by Julie Greene
“IT IS NOT THE POLICY OF THE COMMISSION
TO HIRE WOMEN”
Like white and African American male employees, the few white women workers in the Zone found that negotiating with the government would be central to their lives, particularly if they hoped to improve their working and living conditions. The 1912 census of the Canal Zone listed 321 women in the employment of the ICC and the Panama Railroad. Most of these women, 251 of them, came from the United States. They hailed from almost every state, but most had made their homes in the upper Midwest and the Northeast, from Illinois and Michigan to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. These women traveled to the Canal Zone most often to work as stenographers, clerks, teachers, and nurses. A smaller number worked as telegraphers, timekeepers, dietitians, storekeepers, and laundresses. White women who were U.S. citizens were always categorized as gold workers. However, ICC officials preferred not to bring female workers to the Zone unless necessary. When possible, for example they hired female teachers from among the population of wives and daughters of canal employees already living on the isthmus. Likewise, they typically declined to hire female clerical workers on the grounds that affordable housing was not available for them.68
Still, a number of women made the trip on their own and managed to secure work. Carrie Townsley of St. Louis, a single woman when she arrived in the Zone at the age of thirty-five, had previously worked for the Mississippi River Commission in various clerical capacities. A division engineer in Cristobal had worked with Carrie in St. Louis, liked her, and hired her to work in the Zone as a file clerk for $ 150 gold per month. She soon married a foreman working in the Atlantic division of the Zone and suffered through a “reorganization” of the clerical staff that resulted in a demotion and pay cut, but nonetheless she continued working at her job until 1911.69
Citizenship could matter as much to American women as it did to their male counterparts. Mary Chatfield, for example, left New England for Panama with many years’ experience as a stenographer under her belt, including more than two years working in the engineering department of Columbia University. She had found life as a workingwoman in New York City difficult and thought the Canal Zone’s higher salaries would allow her to improve her standard of living. She worried about the risks involved, especially for a single woman in the wild tropical land of Panama, but decided the higher pay made it a worthwhile adventure. She arrived on the isthmus in November 1905 with only her return ticket to New York, her clothes, and $ 35 . Chatfield immediately went to visit John Stevens and asked for a job, showing him letters of recommendation from Columbia University. When Stevens offered her only $ 75 per month, she felt insulted and considered walking out on him. But remembering her limited means, she responded, “Having had $ 3 . 00 a day in New York City for more than three years, I am not willing to accept less than that on the Isthmus of Panama.” Ultimately, they settled on $ 100 per month, with the agreement that Stevens would raise her pay when he saw that she deserved it.70
Chatfield’s sixteen months on the isthmus proved difficult. Reorganizations and the search for better pay and working conditions forced her to change jobs several times. All the jobs shared certain qualities: long hours, bosses who (she believed) knew less than she did, and insufficient pay. Like her male counterparts, she found living conditions intolerable and the government food “execrable.” She felt miserable and isolated when work took her to towns in the heart of the Zone, but when transferred to a job at Colón Hospital, she found the work even more difficult and the conditions in Panama more unpleasant. Two aspects of life and work in the Zone stood out to her as particularly unjust. First, she observed a widespread bias against women workers. Second, and closely related, she believed that American citizens failed to get the respect due them. She complained vociferously about the unwillingness of canal officials to hire women who were U.S. citizens. In offices known to be understaffed, Chatfield had offered to recruit a friend of hers from the United States, but she always received the same reply: “It is not the policy of the Commission to hire women.” The same happened to male friends of hers who sought jobs for their sisters. “Aliens, sots, sharpers, any old thing, will be given a position in an office by the Isthmian Canal Commission, anything but an American woman… . Our desire and hope is to get the larger salaries we should receive in this climate to keep us out of the poorhouse when we get too old to work and we should be encouraged, not refused.”71
All around her, Chatfield believed, she saw talentless or ignorant people, mostly men and many of them foreigners, who had received good and high-paying jobs because they knew someone influential. She resolved to try the same tactic. She secured a better job by visiting a judge she had met and asking him to put in a good word for her with top officials. But the new job was not a sufficient improvement, and she kept hearing that the only way to improve her situation was to visit her congressman or senator. She determined, when she finally earned a vacation to go home, to visit her representatives. There she hoped to find out if it meant anything to be an experienced stenographer and “to have made every effort to comply with theadvertised Civil Service requirements (barring the impossible one of changing your sex), to be a citizen of the U.S., a native of the U.S. and a descendant of men who fought and women who suffered to make this country a nation.” If it meant nothing, she declared, she wanted to know so that she might “not labor longer under delusions.”72
