Reconstruction Era National Historical Park makes efforts to engage with current scholarship on Reconstruction. To help facilitate this, beginning the Spring of 2020, park staff began a series called "Ranger Chats on Reconstruction" to interview academic historians of the Reconstruction.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Hilary Green from the University of Alabama about her research and book, entitled "Educational Reconstruction," which explores African American education in the urban south during Reconstruction.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Evan Kutzler, a history professor at Georgia Southwestern State University. He is the co-author of a National Park Service Special History study examining African American history at Andersonville National Historic Site, and shared some of his research into the Reconstruction era Freedman community that emerged around the site.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Kate Masur from Northwestern University about her research and role in crafting the National Park Service's Reconstruction Era Theme Study.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Adam Domby from the College of Charleston about his book, "The False Cause," which explores the collapse of Reconstruction era coalition governments in North Carolina.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Sarah Handley-Cousins, Dr. a history professor at the University at Buffalo, and the Associate Director at the university's Center for Disability Studies. Her recent book, "Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North," examines the difficulties faced by disabled Union veterans struggling to navigate through the Reconstruction era federal bureaucracy to secure pensions and other support.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Stephen West, a history professor at Catholic University of America, and is in the process of writing a book on the 15th Amendment and its place in American memory.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University and author of numerous books on the Reconstruction era, about his research and path to becoming a Reconstruction historian.
Duration:
16 minutes, 50 seconds
Ranger Chat on Reconstruction: Dr. Jessica Ziparo
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Jessica Ziparo about her book, "This Grand Experiment," which explores the role of women in the Federal workforce during Reconstruction. Due to a technical issue on the park's side, this interview is audio only.
Chris Barr(CB): Good afternoon this is park ranger Chris Barr here with Reconstruction Era National Historical Park out here with Dr. Jessica Ziparo who is the author of a really cool book called This Grand Experiment. One of the things we’ve been doing here is chatting a little bit about reconstruction with with current Scholars and in your books certainly sort of fits that bill so I just going to dive right in for our digital visitors here to the park social media accounts and websites.
We often talk here Reconstruction Era National Historical Park about the role of women in reconstruction as being more traditionally domestic type things - teachers especially here in Beaufort County we talked a lot about the teachers at the schools. But your work is really focusing on the role of women in a totally different world. Tell us a little bit about some of the things women were doing during Reconstruction.
Dr. Jessica Ziparo (JZ) Sure yes oh my book examines the first woman to work for the federal government during the Civil War. So it kind of looks at who they were or how they came to be there how they got their job so they kept their jobs, how they got paid, and how they change the city. And so in terms of with how I think of my women in reconstruction I think the two main things are sort of how they change the city of DC just by their presence alone and their participation in events and then also the more important but often forgotten is their fight for equal pay in the Reconstruction era. So a lot of the Radical Republicans were involved in the Senate and the house debates in the late 1860's early 1870s trying to get women equal pay for equal work and it's so frustrating because they passed four times a bill saying yes we should pay women the same for doing the same work and every single time I kind of fell out in committee. And at the end of the day women weren’t granted that justice.
CB: Just a quick apology I may have to move my I'm sitting outside & my next door neighbor just fired up his weed eater. So interpretive work in the era of global pandemic and working from home. Can you hear me? Yeah but it's not that bad. Okay alright well I'll see if I need to clean up that audio then later instead of trying to move around got to love that.
So one of the things I found really fascinating in reading through your chapters was what kind of work were some of these women doing again like we talked about this domestic work but what sort of things were these women doing working for the federal government?
(JZ): Some were doing domestic work in the government hospital for the insane, as it was known at the time, they were doing a lot of domestic labor. And then there were sweepers and scrubbers in the Dept of the Treasury, the Patent Office, and those women were most often African American and poor. And there was some domestic labor going on, but then women when they came in, clerical work was undifferentiated. So as a clerk male or female you were given like “copy this letter. Write this post.” All these different things, work wasn’t really siloed into different tasks yet. So when came in they were really doing the same thing that men were doing when they first came in. It started to get a little more differentiated, especially in the Treasury Department, and women started to get more stuck on copy work or trimming notes in the in the Treasury Department - so actually physically cutting the notes apart. Helping to print the notes. Women were also in the Government Printing Office. So they would help lay paper on the machines that the men would pull down. Women are in the patent office doing copy work. Women were kind of all over the place. I’m trying to think of - I mean those are the big ones that come to mind. But a lot of it was intellectual labor. So there were women in the post office for example that were translating mail. There were women in the post office working in the dead letter office alongside men, although not physically alongside because they had to be in this sort of weird room like separate area that they weren't physically close to each other. But they were doing the exact same job - there were all these dead letters where there is insufficient postage or incorrect addresses or just be like “to John in America.” And the people laboring in the dead letter office were tasked with trying to find “John in America.” So they were going through this pretty challenging intellectual work to solve those mysteries. And many women were doing that exact same job at the time.
