Increasingly, society fretted about what to do with these “surplus” women. Some male authorities said the problem was too much education and not enough focus on domestic skills. “Girls are being prepared daily, by ‘superior education’ to engage, not in childbearing and housework, but in clerkships, telegraphy, newspaper-writing, school-teaching etc.,” complained Nathan Allen in the Journal of Psychological Medicine. In 1883, the suffragist and social reformer Mary Livermore addressed the subject of “superfluous” women in her popular and widely reprinted lecture “What Shall We Do with Our Daughters?” She rejected the idea that unmarried women were somehow extra or useless. “Who are the women whom the social scientists insult with the adjective ‘superfluous,’ at whom misogynists sneer as ‘old maids,’ and whom sociologists brand as ‘social failures’?” she asked. “A glance at them reveals the fact, that in many instances they are the most useful women in society,” she said. What single women needed, said Livermore, was not less education, but more, as well as “fair remuneration” for their work and an opportunity to enter the “higher fields of labor”—the professions like law and medicine jealously guarded by men.
Jennie unwittingly found herself at the cutting edge of the debate about “surplus” women. Her family could no longer support her. By 1888, out of money and other options, her mother had begun quietly taking summer boarders, a haunting reminder of her own family’s downfall, when her mother ended up running a boardinghouse to make ends meet after her father’s death. With no jobs available near home, Jennie did what young women around the country were doing: she made her way alone to the city to work, something that would have been unimaginable for a woman of her social status just a decade earlier. She worked for a time at R. H. Stearns, the best department store in Boston, doing fancy embroidery. Then she returned home and gave lessons in needlework and took custom embroidery orders. The continued encroachment of factories was making the needle trades less profitable than ever, so she turned toward what was about to become the biggest advance in employment opportunities for women in the nineteenth century: office work.
Traditionally, offices had employed male clerks who worked mainly as copyists, laboriously writing out in longhand copies of letters that their bosses had scribbled out in draft. The dual introductions of stenography and typewriters revolutionized office work right as the industrial boom created an explosion in the number and kinds of businesses that needed clerical help. “Five years ago the typewriter was simply a mechanical curiosity,” noted Penman’s Art Journal in 1887. “Today its monotonous click can be heard in almost every well regulated business establishment in the country.” Who better to fill the suddenly insatiable demand for office workers than the thousands upon thousands of educated “surplus” women? They could be had cheaper than men and, unlike male clerks, there was no expectation that they were looking to move up in the business. The National Stenographer reported the existence of exactly “six women shorthand writers” in Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1874. By the early 1890s, there were more than five thousand. “In every large down-town building in New York there are now employed dozens, and in some cases, hundreds of women,” effused the 1890 catalog for the Albany Business College, one of the many secretarial schools that had sprung up to train office workers for jobs that paid upward of five dollars an hour, making office work by far the best-paying job available to most women.
Employing women in public spaces, however, ran up against long-standing prohibitions against respectable women mingling with strange men. In 1854, the U.S. Patent Office hired three women copyists, including thirty-three-year-old Clara Barton, and put them to work in its Washington office until Interior Secretary Robert McClelland ended the practice the following year. “I have no objection to the employment of the females by the Patent Office … in the performance of such duties as they are competent to discharge, and which may be executed by them at their private residences,” he said, “but there is such an obvious impropriety in the mixing of the sexes within the walls of a public office, that I am determined to arrest the practice.”
When Dr. Isabel Barrows became the first woman to take shorthand for congressional committees in the early 1870s (to supplement her practice as the country’s first woman ophthalmologist), her boss told her to sign her vouchers “I.B.” so that no one would know there was a woman working on Capitol Hill. That worked fine until the day she was told to report to the sergeant at arms to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. When “the gentleman whose initials are I.B.” was called, there were “surprised whispers and a few loud guffaws” as Isabel stepped forward. The sergeant at arms “paled a bit” but plowed forward. “I.B., will you raise your right hand,” he said. Isabel did and was duly sworn in “as a roar of laughter rose to the dome of the Capitol.”
A few years later, when another pioneering stenographer named Nettie White became the first woman to take shorthand for the Committee on Military Affairs, she brought along a friend “to accompany her to keep her as well as the ‘Members’ in countenance,” quite aware of the danger to her reputation of going alone into a room full of men. The inference was that any woman who would mingle with strange men must be sexually available—or might become so for the right inducement.
Indeed in 1864, only three years after the U.S. government again began employing women in offices because of the shortage of male clerks during the Civil War, the “Treasury courtesan” scandal rocked Washington when female clerks in the Treasury Department complained of widespread sexual harassment by their supervisors. A special congressional committee was formed to investigate the charges. One man testified that his sixteen-year-old daughter had been forced to work by her supervisor Mr. Gray until ten o’clock at night six nights in a row and said that he propositioned her, telling his daughter “if she would go with him (Gray) to a certain hotel in this city and submit to his (Gray’s) wishes, he (Gray) would raise her salary to $75 per month.” Jennie Germon, who worked for the National Currency Bureau, testified that her supervisor “came to me in the office and asked me to come to his private residence,” which she did the following Saturday night, and they “went to a private bedroom, and both occupied the same bed until morning.”
