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In war days, when tens of thousands of men were withdrawn from civil labor, and when one day’s expense to the Government equalled a whole year’s in the time of Washington, General Spinner went to Secretary Chase and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.