(CB): So this is kind of somewhat unrelated your research, but in the story you told about these women having to sort through all the mail - Prior to working here, I worked at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park and one of our stores there was this group of African American women who trained there during World War II at the battlefield - the training facility. And then went to Europe and they were part of this team that was having to do that same thing. So that was kind of a place my brain just went Wow some things just did not change a whole lot.Which is fascinating. But speaking of things that haven’t changed a whole lot, as you well know, we still struggle with this idea of equal pay for equal work in many industries throughout the nation. So not necessarily a number - if you know a number that’s great - but what kind of discrepancies are we looking at here for women's labor during in the federal government during the Civil War and reconstruction?
(JZ): Yes - I can really hear that weedwhacker - (Audio sounds of moving the microphone indoors)
So yes, I actually do have numbers. Refer to my book in case I’m wrong - So when women came in, the Federal Government didn’t say “Let’s hire women.” It was these individual supervisors in different departments that brought women in. And so they were paid - the way that mail clerk salaries worked - they started at $1200 a year, 1400 1600 1800. That was the pay scale, those were ways they could advance. 1200 with the lowest paid male clerk. When women came in they were paid $600. And it was a flat rate - there was nowhere to advance. It was just you were stuck at $600, even if you were the best clerk. So they were paid at most half of what the lowest paid male clerk earned, even though some of them were doing the work of higher paid clerks. So women really started to agitate to get paid more. So there are hundreds of signatures on petitions asking the federal government “pay us more” We are doing the exact same job as men. Why are we getting paid half? So slowly that salary started to come up and so it went up from 600 to 720 and then 720 to 900, and 900’s where it got stuck. So that's when we had all these debates in Congress and Congress kept - they’re very fascinating because you see these politicians - you see some of them just saying “This is insane. If they're doing the same job” including some former supporters of slavery. Which is kind of cognitive dissonance because they’re saying things like “Well if you have two hands and one head and you're performing this labor why wouldn't you pay them different from another two hands and one head performing the labor?” So Democrats were saying that too - it wasn’t just a Repubican stance. But then you have the men that didn't want to pay women the same and you can see them struggling with this idea of “Well they’re women. Of course we’re not going to pay them the same.”But they couldn’t rationalize it was so indefensible. So the main way that men rationalized it was by saying “We need to run the government as a business there are so many women that are so desperate for these jobs we're not going to pay more than we have to because we're going to run the government like a business. And so sorry it's unfair but that's just the way the world is. And the government shouldn't be in the business of changing the way that the the world is essentially. So you have this fight, which is interesting in terms of Reconstruction, you have this fight in Congress about should the government serve as an example for the nation? So even though they go out in the private sector and not get paid should we set this example that female labor should be valued equally with male labor? And ultimately they didn’t - Which is very frustrating.
(CB) That’s just just really fascinating again when you’re describing this in the nineteenth-century my brain can't help but think about how these are some of the same debates that we’re having in the modern era. So one of the things I thought was really fascinating reading through your work was the idea. Well most people when they think of women in the workforce during and immediately after a war, our brains all go to Rosie the Riveter in World War II. And part of the story there is well all the men come home and go back to workforce, and the women kind of go home, then the Baby Boom generation and all that. But one of the things I found was really fascinating is that that didn’t necessarily happen during Reconstruction. Is these men came home and a lot of these women were able to keep these jobs in the federal government, at least for a while. Can you speak a little bit about how was that able to happen? How long did that last? - That kind of thing.
(JZ): Once women got in they never left - women as a class. Part of the reason I think that happened is because unlike World War II it wasn’t this acute labor shortage- it wasn't like men were all out fighting and that's why women came into the federal service. The problem was that - I mean men never stopped applying for these jobs. They were good jobs and the men were constantly applying. But supervisors suddenly had more work to do and not not budgets that were big enough to accommodate all of this male labor. So in women they found people that could do all of the work for half the pay so that's why women were coming in - because rather she can get the job done and still stay in their budget. So that meant when - when the war ended it wasn't like bureaucratic work ended. There was this huge backlog of bureaucratic work and the Federal government grew during the Civil War and never shrank again to anything resembling Antebellum federal government size. And so there just continued to be a lot of work. And so supervisors weren't going to let go of women that they could pay half to do all of the job. What I said in the beginning of this - women kind of as a class never left. But what was interesting when I really dug into the data because getting really granular you could see that women there was intense volatility in the federal service civil service for women because there was such pressure for those jobs. So that there's a lot of turnover in terms of individual women. But women as a class never left the federal civil service after this. Even though individual women kept getting churned in and out because of patronage pressure.
(CB): One of our big core stories of Reconstruction here that we talked about at the park is this expansion of the federal government and this expansion of civil rights and I think one of things that's really fascinating in your work is this idea that this expansion of the federal government was being driven in large part by the labor of of these women who often had been at the forefront of leading the charge for African-American civil rights but then you know when the 15th amendment was ratified they’re left out of it. So sort of as a last thing, is there a connection between the labor of these women in the Federal government and the rise of the women's voting movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century? Is there any kind of connection into that a little bit?
