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.