The Women who Entered the Federal Workforce during the Civil War Era

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. On June 23, 1860, Congressional Joint Resolution 25 established the Government Printing Office, GPO, a public office in charge of printing, binding and engraving federal reports, work that had previously been contracted out to private companies. From its inception, the GPO employed hundreds of women, especially in the types of labor like folding, stitching and pressing, that were similar to domestic labor women often performed elsewhere. Although the GPO was the largest antebellum federal employer of women, it wasn't the only federal department that employed women at the time. The Government Hospital for the Insane, also known as St Elizabeth's, which admitted patients beginning in January, 1855, employed women as attendants to care for women patients, along with women cooks, seamstresses and housekeepers. Individual department supervisors also hired occasional women to do copy work within their own homes, which was considered more acceptable for keeping employment within the women's sphere. In 1861, the United States Department of the Treasury began to issue paper currency for the first time to finance the Civil War. Paper currency already existed in the United States, but it was previously printed and circulated by private banks under state charters. This new federal paper currency was printed four to a sheet, and had to be cut out by hand. In his 1873 "Behind the Scenes in Washington," writer Edward Winslow Martin quotes then US Treasurer Francis E. Spinner, as saying, "I went to Mr. Chase and said to him, 'A woman can use scissors better than a man, and she will do it cheaper. I want to employ women to cut these notes.'" Mr. Chase, that is Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, expressed concern that employing women would demoralize the department, but he allowed Spinner to bring in one woman as a test case. Within one day, the woman whom Spinner brought in, Jenny Douglas, an unemployed school teacher, showed that she could easily cut and trim currency more quickly than the men and for less than half their salary. By the end of 1861, all of that work was being performed by women. Spinner also hired women to count the worn and dirty money being returned to the Treasury Department for replacement, and to count the new money going out. He believed that the seven women appointed to do that work on October 9, 1862, were the first women, "who ever received appointments as clerks in any executive department of the national government at Washington." Spinner was almost certainly wrong about that, but in his defense, no one, Congress included seemed to be keeping track. The Washington Arsenal, the Post Office, and the War Department's Quartermaster General's Office, all hired women without any kind of explicit congressional approval. Members of Congress certainly knew about the  practice. In fact, many of the women who were being hired into these federal departments had presented letters of recommendation from their congressmen and senators, with their job applications, in order to obtain these positions in the first place. In March of 1864, Congress, for the first time, formally acknowledged the employment of women in its Act to Supply Deficiencies in the Appropriations for Service of Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1864. As Congress was allotting additional funds for departments whose workloads had expanded as the Civil War wore on, it noted that, "The heads of the said several departments are hereby authorized to employ females instead of any of the clerks here and before designated whenever, in their opinion, the same can be done consistently with the interest of the public service." One particularly compelling reason that the department heads may have had for hiring women was that the salary for women, regardless of how long they had been working or how well they were performing, was capped at $600 per year, half of what the lowest paid male clerk was paid. Even so, working for the federal government was one of the highest paying jobs that women could obtain at the time, and these jobs were in high demand. Two years later, in the General Appropriation Bill of July, 1866, Congress agreed that women could be classified as clerks, not just as ladies, and they raised their salaries to $900 a year, still well below what the men made, but perhaps slightly more livable in the very expensive city of Washington, DC. Surprisingly, Congress did consider setting the salary for women employees in the federal government to be equal to that of men. The Senate debated the issue in 1867, 1869, and 1870, and the House debated it in 1870, as Radical Republican Senator, Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas argued in 1869, "Where labor is performed, the compensation should be according to the capacity and character of the labor. And if the same labor is performed by one person as by another, and the same amount of time in the day is bestowed on it, why should not the compensation be the same?"  Not everyone agreed, of course. In fact, Democratic Representative Anthony A. C. Rogers of Arkansas, went so far as to threaten,  "If I live to be a month older, I intend to introduce a bill abolishing this whole business of female clerks in the departments." He did, in fact, introduce that bill, House Resolution Number 1516, to abolish female clerks in the departments of government on March 14, 1870. It didn't pass. The Equal Pay Resolution, on the other hand, came surprisingly close to going into effect, eventually failing in committee, when the Senate, instead of adopting an amendment that women clerks should be paid the same as men clerks, adopted one that gave department heads the discretion to appoint women into the graded classes of clerks with the accompanying pay. While a few women benefited from those promotions, most, predictably, did not. Still, once women began working for the federal government, they never left. And on June 10, 1963, over 100 years after women began working for the federal government, President John. John F. Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act, which was intended to abolish wage discrimination based on gender. According to the White House, though, as of March, 2024,  "Women workers are still paid on average, only 84 cents for every dollar paid to men." Joining me in this episode is Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh, author of, "This Grand Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil War-Era Washington, DC."

