Читать книгу Belva Lockwood - Jill Norgren - Страница 9

The notion of political equality for women was so radical that for a long time it was virtually impossible even to imagine woman suffrage.

Ellen Carol DuBois, 1987

The Universal Franchise Association first met at a Pennsylvania Avenue building known as Spiritualists Hall but later moved to the space that the Lockwoods provided at the Union League building. The UFA welcomed men as members, but the elected positions of chair and secretary were filled by women who managed the association and represented it in public.¹ After Julia Holmes and Josephine Griffing each served as president, Belva took office in 1870. Holmes was a widely traveled woman whose husband had finessed a political appointment from Lincoln but, in the late 1860s, in their group, Josephine Griffing was the star, an activist with years of experience who regularly corresponded with other influential reformers.² Lockwood was the less knowledgeable partner, a newcomer on the periphery of suffrage and temperance politics.

The women started the UFA hoping for a measure of positive influence on public opinion. The congressional debate over S.1 had been respectful, but the behavior of the public and the press was another matter. Rowdy opponents could, and did, reduce public UFA meetings to chaos. Men came just to hiss and boo speakers. As a child, Allen Clark, a Lockwood family friend, watched as bystanders threw vegetables and rolled metal plates among the chairs.³ He developed great admiration for the bravery of these “suffragettes,” then a term of derision. Lockwood and her reform colleagues were, he wrote, “martyrs without seeking credit for their martyrdom. They endured the abuse in silence [and] were of strong spirit which ridicule could not swerve.”⁴

Belva thought that the press wanted to “break” the UFA. She wrote that as soon as the regular meetings of the association took on a “serious air,” reporters began to show a “special talent in ridicule.”⁵ They described the heckling and rolling tinware with smug satisfaction and threatened to print the name of any woman who attended a meeting of the UFA.⁶ This bullying, along with what Lockwood called the “fusilade of ludicrous reports,” scared away many ladies who were curious about suffrage reform but afraid to have their husbands come to the breakfast table and learn from newspaper gossip that their wives were inclined toward women’s rights.⁷ What was apparently not remarkable was the racially integrated nature of UFA membership. Local newspapers noted, without comment, the presence of “ladies and gentlemen of both colors.”⁸

UFA officers bore the insults directed at them with dignity and continued to call meetings although it was also difficult to draw diffident women to gatherings that spun out of control when the police “join[ed] hands with the mob.”⁹ Reluctantly, the officers decided to impose an admission fee, hoping to put a check on the “rabble.” “Strangely enough,” Lockwood reported, “so great had the interest become, the crowd increased instead of lessening, and night after night Union League Hall was crowded, until the coffers of the association contained nearly $1000.”¹⁰ In 1869 the association’s executive committee passed a resolution to spend this money on a lecture series devoted to the question of equal political rights for women. Lockwood, UFA secretary, and Griffing, then president, organized the series, beseeching leading personalities of the day to “favor” them with a talk. They succeeded in scheduling the much sought after Anna Dickinson, “queen of the lyceum,” humoristsatirist Petroleum V. Nasby (David Locke), author Bret Harte, Stanton, Anthony, and Belva’s future boss, newspaperman Theodore Tilton.¹¹

Lockwood adopted a practical attitude toward the press. She believed that editors could be won over with goodwill. To enhance the group’s reputation, as well as her own, she became adept at producing a steady stream of news items for the daily papers. Although many of Lockwood’s contemporaries disparaged journalism, she never mocked the men of the newsroom. Living in downtown Washington, close to the offices of the Star and other papers, she was able to visit with editors and staff, and to befriend them. At national suffrage conventions she offered resolutions of gratitude to local reporters “for their courtesy.”¹² She had a natural feel for the art of public relations, and her attention to the press paid off. Increasingly, reporters and editors treated her and the issue of women’s rights with deference.

