This grand experiment : when women entered the federal workforce in Civil War-era Washington, D.C / jessica Ziparo.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

We are not playthings -- I wonder if I cannot make application for an appointment too: women join the federal workforce -- Telling her story to a man: applying for government work -- Teapots in the treasury of the nation: gendering work and space -- A strange time to seek a residence in Washington: perils and possibilities of life for female federal clerks -- The picked prostitutes of the land: reputations of female federal employees -- I am now exerting all my thinking powers: women's struggle to retain and to regain federal positions -- What makes us to differ from them?: the argument for equal pay in the nation's capital -- We do not intend to give up.

In the volatility of the Civil War, the federal government opened its payrolls to women. Although the press and government officials considered the federal employment of women to be an innocuous wartime aberration, women immediately saw the new development for what it was: a rare chance to obtain well-paid, intellectually challenging work in a country and time that typically excluded females from such channels of labor. Thousands of female applicants from across the country flooded Washington with applications. Here, Jessica Ziparo traces the struggles and triumphs of early female federal employees, who were caught between traditional, cultural notions of female dependence and an evolving movement of female autonomy in a new economic reality. In doing so, Ziparo demonstrates how these women challenged societal gender norms, carved out a place for independent women in the streets of Washington, and sometimes clashed with the female suffrage movement.

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