Hi, Jessica. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  11:09  
Thanks for having me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:10  
I want to start by hearing a little bit about how you came to even know about these women who were working for the federal government, how you got interested in writing about this topic.

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  11:21  
Sure, I got my PhD at Johns Hopkins, and when I was thinking about my master's thesis, I've always been interested in the way that women find places to be autonomous or independent in societies that are patriarchal and don't allow for such independence. And so I actually started looking at sex workers during the Civil War. And looking at sex workers actually led me to the Treasury Department scandal of 1864, and that was a scandal that started out about fraud and counterfeiting, but wound up being about the sexuality of women that worked for the Treasury Department in 1864. And that just got me really interested, because at the time, I didn't know that women had worked for the Treasury Department or any federal departments during the Civil War. And so that was kind of my entry point. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:05  
And so I want to understand a little bit about the kinds of sources that you were looking at. It sounds like you had to do a fair amount of database building to sort of pull all these different kinds of records together. So tell me a little bit about that process, what, what we do know, and maybe a little bit where the gaps are, what, what sorts of things we maybe don't know. 

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  12:28  
Sure. Yes, it was definitely database building intensive. So because we're studying quote, unquote, ordinary women, they don't leave a lot of records. And when they get married, most women change their names, so it's really hard to follow them through the documents, even if they're in there to begin with. So I looked at a lot of different documents. One of the main things I looked at was a document called the Federal Register, and that was published every other year, and it listed the names of most, but definitely not all, people that worked for the federal government in these periods. So that was a big starting point. It wasn't, when I was looking at it, digitized in any way. So that was me with my eyeballs on the pages, counting, tabulating. I also used census records. Again, that also wasn't something that was searchable, and so I just read census records at night. I read multiple newspapers for years at a time, and a lot of that was because the words that I was looking for, even if they were searchable, weren't going to result in fruitful searches. So you can't really search woman and expect to kind of get what you're looking for. And I didn't even know what I was looking for, honestly. And as I was creating this database that was searchable by name or occupation, or department, I started recognizing names that I could then search. If I found a woman's name in the newspaper, I could then searched to see if she was in my database, and was she one of these women that worked for the federal government. Ultimately, this had over 3000 names in it, and I also looked at divorce records. I looked at petitions in the Committee of Ways and Means, files, diaries. It was pretty it was pretty broad searching, and it really was just pulling this like ephemera information and being able to organize it in a way that was searchable and quantifiable, and ways that I could use it and to tell a story, to kind of almost create a composite of these women that were so hard to pin down individually. What in the aggregate could I glean from all of this to say something about the women that worked for the federal government in this period?

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:19  
Could you talk a little bit about the kinds of work that we're talking about. You mentioned the Treasury Department. There's a few other departments where they're working in really big numbers. What is it exactly that they're doing in these departments? 