At the end of the Civil War women like Lockwood expected that the significant energy of the abolitionist and women’s movements would be jointly focused upon winning national legislation, or a constitutional amendment, barring the use of race or sex in the determination of voting rights. For more than two decades members of the antislavery and women’s movements had worked closely, sharing leaders and the common language of natural rights. But in 1865, only weeks after the victory of the North, Elizabeth Cady Stanton learned that prominent advocates of African-American citizenship and voting rights planned to abandon the fight to enfranchise women, limiting their campaign to black manhood suffrage. Wendell Phillips, president of the Anti-Slavery Society, declared that the “hour belongs to the negro” and that Reconstruction politics could not bear the weight of women’s aspirations.¹³ Stanton, a long-time friend, quickly fired off a letter in which she asked, “Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?”¹⁴

For the next five years a fight to define the terms of this suffrage-reform debate enveloped these two civil rights movements. Initially, Stan-ton, Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Lucretia Mott, along with male allies, including Theodore Tilton, tried to win back the support of their anti-slavery society colleagues with a renewed appeal for the “equal rights of all.” In May 1866 they formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), with Stanton asking whether the time had not come “to bury the black man and the woman in the citizen?”¹⁵ Within a month of its founding, however, Congress approved a constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth, which established modest guarantees of male African-American voting rights while ignoring the question of women.¹⁶ AERA members protested, sending to Congress petitions that legislators refused to introduce into floor debate. The amendment assailed women’s sense of justice but, with a bitter irony, it also disappointed many male reformers who had hoped for a stronger statement of impartial male voting rights.

The limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified by the states and made part of the federal Constitution in 1868, meant that the nation’s examination of its political conscience continued through the elections of 1867 and 1868. Christmas 1868 brought the bold decision of congressional Republicans that, despite recent setbacks at the polls, they would support a Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise African-American men.¹⁷ Proponents of woman suffrage immediately pressed their former allies to reject anything other than a universal suffrage amendment, again to no avail. With violence against African Americans rising in the South, and the Republican Party leadership envisioning a greatly expanded base of voters if the more than one million freedmen were enfranchised, virtually no member of Congress was willing to jeopardize passage by asking that women be added to the list of citizens to be protected in their political rights.

Stanton and Anthony came into this fight with tarnished reputations. Stanton, in particular, was increasingly spoken of as a radical critic—of religion, men, and the laws of marriage and divorce. The two women vociferously opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, debated in Congress during January and February 1869 and sent out to the states for ratification in March. But in speaking against the “aristocracy of sex” that the amendment would establish, Stanton abandoned measured language.¹⁸ Anthony defended her friend. She wrote the editor of the New York Times that Stanton did not object “to the voting of ignorant men per se, but that she most strenuously protests against the principle and the practice that gives them civil and political superiority over…women.”¹⁹

Recognizing the likely ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, in the early spring of 1869 the Stanton-Anthony faction prevailed upon Radical Republican George Julian to introduce into Congress a Sixteenth Amendment that would enfranchise women. In May these women, a group that included Lockwood’s colleague Josephine Griffing, traveled to New York City for a meeting of the near-moribund AERA. At the convention hall they presented a plan: their faction would discontinue its effort to block the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment if the association would pledge its immediate support of Julian’s bill.²⁰

The convention was a contentious meeting of friends who had fallen into hopeless bickering over interpretations of democratic theory, strategy, and ego. Delegates who championed the Fifteenth Amendment refused to endorse the Julian initiative, still arguing that debate on the woman suffrage question could threaten ratification of African-American manhood suffrage.²¹ Frederick Douglass was one of several speakers who insisted that woman’s cause was not as urgent as “the shield of suffrage” needed by freedmen facing the violence of the “Ku-Kluxes.”²² Exasperated, Anthony told him he would not “exchange his sex & color, wronged as he is, with [the woman] Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”²³