The discomfort caused by employing women in public offices had to do with the difficulty people now faced in distinguishing between “good” and “bad” women, notes the historian Cindy Sondik Aron, as “all female clerks (innocent or guilty) now behaved in ways that would previously have been defined as improper: they approached and asked favors of strange men, [and] they conversed and formed friendships with men to whom they had not been properly introduced.” For a time when women first entered the workforce and public spaces, attempts were made to keep them separate from men, with segregated offices and special ladies-only tearooms, waiting rooms in train stations, and reception rooms in hotels. But the sheer need for office workers and the logistical difficulties of segregating women eventually overcame the reluctance to place women in the same physical spaces as men. When the revolution finally came, noted one historian of clerical work, it came “rather quietly, on high-buttoned shoes.” In 1870, fewer than 5 percent of stenographers and typists were women; by 1880, 40 percent were, and by 1890, nearly 65 percent of all office workers were women.
It was in 1890 that Jennie did what thousands of other women were doing—she enrolled in secretarial school: Hickox’s School of Shorthand and Typewriting in Boston. By the spring of 1891, she had graduated and was excited to take her first job, in the office of a shoe factory paying ten dollars per week. But instead of using the shorthand she had so laboriously perfected, Jennie found herself copying page after page of tiny numbers in longhand, a task that bothered her eyes and one that she apparently fumbled, because the job didn’t last.
Next, she got a job at the West End Street Railway, where she more than got to use her shorthand. West End operated the electric streetcars that were transforming cities like Boston, creating an affordable urban public tra
nsportation system and giving rise to a new nether land of neither city nor country called a suburb. Streetcars were fast and efficient—a little too much so. Nearly every week the speeding street-level cars were involved in an accident with a hapless pedestrian or horse-drawn vehicle. Jennie’s job was to take the shorthand reports of the accident testimony. It was grueling work, ten hours a day, six days a week; one day she took the testimonies of twenty-five men. This “office is an awfully hard place,” she told her mother. She grew weary of not only the pace of the work but also the gory accident reports, although eventually she did develop a sort of gallows humor about it. “I suppose you have noticed in the paper that we’ve killed another man,” she wrote home. “It does make such a lot of work to have a death; if they would only be satisfied to get their legs or arms cut off, it would save me a lot of work. This poor fellow’s head was smashed almost flat.”
Nonetheless, Jennie loved city life. She had lots of acquaintances in Boston and rarely lacked for company. She visited friends on her day off, went to the theater every chance she got, acted in a few plays, and frequented the bargain counters of the Boston department stores looking for the latest fashionable update to her wardrobe. She was so busy that her mother complained that she was “going all the time” and accused her daughter of being “morbidly restless and seeking excitement.” Jennie did have a restless nature, or maybe she just wanted more than what life offered a ten-dollar-a-week working girl.
In May 1892, she took a new job at the W. A. Boland Company that she hoped would be easier work for the same money. It was short-lived. By the fall, Jennie had decided to try her luck in New York City. She got a room in a respectable boardinghouse after making inquiries at the local Young Women’s Christian Association and signed on with an employment agency. Her first job was with a life insurance company. It lasted for exactly one week. “I stood it as long as I could and then I just got out,” she told her mother, because “the man I had to work for was a regular fiend.” She didn’t say exactly what had transpired, only that he was “the ugliest man I ever struck,” so it’s not hard to imagine what happened.
Just when it seemed like she would never find a job that didn’t involve grueling, monotonous work or a lecherous boss, she got the call to work for Charles Stoll. She knew at once the job was different. “I have at last ‘found location,’” she wrote home triumphantly. “I am perfectly delighted with my position.” Stoll, she said, was “a real southern gentleman” and was “the kindest and nicest man to work for.” He treated Jennie as an equal; he actually took her to lunch, which, she said, “seems so nice after the hard times I’ve had.” The pay was more than she had ever made—fifteen dollars per week—and the hours a luxurious 9:30 to 4:30. When Stoll needed her to work late, traveling with him on the L train or the ferry taking shorthand as they went along, “he always makes it up in some kindness or other,” she said. She also had real responsibility and autonomy. Stoll traveled frequently, and she handled his mail and attended to whatever she could in his absence. Before long, she was managing the office. Flush with success, Jennie donned her very best dress and sat for a photograph at New York’s most fashionable portrait studio and sent it home—proof that she had finally made it.
Unfortunately, Jennie’s dream job didn’t last much longer than the others did. By March 1893, with the whole country reeling from the financial panic, she wrote home that she was worried about her job. “The money market has been very high and this also effects Mr. Stoll’s business,” she told her mother. The blows, when they came, came close together. By the end of April, all that she had left of her job was a glowing letter of recommendation from Stoll. At the end of May, she learned her sister Patty had cancer. By October, Jennie was back from the World’s Fair and again working for the West End Street Railway. It seemed as if her life had circled back upon itself. “I do hope Patty will get through all right, for it does seem as if she had so much more to live for than you or I,” Jennie wrote gloomily to her sister Maude. “Somehow we don’t get much fun or happiness out of life and haven’t as much of a desire to hang on to life wereas [sic] she has … I am sure I don’t care a cuss whether I live or die.”