In August 1906, Chatfield, having earned that paid vacation, boarded a ship and headed to Connecticut, where she met with her aged congressman. She yelled at the top of her voice, she reported, because he was nearly deaf. She told him she had fourteen years of experience as a stenographer and that her family had been in Connecticut for 267 years. She had taken and passed the Civil Service Exam and now asked that her appointment be recognized by the Civil Service Commission so she would receive longer vacations and have her transportation covered. She also requested a raise in pay. Afterward she traveled to Philadelphia to meet with ICC officials, confident that they would grant her request. The officials disappointed her. They declared that women were not allowed to receive civil service appointments and that she was lucky even to have been hired. Her citizenship did not entitle her to special treatment, they informed her. Chatfield was aghast: “Until now I would not have believed that any official of any government in the universe, even the meanest in existence, would have made an official statement that a citizen of his country was the same as ‘people from all parts of the globe.’ ” Sorely disillusioned, Chatfield returned to the isthmus and finished out her time, then packed her suitcases for good and returned happily to the United States. In letters home to her literary club, she offered final advice for American sisters who might follow in her footsteps: “Do not feel proud because you are a citizen of and a daughter of the United States. These facts do not command respect here.”73
The largest concentration of female employees could be found in the modern hospitals of the Canal Zone. A small group of nurses had been among the very first Americans to arrive on the isthmus after the United States finished negotiating the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty in 1903. Many came to the isthmus with experience in the Philippines, Cuba, or Puerto Rico or on Indian reservations in the United States.74 At a time when American women were strenuously discouraged from coming to the isthmus, these early nurses entered a land feared for the pervasive death and disease that had handicapped the French construction effort. They nursed American officials and employees through malaria and pneumonia and suffered through the terror in 1905 when yellow fever struck.
By 1908 several dozen nurses were working at each of the two main hospitals in the Zone, at Colón and Ancon. The latter, the larger of the two, could accommodate fifteen hundred patients at once. The lives of female nurses differed from those of male workers in many ways. They lived in female-only housing, and they faced special curfews and received greater scrutiny regarding their behavior (alcohol consumption seemed a particular con
cern). They also found their work environment extremely challenging. With hospitals divided into wards on the basis of gender, race, and sometimes nationality (there were special wards
for women, Spaniards, and “coloreds”), nurses competed for assignments to the best wards. They protested particularly when assigned to the women’s ward, as all agreed it lacked basic medical resources. It was difficult for them to assert authority around male patients, and sometimes they felt uncomfortable in the mostly male environment of the Canal Zone.75
A young nurse named Alice Gilbert recorded her impressions of the isthmus upon her arrival. Shown to her room in the nurses’ quarters near the hospital, she was taken aback by the awful, damp odor emanating from within: “But when one is weary they will sleep and so it was only too soon morning and I was awakened by a great bell being rung on the porch by a colored man, that was the rising bell.” She let the exotic sounds of tropical birds outside her room bring her more fully awake, then hurried down the hill to the mess. Gilbert quickly realized she would need to learn a few words of Spanish since the waiters spoke nothing else. At work, she found the hospital a busy place. Each ward had about twenty-two beds, yet “frequently we had cots down the center of the wards and on the porches and all filled.” The nurses dreaded mosquitoes and doses of quinine as much as patients did, and Gilbert described her many sleepless nights trying to catch mosquitoes that had somehow slipped inside her netting.76
Yet the life of a nurse in the Canal Zone involved some unusual rewards. These included a sense of empowerment that came from working with a group of highly skilled and well-paid women. Nurses were sorely needed, and yet turnover among them was high, as unmarried nurses frequently met and married canal employees. All this could make nurses a difficult group to manage, yet because they were highly visible symbols of the government’s authority, officials repeatedly felt compelled to control their work habits and appearance. In 1911 an effort by the government to introduce more stringent rules regarding uniforms demonstrated not only officials’ determination to manage every aspect of women’s work lives but also how tenaciously nurses stood up for their rights as they perceived them. Unlike many other American workers, these women appealed not primarily to their equal rights as citizens but rather to their right,as women, to gender equality.