The Equal Rights Association had been tottering, and now it fell. Stanton, Anthony, Griffing, and a number of other reformers, impatient, bitter, and fearful that the power of the Radical Republicans was waning and that the delay demanded by the Douglass faction would defer woman suffrage indefinitely, quit AERA, determined to form an independent women’s rights organization. Two days after the close of the AERA convention, they announced the creation of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). These break-away delegates pledged to work for a federal woman suffrage amendment and to do everything in their power to block ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Six months later AERA members who supported the Fifteenth Amendment formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Built around the leadership of several notable New Englanders, including Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell, the “Americans” committed themselves to woman suffrage only after ratification of the manhood suffrage amendment, and to the recruitment of men in the “management” of the association.²⁴ After the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the efforts of AWSA members focused on reform of state constitutions. Twenty-one years would pass before the two factions reunited as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Lockwood did not join the anti–manhood suffrage lobby in the winter of 1869 or participate in the meetings that led to the creation of the NWSA. She was sidelined, being nine months pregnant and then busy with her young daughter, Jessie, born January 28. She relied on Josephine Griffing to represent the UFA and to bring news to her. When the time came to declare loyalties, she became a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association. While she supported voting rights for freedmen, she had personal ties to Griffing and Anthony and believed, as they did, that female citizens should not have to wait any longer for their political rights. This group also attracted her because its founding members championed equal educational and employment opportunities for women, and for a number of years had lobbied for the reform of laws that gave husbands absolute control of their wives’ assets and earnings. Lockwood liked their willingness to bundle social, economic, and political rights. As she later told an interviewer, she had first taken an interest in woman suffrage because of the “inequality that prevailed between the payment of men and women for identical work.”²⁵

For an energetic woman who liked to be in charge and in the thick of things, Lockwood’s “confinement” must have been a trial. She curtailed her public activities for as short a period as was respectable and then, with paid household help as well as support provided by Lura and Ezekiel, she resumed her life as an activist. She wrote that the baby, her “little blossom,” did not prevent her from doing “a great amount of work in benevolent causes.”²⁶ Temperance figured in this “benevolence” but, curiously, she seldom referred to her advocacy of prohibition laws.²⁷ She also resumed work on the reform of the District’s married women’s property laws, and by summer 1869 she was participating in discussions of how to overcome employment discrimination with her UFA colleagues as well as her friend Mary Walker. The UFA had an ambitious plan to attack the inequities experienced by women working for the federal government, while Lockwood and Walker, perhaps with the support of Julia Holmes, who employed women typesetters, were exploring the possibility of collaboration with the new trade union movement.

The new mother was not yet traveling. In August she wrote a letter of introduction for Walker to take to the National Working Men’s Convention in Philadelphia: “This is to certify that Dr. Mary E. Walker is connected with the Woman’s Labor Movement in this City and is an accredited Delegate for the Working Women of Washington.”²⁸ Lockwood and Walker left no record attesting to a local labor movement; quite possibly, they invented it at Belva’s writing table. Still, their concern with improved salary and working conditions for women reached back to their teenage years. They were undoubtedly encouraged by the knowledge that several women, including Susan B. Anthony, were trying to create a bridge between the women’s movement and labor reform. Anthony had been seeking influence within the National Labor Union but Walker, apparently with Lockwood’s blessing, hoped to win credentials from the more radical-socialist Working Men’s Association.²⁹ Their correspondence is silent as to whether she succeeded.

With her confinement behind her Lockwood learned that the fledgling National Woman Suffrage Association planned to hold its first annual convention in mid-January. She had missed several important suffrage meetings because of the pregnancy and was pleased that this gathering would be in the capital, only a few blocks from her residence and eleven-month-old Jessie. The year, 1870, would be an important one for her: she was about to step into greater prominence as the president of the Universal Franchise Association, and she was now giving greater thought to becoming a lawyer. The convention of the Nationals was a good start: for the first time she came face to face with accomplished women from across the United States, many of them ready to take up the mantle of progressive reform leadership.

In a world without radio, television, telephone, or internet, the annual meetings of the National provided suffrage women with the opportunity to boost one another’s morale and to inform public opinion. The women met in January because Congress was in session. Founding member Matilda Gage told delegates that the meeting had been called in Washington “to impress more fully upon members of the National Legislature the claims of the women of the land.”³⁰ Grabbing a few headlines was also part of the plan.

The record of the annual NWSA meetings held in the 1870s and early 1880s tells the story of respectable middle-class women with a remarkable commitment to free and open debate. Lockwood was attracted to this spirit of inquiry and argument. She also enjoyed hobnobbing with the country’s leading reform women and quite quickly realized that she could carve out a niche for herself, privileged by her Washington residence and, later, by her status as a woman lawyer. She was repeatedly chosen as a member of the important resolutions committee through which convention policy was expressed, served as convention coordinator, and was a regular speaker until her falling out with the Anthony faction in the mid-1880s.