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  14:33  
Got it, and I actually have a whole chapter about this, because it's actually not really a very straightforward or easy question. So when women came in to work for the federal government, it wasn't like Congress said, "Departments you must now hire women." It was individual supervisors within each individual department who was making these choices about what women to bring in, whether to bring women in, and then what those women would do once they were there. So it really was pretty broad. So there were initially. Actually there were a lot of women who, for example, worked for the Senate, and they washed the drapery and they polished the rails. So there was that very domestic labor. There was an institution called the Government Hospital for the Insane, where women cared for female patients, or they were also laundresses or cooks. So a lot of the early labor was definitely more domestic adjacent. And then the big push came in the Treasury Department. But prior to that, the Patent Office had employed women to do a lot of copy work. That was mainly at home. So you would bring the work home, which was considered more respectable, and then you would return it later to the office. So that was copying documents or correspondence. And then women came into the treasury through Spinner, who was the the head of the Treasury Department at the time, and he thought, "Wow, I'm watching these men cut these banknotes with scissors. And I think that women could do this work one, and two, I think I could pay them far less to do it." And so women came in to the Treasury doing that. But once they were in, they branched out, doing all kinds of things. So it's hard in the Federal Register, because while men's jobs were explained in terms of what they were doing, women were just women. So it's really undifferentiated. But we do know that women, for example, they counted currency, which was a tough job for two reasons. It was you had to work really fast, and if you made a mistake, you were personally liable for that money that you miscounted. So the stakes were really high, the pay was really low, and it was challenging. Women also were became experts at redeeming mutilated currency. So if a ship sunk and you went to the bottom, you got it out of the river, and it was all like pieces of paper. Women were in charge of seeing if you could redeem that money. Women in the treasury also helped print the bank notes. We don't know as much about that because they weren't in the Federal Register, but Federal Register, but we do know they were helping with printing. Women worked in the government printing office, helping print reports for the House and the Senate. Women worked at the post office, so they worked mainly in the dead letter office, which was where you redirected wayward mail, so it would just be addressed to something like Carlton in America, or it wouldn't have the full name of the of the addressee, and so men opened letters because the fear was that there would be something scandalous inside. So they earned two to three times what women earned. Women did the intellectual labor of trying to figure out how to get those parcels to the correct recipients. Women worked in the War Department. That was also a lot of copying. Women worked in the Patent Office, which was copying and checking copies. A lot of clerical labor. There were messengers, there were sweepers and scrubbers still. So it was, it was a pretty broad range of jobs that became more standardized as we get into the 1870s. For but for the period that I looked at, it was really very idiosyncratic per supervisor and per department.

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:43  
And some of these jobs, to be clear, were exactly the same jobs that men were doing. 

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  17:48  
Yes, they start, some of them were exactly the same. So, and again, that depends on the supervisor, but clerical work generally, for both sexes, was very undifferentiated at this time. And so some departments took pieces that men were doing and gave it to women. For example, prior to the Civil War and prior to women's work, that that counting labor and that mutilated currency redemption, those weren't specific jobs, but they were peeled off of men's jobs and given to women. But men were all copying stuff. So some of that stuff was exactly the same. Some was deemed by Congress in later debates to be harder than what men were doing in some respects. And then some were more domestic. And then in the Government Hospital for the Insane, for example, men and women attendants did the same kinds of duties, and men would complain, "Oh, we have to scrub the floors too?" So they were very kind of similar in that way. But of course, they were paid half or less than what the men were earning.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:42  
And so I want to talk a little bit about the as women were trying to get these jobs. And you mentioned, at least at first, this was just a little bit sort of haphazard and idiosyncratic. Women weren't like, all of a sudden, told like, "No, you can apply for jobs." Some of them were just trying to find work. So who are these women who are trying to find work? And you talk a lot in the book about the ways they need to present themselves if they want to be successful, and that is very different. Like, if I was going to go look for a job right now, you know, I would need to present myself as, you know, successful and educated and stuff. And that is not the kind of presentation we're talking about here.

