Three winters ago, by act of Congress, she was allowed to place her insane son in the Lunatic Asylum here, free of charge, leaving her at liberty to assist her daughter in the support of her young family. Notwithstanding her war services, and the names of twenty prominent men in her native State attached to her papers, it took her six months to obtain, for herself and daughter, the chances to labor which she sought. “Sorrow does not kill,” she says, and as we look into her beaming eyes, we say it does not even extinguish the brightness of a soul forever young,—and yet this lady, in a few eventful years, “lived through sorrow enough to break any heart less stout than hers.”
In the Patent Office, fifty-two women clerks are allowed by law. A few women are employed in copying Pension Rolls in the Pension Office, who have a room provided for them in the Patent Office. Ten or twelve women have work given them from the Patent Office, which they do at their homes. This work, as well as that done in the Office, consists chiefly of the drawing of models. Every model of all the tens of thousands received in the Patent Office, from the beginning to the present day, has thus been re-produced and preserved. Glazed transparent linen is placed over the engraved lines, and through this, with ink and stencil, the most intricate and exquisite lines are drawn. To do this work perfectly, a lady must be something of an artist and draughtswoman. Magnifying glasses are used, and even with their aid, the work is most trying, and often destructive to the eyesight. The salary fixed for this work is ten hundred dollars per annum. Those who take their work home, and are paid by the piece, make as much as those who give the work will allow. Here, of course, is a large opportunity for favoritism and injustice. Thus favorites are often allowed to do twice their share, while others get barely work enough to subsist.
The Agricultural Department affords temporary employment for numbers of women, for two or three months of the year, and two have permanent positions there. The temporary work is the putting up of seeds for universal distribution, and occasionally copying is given out. Of the two ladies who find constant employment there, one is the assistant of Professor Glover, in taking charge of the Museum. She is the widow of a western editor, and at one time had exclusive control of a public journal (an agricultural one,) herself. She is a woman of large intelligence, a proficient in botany and natural history, which fact gave her, her present position, and enabled her to fill it with credit to herself. The other lady employé is a taxidermist, who prepares the birds and insects for the Museum. The officers of this Department regard her as a proficient in her profession. She is a German, has been connected with the Department over six years, and has a room provided for her in the beautiful agricultural building.
Woman’s work in the Government Printing-Office, remains yet to be noticed, but enough has been mentioned, to prove its value in other branches of the Civil Service. It would be strange if so large a hive held no drones. It is doubtless true, that while many women are not only qualified, but actually perform the duties of the highest class desks, for an unjust pittance, many more do not even earn their nine hundred dollars per annum. There could be no more striking proof of the inequality and injustice which prevail in our Civil Service, than the fact that such persons, men and women, are appointed by men in power, really to be supported by the Government, and receive from that Government, for inefficiency and idleness, all, and more, than is paid often to the most intellectual, the most efficient, the most devoted of its servants.
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.