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  • This Grand Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil War–Era Washington, D.C by Jessica Ziparo
  • Catherine A. Jones
This Grand Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil War–Era Washington, D.C.
Jessica Ziparo
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017
352 pp., $39.95 (cloth); $29.99 (e-book)

During the Civil War thousands of women came to Washington, DC, to take part in a critical wartime experiment: women’s employment in the rapidly expanding federal government. The women who surged forward to demand jobs helped make the capital a proving ground for changing understandings of gender equality. This Grand Experiment presents a vivid account of female federal employees who sustained the wartime government and challenged women’s exclusion from public life, a story largely absent from the historiography. In this compelling book, Jessica Ziparo carefully teases out the ways female federal employees both conformed to and challenged nineteenth-century gender conventions and how those conventions determined much about women’s working lives. In so doing, This Grand Experiment provides new insight into a critical question of the Civil War era: why did wartime disruptions to gendered order fail to yield enduring changes to women’s status?

By triangulating meticulous research in government application files with census records, newspapers, and personal papers, Ziparo transforms spare documents into revealing windows into the lives of women who came to the capital to work for the federal government. Grounded in a database of more than three thousand female federal employees (and aspirants), This Grand Experiment examines how women gained employment, the nature of their work, the ways the media represented female federal workers, and how their work intersected with larger debates about the meaning of equality. Ziparo demonstrates that women who succeeded in navigating the narrow pathways into federal employment found work that ranged from stimulating to enervating but that was always colored by the threat that their tenures might end abruptly. As she notes, the records provide greatest insight into the lives of white, middle-class clerical workers, yet they also hint at the diversity of the female federal workforce, including immigrants, African Americans, and disabled women. Ziparo’s holistic approach to examining women’s working lives reflects a key insight of gender scholarship on the Civil War era: that understanding women’s participation in politics requires recognizing how tenuous the distinctions between private and public life actually were.

Ziparo makes a convincing argument for the larger importance of the “experiment” in women’s public employment in Washington, DC, in part by demonstrating how closely it was observed by the nation’s press. The very fact of treating women’s employment as an experiment raised the stakes of questions like what work women could perform and under what conditions. Ziparo demonstrates that women sought federal employment primarily because of financial need and that managers who hired them did so because they could pay them less — about half what men were paid for the same work. Fitting the novelty of women’s federal employment into gendered conventions required [End Page 136] applicants to foreground need rather than skill, even as their assertive actions often belied the narratives of dependence they were obliged to perform. The failure of the highly experienced Dr. Mary Walker, “a bloomer wearing suffragist” (55) to secure federal employment demonstrated the hazards of stepping outside convention. By minimizing women’s standing as employees, the hiring process and the press defaulted to “depicting female federal employees as either depraved whores or noble widows” (140). While some of the challenges attending women’s federal employment were certainly peculiar to the mid-nineteenth century, others, like sexual harassment, inadequate compensation, and exhausting commutes seem strikingly current. One of the great strengths of This Grand Experiment is the way its analysis attends both to the materiality of women’s work and to women’s discursive performances of gender. Like Kate Masur’s scholarship, This Grand Experiment demonstrates that the District’s importance to Civil War–era politics went beyond its being the seat of the federal government to include the way the city space itself created opportunities and challenges for its burgeoning population.

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