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  19:20  
Right. So who the women were, again, in this period when everything is really in flux, they were everyone. They were all over. So this work, even though it was less than half of what men made, it was way more money than women could earn anywhere else, anywhere else in the country at the time. And so all women from all walks and multiple states were applying to these jobs. It's unclear how women were hearing about this, because even before the federal department started hiring women, women were writing to Lincoln asking for jobs. Is there anything one offered to be the governess for his children? So women were really looking for employment. And then it starts to leak out that, for example, the Treasury, which was one of the bigger employers, is employing women. And women from across the country are applying, and some of them are soldiers' widows, who are writing letters that are not grammatically correct or and you can tell that they're not the most educated women. And then some are applying from these they have done a lot of war work. They've done a lot of they were working for sanitation commissions. They have all of these credentials, and they're applying based on their credentials. As the period of the 1860s starts to move on, it starts to become very obvious that applying on your credentials and what you've done is not the way you're going to get a job. And so the that's how men get jobs. Men get jobs because of what they can do. They're what they've done for the politicians in power. So a lot of patronage stuff, a lot of electioneering stuff. Women don't have those options, because women can't vote. Women don't have a lot of disposable income that they are allowed to control themselves. And so it became very clear that the way to get a job was to rely on your your neediness. So the story that you can construct about how needy you are is what's going to get you a job, and it was this ploy for sort of government paternalism to please take care of me and take care of me in the form of giving me this job. And the two things that women really needed to get the job was her story of neediness, one and two, her recommender. So recommenders, I should say, so the women that were successful had a lot of really powerful recommenders. And I just think that's such an interesting juxtaposition of saying, "I'm so needy and so helpless, but also I could garner the support of General Grant or all of these senators or the president of these banks." So it was really, it became very clear that these were constructed narratives of neediness from a lot of these women, because the things that they were doing were so independent and so ambitious at the time, so but, but the the story that you had to tell to get the job was really this one of neediness, and I think that came back to kind of hamstring their efforts to retain their jobs and to receive equal pay for doing them.

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:56  
Yeah. And so you mentioned that they're getting paid, you know, maybe half what the men are in some cases, maybe less, but they still need to survive in DC, which is not an inexpensive place to live at the time. Could you talk a little bit about what it's like to live in DC, how they're managing to survive on what is not a very big income? 

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  22:19  
Yes, I love reading men's petitions for greater salaries, saying, "There's no way we can survive on these salaries." Some men were seeking to build cottages in Baltimore so that they could commute because, oh my gosh, the salary is so low. And male salaries started at $1,200 a year and went up to $1,800 a year, and it changed over the period, but women earned $600 a year for most of the time. Then it went up to 720 and then 900, so clearly they must have been struggling. Washington, DC was a boarding house city. So whereas in other cities that women work, they were still had some kind of social control because they were living with their family, or they were living with kind of communities that they were in, women were really on their own in terms of living in these boarding houses. And a lot of the women that I have, for example, diaries about would were pretty tight with their purse strings, and they were pretty aware of, you know, that someone lost their eyeglasses and thought, oh gosh, this is going to put me in the hole. I don't know how I'm going to recover from this, or their umbrella gets stolen, and they like write about it in their diary, of such a financial burden that that that was, but still, it was so much more money than women could make anywhere else, that they had this freedom, that they could a shop open for the Treasury Department ladies advertising, you know, 25 it was essentially like a 25 cent store, and they were targeting the Treasury ladies, because they did have more disposable income than other women did, typically, on their own. And there was just so much excitement in DC for women. You know, they're on their own, most of them. They're living in mixed sex spaces. They're working in mixed sex places, and it's DC during the Civil War and Reconstruction. So they're going to church with the most famous politicians. They're going to the halls of Congress to listen to debates on the most important things going on. This one woman, if she couldn't get to the debate because work interfered, she would go and find the transcript of the debate and then read it that night. So they would go to parties, they would stay out all night and come home, and it was 7am in the carriage when we got home. So it was a really exciting and there was such freedom for women in ways that there just wasn't in other cities at this time, such freedom and such independence, even though their salaries were lower than that of men. But they made it work, and they also the final thing, they were living in boarding houses, which typically women had to come home working women at this time would have to come home and share domestic labor. And here it was, you didn't have to clean, you didn't have to cook, you that was all taken care of. So you had all of this spare time to devote to other pursuits.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:42  
But all of this freedom and excitement and independence did not, at least did not always translate into supporting women's suffrage, or at least feeling like they could support women's suffrage. Could you talk a little bit about that? You mentioned that they were hamstrung a little bit in the way they had to present themselves as needy, and, you know, if they wanted to keep their jobs and all of that that they had to present a certain picture. So could you talk some about the there's just a complicated relationship, I guess, between the kind of women you might expect that they would become, looking back at it, and the way that the kind of women that they had to be.