NWSA delegates met for two days, in a setting that, for some, must have resembled a revival jamboree. People came and went in easy fashion, with talks occasionally interrupted to applaud a late arrival whose reputation was greater than that of the speaker. Members of the audience were asked to stand up for suffrage and promised a better world when, according to Stanton, women’s votes would bring “moral power into the political arena.”³¹ The speeches were sober, full of urgency, encouragement, and, occasionally, bitterness. Most speakers concentrated on the issue of woman suffrage, but Matilda Gage and Lockwood were not alone in urging the membership to lobby for equal educational, employment, and property rights.³²

Stanton opened the convention with an enthusiastic speech. She rejoiced in the decision of the Wyoming territorial legislature granting women the right to vote and said that the hour of universal woman suffrage throughout America was near. In the hours that followed, in quick succession, the audience heard comments from several men who had joined the meeting as well as letters from absent supporters, including one, read by Stanton, from the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Delegate Pauline Davis delivered a lengthy history of the women’s rights movement in the United States, Britain, and Europe. For many of the convention participants, this talk was the first opportunity to hear the details of their as-yet-unwritten struggle. Primed with history and exhortation, the delegates listened next as Anthony enumerated four resolutions presented for approval. If accepted, they would guide the association’s lobbying effort in the coming months. Predictably, the first resolution requested that members of Congress submit a woman suffrage (Sixteenth) amendment to the states. A second resolution asked that Congress strike the word “male” from the federal laws governing the District of Columbia, while a third urged officials to enfranchise the women of Utah Territory as a “safe, sure and swift means to abolish the polygamy of that Territory.”³³ Lockwood’s influence, felt in the D.C. resolution, was also expressed in the final resolution, which petitioned Congress to amend federal law to provide equal pay for women government employees. All of the items received approval. Before a dinnertime adjournment, Anthony said the hour had come “to pass the hat,” to cover the expenses of the rental hall. In a rare moment of playfulness she said that women delegates were not expected to make much of a contribution as their husbands still held the purse strings, “but the men were expected to give liberally.”³⁴

Speaking at these meetings was not an easy task. Audiences were unpredictable, and could be apathetic or overstimulated. In Washington the sessions became events that, according to one reporter, attracted large crowds of young ladies, drawn more “from curiosity than a desire to be instructed.”³⁵ As a matter of policy the public could enter much of the time without paying a fee, leaving the men and women at the podium with the challenge of addressing simultaneously believers, cynics, and social gadflies.

Lockwood left the convention full of plans. In addition to the public sessions where speakers exhorted the audience to take action, there had been opportunities to talk about the future during informal conversations. She had been particularly interested in meeting Phoebe Couzins, who, along with Lemma Barkaloo, had started law school at St. Louis’s Washington University. Three months earlier the faculty of the law department of the District’s Columbian College had denied Lockwood’s application to become a student. She was stung by their decision but had resolved to apply to other law schools, and to join Barkaloo, Couzins, and Illinois resident Ada Kepley as one of America’s first women law students.³⁶ Nothing she learned at the convention changed her mind.

Lockwood felt good about the future. Shortly after the NWSA convention, she took over as UFA president, an opportunity that may have come to her because Josephine Griffing was showing signs of the illness that would lead to her death in 1872.³⁷ Lockwood was a logical choice to head the association. She had joined the organization as an inexperienced newcomer but had apprenticed successfully with Griffing, who had taught her the ropes and who appreciated that Belva’s personal fearlessness made her a valuable spokeswoman for an unpopular cause. As she left the NWSA convention Belva had the confident feeling that she could duplicate her rise to prominence in the UFA within the national women’s movement. Perhaps to prove this, she took up work on two UFA-backed initiatives: a renewed drive for female suffrage in the District and a campaign to initiate equal employment legislation for women employees of the federal government.

