Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
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