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  25:22  
Yes, and so suffrage, the suffrage issue is complicated, like you said. There were some women who were very involved in suffrage. So you had Julia Wilbur, who was known for a lot of work with the Freedmen's Bureau. She was really involved in suffrage, and she was close friends with some of the big names in the suffrage movement. She really struggled to get her job in the pension office at first, and she had tried to register for to vote prior to obtaining a job. She it was the ploy where you would go to register to vote and you'd say, "Women already have this right, like it's already in the Constitution." And her recommender heard that she had done that and said, "Well, you're never going to get a job now." And she ultimately did get a job, which was great, but then the next time that women tried that strategy, she didn't go. And part of the thing was, once you got this job, which was so, so hard to get, and I don't think I've mentioned yet, just the pressure of applicants, there were 1000s of women applying to these jobs constantly, and that's something that you hear about in a lot of the Reports to Congress from the Treasury officials who were making these annual reports or in newspapers, or just the absolute rush of female applicants did not abate. It was just this horde of office seekers and skirts they were called. And so once you got your job, you could not rest on your laurels. You had to that keeping that job was a full time job. And so suffrage was still a very controversial topic, and so a lot of women seemed very uncomfortable putting their necks out to seek female suffrage when their their job was on the line, and they were constantly defending their place and trying to hold their place. So someone could apply for six years, get the job for less than a year and be fired or not fired, but let go, or someone takes their place. At some of the suffrage meetings, male Treasury clerks or male clerks from other departments would come and disrupt the suffrage meetings. So your coworker could be coming in and causing a ruckus, and you don't want to be seen as one of the troublemakers, quote, unquote, and lose your job for it. It's frustrating, though, because I think that that would have been a really powerful symbiotic relationship, had the suffrage the women advancing the cause of suffrage and the women advancing the cause of greater labor equality, had they been able to work together a little bit more, I think it would have been, it could have been a very productive relationship. But the suffrage movement was really focused on suffrage, and the women working were just so frantic to keep to get their jobs and keep their jobs, that they were just really reticent to expose themselves to controversy over suffrage. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:51  
While we're on the subject of controversy, maybe we could talk about the Treasury scandal that you alluded to earlier. So this is, I mean, it's, it's really, it's a shocking sort of sex scandal, so to speak for the day. But it really, what I found so interesting in reading about it was how, how pervasive the idea of it was nationally that people would, you know, talk about, like, Treasury girls as like, code for prostitution like that that was just like a phrase that people used. So, could you talk a little bit about what, what, what's going on there? What is this scandal? And you know how, how the idea of this was sort of, I, I it must have been playing into preconceived notions people had about what these independent women were up to, you know, what they thought they were probably up to anyway, that it had such legs that this scandal, like, kept going, or the idea that kept going?