(JZ): Yeah and I think this story is really complicated and interesting and I think about it alot when I think of big social movements that are trying to succeed I think about this one. But there is a connection. So there are some women who were working for the Federal government who were very involved in women’s suffrage. But women were dissuaded as female civil servants women were dissuaded from being involved with the suffrage movement. Some supervisors were pretty straightforward by saying you're not going to keep your job if you keep doing that kind of work. So it was hard for women to engage - there's one woman in particular I look at whose diary I have, Julia Wilbur, she’s constantly going to be meeting but she was told - she was dissuaded from doing it. The really complicated part of the story is when you get to the Equal Pay fight because the women's suffrage movement was really absent during that fight. And I think that I think that that hamstrung the fight for equal pay. And this is what I think is so interesting because the women agitating for equal pay - like the suffrage movement said yes we support that in theory but they didn't dedicate any resources to it. And because it kept falling out in committee, I wonder if the suffrage movement had committed more resources to the equal pay debate - if they could have gotten over that hurdle - the suffrage movement didn't do that because they had limited resources and they really thought that getting the vote with a possible thing. That they very genuinely thought that they could get to vote in that moment. And they didn't want to take your foot off the gas on that to deal with equal pay. So it was kind of question of hindsight is 20/20 they didn't get the vote, so perhaps if they had gotten equal pay would we be in a different position now? If they had dedicated their resources to that? So it’s a very gnarly, complicated relationship that I think is very interesting.
(CB): WellI don't want to take up too much more of your time here and I know you got some family stuff run around, and my family is now walking around the kitchen trying to figure out lunch. Again I just want to thank you for tuning in here we’ll hopefully get this posted to our park social media and website account here in the next couple of days. But real quick before we go your book is called This Grand Experiment from the University of North Carolina press and we'll put a link to that in the comments on the website and social media accounts when we post this but again thank you Dr. Ziparo for joining us today and chatting with us for a few minutes please stay safe and keep up the keep up the great work.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. LeeAnna Keith about radical republicans during the Civil War and reconstruction eras. Dr. Keith is the author of a book on the Colfax Massacre, and most recently, "When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War"
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Tyler Parry about his current research project that explores the African American students who desegregated the University of South Carolina in the 1870s.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Brent Morris, history professor at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort about the university's Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era, as well as the upcoming University of South Carolina Press series on Reconstruction.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Niels Eichhorn about his research involving a comparative study of European "Reconstructions" with Reconstruction in the American south.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Jim Downs from Connecticut College about his book, "Sick From Freedom," which explores the Reconstruction era disease outbreak in the Freedman community.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Holly Pinheiro from Augusta University about his current research project exploring the lives of African American Civil War veterans in the north during Reconstruction.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews JaQuay Carter, the founder of the Hazelwood Historical Society of Pittsburgh, about issues facing Black citizens in a northern city during Reconstruction.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Kristi Farrow Kristi Farrow, Director of African and African American History at the Battle of Franklin Trust, on Reconstruction in Middle Tennessee and the Exoduster Movement into Kansas.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Edda Fields-Black, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently writing book entitled, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Gullah Geechee Transformation." Her work not only explores the role Tubman played in the raid, but how the Combahee Raid reverberated throughout the Gullah Geechee world for generations afterwards.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Dr. Kelly Sharp from Furman University about her research on African American foodways and agricultural practices in the 19th Century South Carolina Lowcountry.
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews Dr. Caroline Grego from Queens University of Charlotte about her research on how the Sea Islands Hurricane of 1893 fit into the broader political and social issues facing Black South Carolinians at the end of Reconstruction.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Dr. Robert Bland from the University of Tennessee about his research on the 1876 labor strikes organized by Black citizens in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Dr. Abigail Cooper from Brandeis University about her research on the refugee camps that enslaved people moved into during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Lowcountry and beyond.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Dr. Gregory Mixon, Professor of History at UNC Charlotte and author of "Show Thyself A Man: Georgia State Troops, Colored, 1865-1905," regarding his research on Georgia's African American militia groups during Reconstruction.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Dr. Elaine Frantz Parson, Professor of History at Kent State University and author of "Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction," about her research on racial violence and terrorism during Reconsruction.
In this episode of "Ranger Chat on Reconstruction", we spoke with Dr. Jared Frederick, history instructor at Penn State Altoona, about depictions of the Reconstruction Era through film, as well as cinema's role in shaping the public's understanding of Reconstruction throughout the 20th and 21st centuries."
Park Ranger Chris Barr interviews historian Dr. Megan Kate Nelson about her research and book project, "This Strange Country: Yellowstone and the Reconstruction of America."
Park Ranger Kaley Crawford interviews Dr. Kelli Cardenas Walsh of Fayetteville State University to learn more about her research on the Reconstruction period and her involvement with the creation of the immersive and interactive North Carolina Civil War and Reconstruction History Center. To learn more about the center, visit www.nccivilwarcenter.org.
Park Ranger Rich Condon interviews Dr. Jonathan White, of Christopher Newport University, about his research related to the education of freed people during Reconstruction, as well as his recent publication, "My Work among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss," which explores, in part, the experience of a wartime schoolteacher in Beaufort County, South Carolina.
