Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America 1st Edition

It's a little overpriced at Amazon (to say the least) but there are used copies. The book has a lot of the necessary dry statistics in it, but it is also full of the loveliest, most interesting anecdotes, primarily regarding the post-Civil War influx of middle-class women into the workplace and how the workplace evolved to deal with it. The interactions between men and women in the workplace are sometimes sad, but quite often funny, such as when a woman complained that her supervisor remarked to two "ladies of standing and character" that "it made no difference to him whether a woman was a harlot or a virgin if she came and did her work." And that messenger boys "walk about with their hats on their heads, whistling as they pass where ladies are sitting at their desks." Men even "idled their time, ate fruit, wrote letters, and were very insulting to the ladies." Tsk tsk.The book is full of dozens of cool little glimpses into day-to-day workings, "A diagram of three rooms in the General Land Office in 1882 revealed a spittoon next to each desk...suggest(ing) that the government preferred the expense of numerous cuspidors to the work time that would be lost as men wandered in search of centrally placed receptacles." There are also a lot of insights into the different ways women and men worked. Men who wanted to support or defend co-workers would often write formal letters to higher-ups, while a woman was more likely to impulsively jump to the defense of a co-worker, heaping abuse upon a supervisor at the risk of losing her job. The book covers the variety of conflicts that were involved in forming the first codes of proper office etiquette, with lots of quotes from original sources. Just a really fascinating book, all around.

First of all I would like to comment on how very readable this book is, I know it should be a given, but some nonfiction authors tend to forget that academical types may not be the only people reading their works. I could not put this book down, author has very attractive writing style (if this is the right word to use in this context of course). Of course partially it is because she chose to introduce individual stories of the workers for american civil service of 19 century in the broad discussion about patterns in hiring, work atmosphere, salaries, so when together with stats you can "hear" the voices of real people, I usually enjoy such book much more.

The book is one of the best I have read. I am surprised that all those documents that the author had used in her book were available considering how those documents were 100 years or more old. The book will remind me of what Trump will be doing to the federal government where people will get jobs based on the connections to their political parties, their connections to business people etc, no unions (we had no federal unions until JFK allow it in the 1960s), lousy pay (which is already lousy), people playing office politics to get rid of someone, kissing the boss's butt, and/or getting that promotion. Oh yeah, we are going back to the future; however, it this case, it is back to the past.