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  28:54  
Yeah, I think a lot of factors come into play there. So just very basically, the scandal didn't start out as, like a quote, unquote sex scandal, scandal. The Treasury Department had just introduced greenbacks, which was the first time we had national currency, and there was a lot of concern around counterfeiting in national currency. So prior to this, every state had its own currency. Now you have this national currency, and it's like very hard to tell if it's real or not. So there's this whole fear of counterfeiting. And so S.M. Clark, who was working in the Treasury Department, he brought in this scientist to create this paper that you would be protect against counterfeiting. And an investigator, Lafayette C. Baker, came in because there were all these rumors around this. "This is really shady, and people aren't trusting that these greenbacks are legitimate." And so Chase brought in Baker to kind of whitewash the Treasury Department and say, "No, everything is great. Everything looks fine," except Baker came in and said, "Ooh, I don't trust Gwynn," and he arrested him based on evidence that he couldn't later produce. And so Jordan, who was the solicitor of the Treasury, said, "Do you have evidence?" And Baker said, "Yeah, yeah," but he didn't. And so then Gwynn got released and sued Baker, and Baker went to Jordan and said, "If you don't protect me against Gwynn's lawsuits, I'm going to expose all of this stuff that I found out about the Treasury Department and all of these sexual liaisons that are going on." And Jordan essentially called his bluff. And so what Baker did was there was a woman who was an actress in the city. He enlisted her help, and they broke into the hotel room or boarding room of one of the women who worked in the Treasury Department, Ella Jackson. They went through all of her papers and all of her diaries. She was a treasury employee, but she also was an actress, and they went through all of her papers, and they she came home and they said, "Your other roommate," this was totally fabricated, "Your other roommates spilled the beans, told us everything." Ella Jackson then confessed to all of these liaisons that were happening in the department, signed an affidavit. Her roommate came back and signed an affidavit. So anyway, this whole thing just exploded into this sex scandal, and Congress got involved. So the Democrats got involved, and ultimately, this 418 page congressional document was issued where they went through and talked to all the departments of the Treasury. The conclusion, the majority conclusion, written by Garfield, was that, "Nope, this was all Baker's fault. Those women were lying, and everything's hunky dory at the Treasury Department. You don't have to worry about it." The Democrats said, "Oh no, no, no. There was definitely things going on that were not okay," and made these huge, broad brush statements about the morality of the women working in the Treasury Department. Was it true that Baker and Ella Jackson and Jenny German and Laura Duvall? Was it true that they were having liaisons with the men in power? Maybe, probably they were in their late teens, and it was very possible, but we're talking at this time about hundreds of women working for the departments, and so those women kind of the opprobrium that was put on them, and the scandal that was put on them spread throughout the Treasury. And you're right. Newspapers from Maine to Hawaii were reporting that the women that worked for the Treasury Department specifically, but it also bled out into other departments, were sexually promiscuous, and that either they had gotten their jobs because they were corrupted, meaning they were already kind of sex workers, or they were corruptible, meaning they were hired because they were pretty, and men in power thought that they could seduce them. And just what that did to the reputation of women. And again, bringing it back to this was the highest paying, most prestigious job women in the entire country could get at the time. And so you can see this reflected in some of the application letters where women are saying, Look, I've heard the rumor, but I'm not like that. I'm a good woman who is, you know, moral and please hire me at the Treasury." Ultimately, I think I did uncover liaisons among coworkers. I do think there might have been some truth to the Clark scandal, but ultimately, most of the women were not that way, and they were really, you know, just searching for intellectual, high paying work, and I think that also complicated, later, their fight for equal pay for equal work. And also just a side note, and I don't even know if this was in the book, but the reason we don't have living people on US currency is because after that scandal, a year or two after that scandal, S.M. Clark, who was at the heart of this, put his own face on national currency. And Congress was like, "Absolutely not," because they had just been through this with him, and so they passed a law after that. So the women are all fired, but Clark stayed on and put his own face on national currency. It was a five cent note. So

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:15  
Wow. So you just mentioned the fight for equal pay, and it is fascinating how close they got to equal pay, and the some of the arguments really on both sides, for and against equal pay are just kind of riveting reading. I love political history anyways, so I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that. And some of the arguments against are really framed as like protecting the women and protecting their jobs. So what if you could talk some about that? Ultimately, of course, it didn't come to fruition. And even though we have legal protections for equal pay now, still don't really have equal pay. So you know, when we're we're still living in that world. Don't know what would have happened had they achieved equal pay in the 1870s.

