the heat of the Washington summer. His decision resulted in a good deal of confusion in the Patent Office and had some unfortunate consequences for Clara Barton.17
Mason left in mid-July 1855, and Samuel T. Shugert, his chief clerk, was appointed acting commissioner. Shugert was eager to please Secretary McClelland, and one of his first steps—despite his personal friendship with Clara Barton—was to consider removing the four female clerks from the office. Their presence had long annoyed McClelland, an old-line politician who considered that the women were taking jobs from deserving men who, even if not more competent, were at least voters. The sight of teapots and hoopskirts in the office irritated him; he could not see that they were only the female equivalent of the omnipresent cigars and spittoons. Barton's appointment as recording clerk was immediately dropped, and in August 1855 she was placed on the rolls as a copyist, to be paid according to the amount of work she completed each month.18 Ten cents per hundred words was the standard rate for both men and women. Even the most industrious copyist rarely made over nine hundred dollars a year. Worse yet, Shugert, though retaining their names as employees, gave the women no work to do; Barton drew no salary at all for the months of July, August, and September 1855.19 She and her colleagues were further discouraged when Shugert announced that by the end of August they must vacate the basement room in which they worked.20 Back in Iowa, Mason heard the news and was greatly saddened. “I have some grave objections if I understand the matter rightly,” he remarked. “They were some of my best clerks and besides charity dictated their appointment and retention.”21
Barton began to mobilize her partisans almost as soon as she heard of Shugert's scheme. She wrote to her cousin, Judge Ira Barton, asking for his support, and she hoped that her father's membership in the Masonic order might also aid her. After reading her lengthy explanation of the situation, her brother Stephen expressed his sympathy and assured her that she had the support of her cousin, as well as Isaac Davis, a prominent politician.22 More importantly, Barton solicited the aid of Alexander DeWitt. He too wrote to McClelland and used all the influence at his command to have her retained. “Having understood the Department had decided to remove the ladies in the Patent Office on the first of October,” DeWitt wrote to McClelland, “I have taken the liberty to address a line on behalf of Miss Clara Barton, a native of my town and district, who has been employed in the past year in the Patent Office, and I trust to the entire satisfaction of the Commissioner.” 23 But McClelland was seemingly unswayable. On September 27, 1855, he replied sharply, telling DeWitt that though he wished to help Barton, he would stop short of retaining “her, or any of the other females at work in the rooms of the Patent Office.” He allowed that they might do piecework in their own homes but balked at the “obvious impropriety in the mixing of the two sexes within the walls of a public office.” He was, he concluded, “determined to arrest the practice.”24
It was not uncommon to send work out to be done in the home, and it is probably in this capacity that Barton worked in October 1855. She collected $73.56 that month, a rate well over that of most clerks. Why she was not dismissed on October 1, as McClelland had ordered, is not altogether clear, but perhaps, if his real complaint was the proximity of the women to other office workers, he did not object to her copying outside the building. Like the other women she would walk every morning along Seventh Street, past the bustling city market, and up the stairs of the Patent Office to pick up her work and hand in completed projects. She was not allowed to stay in the offices or linger with the other clerks.25
What Barton thought of this drastic cut in pay and stature, whether she believed it preferable to dismissal or accepted it only on temporary terms while she looked for work elsewhere, has gone unrecorded, but it surely reinforced her growing objection to the unequal chances women had for earning a livelihood. She did not have long to debate the case, however, for in late October she received news that Charles Mason was returning from Iowa. The demand for his reinstatement had risen from the scientific grassroots of the nation. Inventors from all over the country sent petitions to him and to the government bemoaning the loss of his services. Bored after only a few months of the staid rural life he had previously coveted, Mason yielded. He arrived back in Washington on November 1, and with his return Barton's fortunes again rose.26
In November 1855 Barton received pay of $135, nearly double that of the previous month and again consistent with her old salary of $1,400 per year. She was, however, kept on the rolls as a temporary copyist at the standard rate. Mason, anxious to retain Barton's good services but reluctant to make any move that might goad McClelland into dismissing the female clerks entirely, probably developed the system of classifying Barton as one type of employee and rewarding her as another. As Barton was to declare, it was all a little “subrosa.”27 It may also have served Mason's purposes to keep Barton's real status a secret, for he again needed her help in straightening out intraoffice problems.
“I have been this day in my old place in the Patent Office,” noted Mason in his diary on November 3. “I do not know how well I shall be pleased with it after all. I shall have some very unpleasant duties to discharge in general of the clerks and examiners.…I fear I shall be obliged to discharge some of them.”28 Intemperance was a problem among the employees, a sticky situation since several prominent political appointees were among the offenders. Worse, however, was a network of frauds he believed was threatening the impartiality of the office. Several clerks were evidently selling patent privileges illegally, an old temptation about which he had complained to Congress as early as 1853.29 Moreover, there were apparently a number of in-house rivalries and jealousies cropping up, which were difficult to control and damaging to morale. “I have been so disgusted with the office seeking manoeuvering all around me,” a Patent Officer worker declared.30 Calling on Barton's tight-lipped assistance, Mason set about untangling the personnel knots.
Clara viewed Mason's efforts as a righteous crusade and something of a witch hunt. It appealed to her strong moral outlook and allowed her to indulge herself in a short period of sanctimoniousness. “I found the frauds,” she told a female reporter proudly. “It made a great commotion among the clerks; they knew what it meant and they tried to make the place too hard for me.”31 The only woman regularly in the office now, she took the brunt of any animosity that the men felt against women workers. She wore victory with smugness, and this exacerbated the bitterness that she felt the men had secretly harbored because of her ability to equal or surpass them in their duties. That she made no attempt to hide her close social ties with Mason may also have increased the resentment against her. Lining the halls as she came in to work, the men made catcalls, spit tobacco juice at her, and blew smoke in her face.32 “It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” Barton conceded, “in fact, it was very trying, but I thought perhaps there was some question of principle involved and I lived it through.”33 Indeed, she rose above them, though it did little to dissipate her reputation for haughtiness. In a tone of marked superiority she told a friend that “there is not a spot upon my system that is not perfectly invulnerable to any touch of theirs, all the world who know as I know the relation they have sustained toward me, and know what to expect from them. Any blow that they could slanderously aim at me in these days, would make about as much impression upon me a[s] a sling shot would upon the hide of a Shark—I have got above them.”34 The job that had once been “delightfully pleasant” was now possible to endure only to win her point. By September 1857, the daily trip to the office had become a “weary pilgrimage.”35
It is difficult today to imagine the degree to which Barton's aggressiveness and capability appeared unusual—and in many ways unacceptable—in the 1850s. Such traits as ambition, bureaucratic competence, and leadership were the opposite of those preferred in the Victorian woman. However “accomplished” she might be, a lady was expected to be demure, self-effacing, easily controlled, and interested primarily in children and the home. Within this sphere a woman was exalted and idolized by society, which saw her as the protector of moral values and family sanctity. Outside of it there was little or no place for her. A woman who was not married—who chose not to be married—was already suspect; a woman who enjoyed