Lockwood brought experience and passion to the question of employment discrimination. Throughout her teaching career she had been paid less than her male colleagues. In Washington she had quickly learned that the federal government also discriminated in the salaries paid to women. Friends told her it was not unusual for a female clerk to be promoted to the vacant place of a man, to do exactly the work he had performed, and yet to receive half the “male” wages. She also discovered that the government limited the number of clerking positions open, through hiring or promotion, to women. As a result, before the Civil War, domestic service and prostitution were the only reliable, ready sources of employment for women.³⁸

The Treasury Department was the first federal agency to recruit women employees, after the department had been ordered to print more paper money as a means of financing the war. Processing the new currency was a labor-intensive activity. Fresh notes had to be cut and counted, while old currency had to be checked for counterfeits, recounted, and then destroyed. According to local lore, Treasurer Francis Spinner arrived on the job at the beginning of the war and found dozens of healthy men busy with scissors. He suggested to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase that the men could be sent off to fight, to be replaced by women, who would be more productive and who could be paid half the twelve-hundred-dollar salary of the men.³⁹

Chase, reluctant to violate Victorian customs concerning women’s proper place, was won over when a trial group of women outperformed all expectations. Congressmen also gave their approval. While they shared Chase’s concern for the “proper and tender” nature of women, they were quick to see economic advantage in the new arrangement. These decisions opened government work to women, beginning what one historian has described as a bold experiment, “avant-garde…bordering upon scandalous.”⁴⁰ The “ladies,” happy for respectable, white-collar work, accepted the lower wages, pay that increased to nine hundred dollars with the passage of the 1866 Appropriations Act.⁴¹

According to Lockwood, in 1868 officials at the Treasury Department again urged Congress to approve higher salaries for its women employees, but the legislators, concerned with the government’s expanding postwar budget, said no.⁴² This result infuriated her and she decided to get involved. New to writing legislative proposals, she turned to Andrew Boyle, a friend from the UFA. Boyle was clerk to the House Committee on Education and Labor, headed by Tennessee Representative Samuel M. Arnell. He helped her to draft an antidiscrimination law. They took their proposal to Arnell, who, in the winter of 1870, signaled his support, perhaps after visits from NWSA delegates.

On March 21 Arnell introduced “A bill to do justice to the female employees of the Government, and for other purposes.” Numbered H.R. 1571, it was read twice and assigned to his committee for preliminary debate.⁴³ In its original form, the proposal attacked all forms of employment discrimination and forbade the use of discriminatory hiring practices in any branch of the civil service, requiring that departmental examinations “be of the same character for persons of both sexes.” The Arnell bill was the first major legislation introduced in the Congress of the United States that addressed sex discrimination in the federal departments. Lockwood had reason to believe that it might succeed. The government had been flooded with demands for action on pension, patent, and homestead filings. Federal departments were desperate to keep up with the flood of business and pressed to hire good workers. Lockwood thought that this bill would bring forward the best people and show that the federal government could influence employment practices around the country for the better. To her mind, it was a perfect example of the kind of reform that a Radical Republican Congress should foster, as it embodied fundamental principles of fairness and equal opportunity.

Working with Boyle and Arnell, the former teacher and would-be lawyer fashioned a campaign to win passage of the bill. She quickly discovered a mix of viewpoints among Arnell’s colleagues. A number of representatives supported equalizing the salaries of male and female clerks, but other legislators were skeptical on the question of equal pay, and completely opposed to giving women fair consideration in hiring and promotion. Lockwood had two strategies: she lobbied her position in private meetings on the Hill, while drumming up public support through a petition drive. As was common practice among activists, she placed notices in various newspapers describing the legislation. Interested readers were requested to cut out the notice, sign it, and then circulate it among friends and coworkers.

Lockwood also thought that the endorsement of both woman suffrage organizations would be important, and arranged to travel to New York, where the National and the American were each meeting. She gathered hundreds of signatures and, in separate interviews, asked leaders of the two groups for backing.⁴⁴ Consistent with Stanton and Anthony’s interest in labor reform, the National readily endorsed the bill. She struck out with the Boston-based AWSA, writing later that Lucy Stone had turned her down because “the proposition did not come from Boston.”⁴⁵

House and Senate members debated the bill throughout the spring of 1870. Laughter had accompanied the introduction of the radical proposal, but the discussion devoted to its various measures was lengthy, serious, and revealing.⁴⁶ Three questions dogged the debate: Was it just to pay women less than men for the same work? Was it only fair to open all grades of clerkship to women? Could the government afford to compensate women at the same rate as men? Lockwood was disappointed when, in marking up the bill, the House Education and Labor Committee axed several of its key provisions. By June the bill had been transformed into an amendment attached to the federal government’s general appropriations act.