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  34:05  
Yeah, that was such it's such a sad it's such an exciting and then ultimately sad story for me. And just like a little bit of kind of behind the scenes, the way that I stumbled across this was, and this is a good reminder to always be nice to archivists, is I was just there all the time. So the employee files are really not organized well at all, and so I would just cull a bunch of employee files, and then I had to put eyeballs on every single file to see, is it a woman? Does she work in my time period? So I was at the archives for so long, and so people got to know me. Archivists got to know me. And one of the archivists said, "Do you want to just come back in the stacks and, like, just poke around?" Because it was just so clear that I was like struggling finding what I needed. And I just was leafing through, and there was this file for Committee on Ways and Means for my time period, and I opened it up, and there were 11, among other things, there were 11 petitions from women with over 700 signatures asking for greater or equal pay during this time period. And they weren't categorized as such in any way. I don't think I ever would have found them besides that serendipity. So what happened there was when women came in. So women came in unofficially, right? But then Congress kind of codified this with the Deficiency Act of March, 1864, and said, "Yes, you may hire women department heads and you may pay them $600." So that kind of capped women's salaries at 600. Women clearly wanted more money, and you see petitions asking for more money for men and women. It went up to 720 in 1865, yeah, January, 1865, and then later it went up to 900 but there start to be petitions from women in the Treasury Department, especially, but also the Post Office and the Government Printing Office, asking for greater pay. And one petition actually asked for equal pay for equal work. They, their statement was, "What makes us so different from them?" They said, "We sit down and we do this exact same job, and the man sitting next to me earns 12,14, 16, $1,800 for this exact same job that I'm doing. Why? What makes us to differ from them?" And so there were four, three debates in the Senate in '67,'69 and '70, and one debate in the House in '70. And I kind of analyzed them in one conversation, because it was the same conversation over and over. And so the arguments for equal pay, I mean, it's obviously very straightforward, and it was Radical Republicans that were leading that charge, and it was, "How do we justify not paying them?" They were all agreeing, "We have all these reports from the Treasury Department heads saying, "Yes, these women are doing work that is absolutely equal to the work of men. Some are saying, if not harder. So, you know, how do we justify paying them so little to do the exact same job?" And then the arguments on the other side, in addition to this kind of paternalistic argument that you had referenced, so you have some people saying, "Well, we can't pay them the same, because if we pay them the same, then they're just going to hire men. So the only reason these heads are hiring them is because they're so much cheaper," and these departments had so much work to do, and their budgets did not increase in relation to how much work they had to do. So for department heads, this was such a windfall, they could get all the work done for half the cost. So Congress was saying, "Well, then they just won't hire them." Even though, like, that's not necessarily what the department heads were saying in their reports to Congress. You also had them, my favorite, most bizarre argument was, "Well, we already have so many applicants to these jobs, and if you make the price, if you make the salary higher, that's just unfair to all the women of America, and so we can't do it." Then you had the economic argument, which was saying, "Look, we we are responsible for the coffers of the nation, and to pay more than we need to to perform the labor is not fair to the people of America." The Radical Republicans on the other side were saying things like, "Yeah, we know that women aren't paid equally in other walks of life and other labor, but shouldn't we set an example for the nation?" And this is coming in a time of reconstruction when they are setting an example for the nation. They're making these massive, sweeping changes to society, with the ending of slavery and the granting of Black men the right to vote. And so they are making these huge changes. And so Republicans are looking at this like, "Well, we should just do this one also, because this is so clearly what is fair and right." And so you're right, in both houses, they passed resolutions saying, "We should pay women equal for equal work," and they just kept falling out in committee. And so then they would come back and say, "I thought we decided this. We voted on this. We decided to play." And it just kept falling out. And at the end, in 1870, what ultimately passed was this bill saying, "Okay, we we will allow department heads to appoint women to those graded class of clerks, so the 12, 14, 16, $1800. We'll let department heads do that, right?" And one of the Radical Republicans said, "Yeah, the result is going to be that they don't do that. Because why would they spend more money?" And that was exactly what had happened. So there were this small flurry of appointments in 1870, 1870, 1871, that suggested that people had been waiting for the chance to promote these women. But ultimately, it really didn't go anywhere. And the problem with their pay scale wasn't only that it was way too low, it was also that it was flat, and so women who were excellent at their jobs had very almost no mobility. There are some women I found snuck in, truly snuck in, because they just dropped the Miss or Mrs. off their name and stuck them in the register of a graded clerk. But for the most part, the least effective employee was paid the same as the most effective employee, and there was no way for a woman to advance, really, and that also did not help the women's sign of longer term employment prospects.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:21  
So at various points, this is referred to as an experiment, right? A grand experiment of women working. So I guess the question is, like, did the experiment succeed?

