast stones at the very class which they have themselves created. In nine cases out of ten, these men staid at home while others fought their country’s battles. And now they reward the widows and orphans of soldiers and sailors by giving them a reluctant chance to earn their bread on half-pay. They do it under sufferance, while these legislators withhold just remuneration, sneer at their work, and defame their characters.

The Forty-second Congress, which, in its most hurried moments, could take time to vote to its members an increase of salary from five thousand to eight thousand a year, rejected without debate a proposition to give women-clerks in the departments equal compensation with men, for the same labor. What added proof is required to show that the law-making power of our land is fast becoming a monied monopoly—a legislature for the rich—an ignorer of the poor. “Eight thousand dollars every twelve months, by dint of close economy, will keep my wife and daughters in silks and velvets; will give them a phæton by the sea, and make beautiful their paths upon the mountain tops! What to me are the wives and daughters of the poor? What care of mine the widows and orphans of men who perished in their country’s service, if they do support themselves and their children by working for this just Government, which I help to make, for nine hundred dollars a year! while I pay at least twelve hundred to the laziest masculine lout who dawdles with papers across the Treasury floors?”

Yet there was scarcely a Member of that Congress that would not repel with jest or sneer the mere mention of woman’s demand, in the face of such injustice, to legislate for herself. If you would avert this catastrophe, gentlemen, show that you are capable of just legislation; prove that the power of franchise does not always beget oppression to the disfranchised. I point to the practical working of the new Civil-Service Rules, to your own greedy grasp of additional thousands, with the refusal to grant three meagre hundreds to working women, to prove that woman has no hope of justice in man’s representation. Represent her interests with half the eager avidity which marks your devotion to your own, and she will never ask to represent herself. But no matter what her individual distaste to public responsibility, nothing is more apparent to the wide-visioned, thoughtful woman than that, in a republic, the only possibility of obtaining personal justice lies in political equality.