The proposal fared better in the Senate, where the legislation was also reworked into an amendment but one that would more explicitly equalize salaries and prohibit sex discrimination in hiring and promotion. When the House again took up the matter on June 10 and 11, Lockwood’s most constant supporters acknowledged that the Senate amendment (a reasonable approximation of the original bill) would cost the government hundreds of thousands of dollars. Demonstrating a commitment to human dignity and justice, these legislators insisted that the final voting should be guided by fairness, not economy. Illinois Representative John Farnsworth stated the case: “Whether it involves an expenditure of $400,000, or twice that amount, I propose that a woman doing just the same work as a man shall receive just as much money for her work—I do not care whether the amount be billions or dimes.”⁴⁷

But New Hampshire Republican Jacob Benton disagreed, laying out his own blunt statement of the issue: “As I understand the matter, a large number of female clerks have positions in various Departments of this Government, in the interest of economy, and for the purpose of saving the public money. That is the reason why they have got these offices.”⁴⁸ He argued that nowhere in America were women compensated as well as these clerks. Other opponents of the bill took up this claim in the next day’s debate. Women government clerks employed at an annual salary of nine hundred dollars a year received seventeen dollars each week, and Arkansas’s Anthony Rogers said that if northern factory girls earned only two and three dollars a week, female government clerks in Washington should be content.⁴⁹

Arnell responded with a speech that affirmed the breadth of the issue and the depth of the discord. Lockwood listened in the gallery as he said that his bill did have a wider object “than merely to serve the interests of these female clerks.”⁵⁰ The question affected the interests of all of the working women of the country: “The mere recognition on the part of the American Congress of the legal right of women to equal work and equal pay for that work cannot be overestimated. It will indirectly increase the pay and wages of the factory girls.” The 37-year-old congressman, one of the truest champions Lockwood would ever find, continued with a stark and radical assessment of social relations:

Man has been unjust to woman. What we call civilization from age to age has brought to man wider freedom, yet has but little relaxed the iron subjugation of woman. None but women are treated as political pariahs; and now that we are engaged as a nation in breaking up the serfdoms of the world I would have this injustice and barbarism of the past consigned to its tomb. Yet I am gravely told that this will upset our social system. My opinion is that it will correct great and longstanding evils. The poor pay of woman is an undervaluation of her as a human being.

In the end the conservatives prevailed. The Senate amendment that would have raised the salaries of women clerks to those of men doing similar work was defeated in favor of one proposed by the House Committee on Appropriations, which stated

[t]hat the heads of the several departments are hereby authorized to appoint female clerks, who may be found to be competent and worthy, to any of the grades of clerkships known to the law, in the respective departments, with the compensation belonging to the class to which they may be appointed, but the number of first, second, third, and fourth class clerks shall not be increased by this section.⁵¹

For Lockwood lobbying the Arnell bill had been a difficult but thorough immersion in congressional politics. Through Boyle and Arnell she had gained access to members of the House and Senate, and had won their respect for her advocacy work. Eight years later several of these congressmen would prove important in her fight to win women lawyers the right to practice in federal courts. Most critically, during the nearly four months in which the Arnell bill moved through Congress, she observed the game of political compromise first-hand. She learned that large principles often did not survive the play of politics but that a savvy representative could maneuver and win enactment of a more limited measure. This is just what Arnell had done. Broad principle was sacrificed in the name of a modest but nonetheless affirmative statement by Congress in the matter of equal employment rights.

Lockwood spoke of the Arnell legislation as an important contribution to the lives of working women. Salary figures collected by the Treasury and Interior Departments suggest that the legislation did, in fact, help women. In the decade of the 1870s, the percentage of women in positions at Treasury paying more than nine hundred dollars increased from 4 to 20 percent.⁵² Yet while the new law urged that fair consideration be given to women’s employment, a culture of patronage and patriarchy continued to nourish the discretionary powers of politicians and federal agency officials. In September 1875, Lura McNall told readers of her Lockport Daily Journal column about Washington that the government needed a better merit system and that she had recently heard it rumored that the new U.S. treasurer was as likely as his predecessor to hand out jobs according to the looks and charms of female applicants.⁵³