By January, even her job at West End was gone and Patty was dead. Jennie was in mourning not just for her sister, but for how her own life had turned out. She was unemployed and in debt. “I hardly know what I want to do,” she wrote forlornly to her mother. It’s no wonder that when the request came from Stoll, no matter how unconventional the assignment was, it seemed that Jennie had little to lose.
8
For the Likes of Me
Congressman Breckinridge made his first public appearance since the scandal broke when he spoke in Congress on September 28, 1893, in support of a bill to repeal the last vestiges of federal oversight of southern polling places—the Democrats’ revenge for the so-called force bill. He appeared confident—unconcerned about the galleries crowded with curious onlookers who pointed when he rose to speak. “Mr. Breckinridge never was heard to better advantage,” noted the Post. “His tones were never mellower nor more magnetic, his picturesque, highly colored periods rolled out with rhythmic plentitude, crowding one after another, his white locks tossed above flashing blue eyes.” But he could not escape the scandal hanging over him. When he dismissed a Republican colleague who opposed the bill, Congressman Henry Johnson shot back, “There are other things the gentleman might like to dismiss; but the people will not dismiss them.”
There was mounting evidence that the scandal was beginning to erode Breckinridge’s political support. One Frankfort, Kentucky, paper reported there was “growing opinion that the Congressman is guilty”; the Frankfort Call demanded his resignation. There were rumblings from home that several challengers were looking to form political “clubs,” which were what the loosely organized campaigns run by supporters were called, to challenge him in the Democratic primary amid reports that he was hamstrung in Congress because of the scandal. “I did not believe the tide would turn so soon,” he wrote to his son Desha, even as he assured supporters that he was as influential as ever in what he said was the “most important session to the Democrats that we have ever had since before the war”—their big chance to turn the tide on the Republicans’ expansive vision of the federal government.
The Pollard scandal was only the most visible of Breckinridge’s woes. Behind the scenes, his family also was in turmoil. In July, just as the situation with Madeline was coming to a head, Breckinridge received word that his twenty-three-year-old son, Robert, had been arrested in Lexington after nearly killing a man in a fight. “Keep Bob locked up until I get there,” he cabled to John Shelby and rushed home to deal with his younger son, who had long been the most problematic of his children—Robert’s main occupations being drinking and gambling. Breckinridge was constantly paying off his gambling debts. Bob had “no apparent aim in life or desire to do anything,” he complained to his daughter Nisba, saying that all he did was “sleep all morning, ride with some girl all afternoon and go somewhere at night.” In the fall of 1891, Bob became locally “notorious,” according to his father, when he got in a knockdown fight with the son of a well-known Lexington preacher “over the hand of a Blue Grass beauty for a certain dance” at the Governor’s Ball, as the New York Times reported, noting that the “prominence of the parties … makes this the sensation of the hour.”
Breckinridge pushed his son to go to work, but by the spring of 1892 he wrote to Nisba that Bob had been “more or less under the influence of liquor since about February” and had “bought poison & was going to kill himself” after he got caught forging checks in his father’s name. “We are making a mighty effort to save Robert,” he wrote, as he used his connections and a cash inducement to get the captain of the British steamer Hilston to take Bob on as an apprentice in hopes a long sea journey would shock him out of his dissolute life. “This is the damnedest mess I ever got into,” Bob lamented to his father in a note he sent back by tugboat as the Hi
lston departed for Calcutta. Bob returned home in March 1893, but by July was again in jail for a drunken brawl. Breckinridge again got Bob released and again signed him up to work on a ship—this time an Australian steamer departing from New York in mid-August. Bob read about the Pollard suit in the newspaper the day before his ship left. “Lock father up and keep him until I get there,” he telegraphed to Shelby, no doubt with a grin on his face. Days later, he jumped ship in Savannah and disappeared on a freighter headed to New Orleans.
Then there was Breckinridge’s new wife, Louise. Just the previous winter she had been thrilled to be on his arm as he escorted her to functions around Washington. Her letters gushed with her delight at finding love so unexpectedly after a long period of widowhood: she told Breckinridge to always refer to her as the “Happiest Woman in Washington.” Yet, by September, just six weeks after their wedding, Louise was decidedly unwell. In mid-September, Breckinridge told Desha she had suffered a “right serious attack” and was “still confined to bed.” In late September, Breckinridge wrote that Louise was still indisposed. As the fall slipped into winter, it became increasingly apparent that what was ailing his wife wasn’t physical. “She does not sleep well, has little or no appetite, and her nervous system is out of gear,” Breckinridge wrote to Desha just after the New Year, admitting that he was “a little anxious” about her condition.
Bringing Down the Colonel Page 12