“Hoping You Will Give Nessary Influence”: Treasury Department Charwomen Applications and Political Networks at the Turn of the 20th Century

At the turn of the twentieth century, the large-scale, industrial production of American banknotes occurred in an ornate, red-brick building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. These operations of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced all kinds of mess: scrap paper piled in the corners, mud caked onto the steps, and inky towels waiting to be laundered. This paper highlights the white and African American women who handled this mess in their positions as charwomen.

This presentation examines how applicants for positions as charwomen portrayed themselves, their lives, and their work in job applications and correspondence from 1898 to 1900. Many of these women were widowed or unmarried mothers who had, in the past, worked as domestic workers. It argues that applicants established and cultivated connections with powerful Washingtonians in order to navigate white male officials’ ideas about race and gender. Letters of recommendation were especially useful to working-class women who sought to emphasize their moral worthiness and their relation to male military service. Decades after the American Civil War, the service of fathers and husbands in the Union Army repeatedly appeared in charwomen applications.

This paper demonstrates how applicants worked with the expectations of government officials in order to secure wages, independence, and working conditions not present in paid domestic work. Drawing on scholarships covering the federal civil service, Washington, D.C., and paid domestic work, this presentation offers a new perspective on the state as employer in the Progressive Era capital city.