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  39:32  
I know it's it's so tricky. I so in some ways Yes, right? In some ways, yes, because women never left the federal government after this period. So in 1859 you had 18 names on the Federal Register of employees that were women. They all worked at the Government Hospital for the Insane in those very domestic jobs. By 1871, you had 922 women on the Federal Register. And because there was so much movement and volatility in that workforce, 1000s of women worked for the federal government in this time period. So women never left those payrolls. And so once they were in, they never left. So in that and they proved themselves to be very capable employees. And so in that respect, it was a successful experiment in that, yes, can women do these jobs and do them? Well, absolutely. But what's frustrating is that it was kind of a failed experiment, because they weren't really seeing if women could do the jobs and do the jobs well. They were seeing if they could jam women in and their understanding of women in terms of what women want, need, deserve. Could they jam those preconceived notions of women into the federal government with a nice added benefit of cost saving? And so it was, so frustrating, because you see this moment of possibility that really should have happened, and it just didn't. So it's, I think it was a flawed experiment, is my kind of answer, in that it didn't really set out to prove what women were trying to prove that they could do the jobs, do them well and deserve equal pay for doing them.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:57  
If listeners would like to read in more detail, how can I get a copy of your book? 

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  41:03  
Oh, I think it's available on Amazon, and it's definitely available at UNC Press, and it's come out in paperback as well, so you can find it there too.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:11  
Is there anything else you want to make sure we talk about? 

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  41:15  
Just when I think back on this, I think about how the story gets lost that the union was able to prosecute the Civil War in part, at least by exploiting the labor of women. So it exploited the labor of women in the federal departments. Spinner came out and said, "There is no way we could have done this without underpaying women. We could not have prosecuted the war without underpaying women." You have you see that in other labor that women did as well, like benevolence, work, nursing, it was all the exploitation of female labor that was a really, in no small part, helped the union prosecute the war. And I think that story gets lost a lot. And then the other thing is just, I think this also hits home with that the privileged really bear responsibility to affect change for those that are underprivileged. Because the thing that was very frustrating was watching these women struggle to keep their jobs, struggle to make it work, being underpaid in DC, and then also bore the responsibility of earning equal pay, even though people didn't step in really and help them, because they didn't have the time, money, and effort to achieve the justice that they deserved. And it would have been nice to see privilege more privileged people come in and support them more.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:23  
Jessica, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It's fascinating story.

Dr. Jessica Ziparo McHugh  42:28  
Thank you for having me.

Teddy  42:44  
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