This Grand Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil War–Era Washington, D.C

Abstract

Despite its nineteenth-century context, Jessica Ziparo's This Grand Experiment feels very relevant. Here is a story about the (gender) politics of space that illustrates the “dangers of accessibility” for women in previously male-only spaces enduring “unwanted attention from coworkers,” sometimes daily (p. 160). It is a tale of mixed success, but one highlighting a “key achievement”: “not giving up despite repeated failures, opposition, and unfairness” (p. 226). The journalist and federal employee Jane Swisshelm provided the title, one that Ziparo persuasively complicates. While not “grand”—“this is not a triumphant narrative”—it was emphatically an “experiment” (p. 8). What is more, this experiment in federal employment transformed what Representative Anthony Rogers called an “irregularity” to “a regular part of the nation's bureaucratic operation” (p. 14). The book “is structured to follow the life cycle of a woman's federal appointment,” one that moves, nonetheless, in a loosely chronological way, from application to hiring; from the jobs and spaces women inhabited to their daily lives outside work; from the ways their sexuality was exploited inside and outside their respective departments to their struggle to retain cherished positions and to obtain equal pay for equal work (p. 12). Ziparo draws from a multiplicity of sources, among them the Federal Register, newspapers, diaries, congressional reports, photographs, and the census. Her close readings illuminate even small references to the women working for the federal government, but she also carefully outlines the limitations of erratic record keeping, especially regarding African Americans, the poor, and laborers.