Previously, nurses had been required only to wear a white skirt and blouse; the rest of their attire was left to their discretion. Now Goethals decided, with input from William Gorgas and the superintendent of hospitals, Charles Mason, to prohibit French heels, require caps and rubber heels, and specify in detail the design of the skirt and blouse. Nurses had to hire a seamstress to make the uniform, and officials allowed a month before the new requirements would take effect. To the officials’ surprise, opposition emerged—particularly among nurses at Ancon Hospital.77
The historical record does not reveal how nurses initially responded to the new rules, but they must have found a way to express their opposition, because as the deadline approached, their superintendent felt nervous about enforcing the rules. He seemed to panic and wrote his superiors, he said, to “ascertain the extent of my authority in enforcing obedience.” Would he be supported if forced to “resort to measures of compulsion”? He anticipated that at least a few nurses would refuse to wear the new uniforms. Therefore, he planned to mark any such nurses as absent without permission. If his superiors felt unwilling to support such discipline, he cautioned, and unless there existed another plan for dealing with “determined insubordination,” then “it would seem better to rescind the order than to expose existing authority to an undermining influence.”78
When sanitary officers decided weeks later to discipline any insubordinate nurses and suspend them without pay, the nurses raised a vocal and effective protest. The nurse Lucy Busbey wrote Goethals a personal note of protest, asking “why, among the many thousand employees of the
I.C.C. a special discrimination should be made requiring us to buy and wear a special uniform?” Officials argued that because nurses wore a special uniform while in school, they should wear one now. To this Busbey retorted that undoubtedly many male employees likewise wore uniforms at school. “Therefore why should a few women who happened also to be educated in institutions requiring a school uniform be especially discriminated against in this matter and on their small salaries be required to incur this extra expense?” Other nurses complained to Goethals that the current uniform had been acceptable for seven years and wondered why a change was now suddenly necessary. Bowing to their protests, Goethals delayed the starting date for the new uniforms and ordered an investigation into the entire matter.79
To the hospital superintendent the issues involved were relatively simple. A cap would highlight the dignity of nurses, providing them with a “symbol of office” while also enhancing discipline in the wards. The nurse Genevieve Russell agreed, writing Goethals, “As a nurse in the United States and in several foreign countries I have found the wearing of my cap and uniform my surest protection. It is only as men instantly recognize in us women set apart, and in a way consecrated, … that they and we can be saved embarrassment and misunderstanding.” The cap, Russell argued, was the key, the symbol that established the “relation of patient and nurse—without it we appear simply women in white dresses, working around among the men.” But most nurses at Ancon Hospital disagreed with Russell. A letter signed by fifty-three of them, which included the vast majority of nurses there, protested to Goethals against wearing the new uniforms and caps. The latter they particularly despised, saying, “The cap is very impractical and entirely conspicuous in a hospital constructed on the plan of Ancon.”80
Three months after the issue had first been raised, after a thorough investigation, Goethals ordered the new requirements put into effect. He accommodated the nurses as best he could, saying they could continue wearing their old uniforms as long as possible. Only when normal wear and tear forced replacing their uniforms with new ones would the new regulations be enforced with regard to the style of the skirt and blouse. Nurses must begin wearing the cap and rubber heels immediately, he declared. Perhaps content with this compromise, the nurses apparently ended their protest and complied with Goethals’s order.81
Another sign that officials thought it important, if difficult, to improve efficiency among nurses can be seen in their reliance on some of the most innovative tools of labor management that had been devised by early-twentieth-century corporate capitalism. The officials made use of scientific management, a system of thought developed in the United States. Taylorism, as it was also known, after its creator Frederick Winslow Taylor, became popular among employers seeking effective labor management strategies. Taylorism combined detailed studies of employees’ efficiency with an extensive division of labor in order to better control them and maximize their productivity. Although originally intended for industrial environments, it became influential even in white-collar settings where female workers were predominant (among department store clerks, for example, and clerical workers). Therefore, it is not surprising that officials in the Canal Zone would turn to Taylorism.82
In 1908 and 1909 officials decided they should reduce the number of nurses working at Colón Hospital. Forty-two nurses worked there; officials determined seven would be dismissed and three others would be transferred to Ancon Hospital. The nurses were evaluated by the chief nurse and by three doctors. Each evaluator was asked to rank all forty-two nurses in order of their efficiency. Supervisors then compared the four ranked lists to determine which nurses would be retained. Evaluators assessed the medical knowledge of each nurse and her “purely professional ability,” as well as her health, temperament, executive ability, and “subordination to discipline.” Seniority was not to be included in the evaluation. W. H. May, an assistant of Goethals’s, oversaw the process. He confessed that the procedure itself was rather inefficient, particularly since one of the doctors involved had no firsthand knowledge of the nurses.83
Virginia Mooney and Margaret Judge, two nurses discharged as a result of this exercise, refused to go without a battle. They protested to Goethals and claimed that personal prejudice had played a role. Virginia Mooney had worked on the isthmus since 1905 and nursed men through the yellow fever epidemic. Margaret Judge, a more recent hire, questioned why her service would suddenly be considered inefficient when previously her superiors considered her more than satisfactory. She also specifically raised the issue of seniority, protesting that more recent arrivals had been ranked more highly than she had.84
The evaluators, despite officials’ instructions, focused more on behavior, personality, and temperament than on the nurses’ skills or lack thereof. Most who testified regarding Margaret Judge’s efficiency agreed she possessed fine executive ability. However, some found her unable to maintain order on the wards, especially when a patient proved troublesome. Others declared that she irritated patients more than other nurses did. The chief nurse particularly evaluated nurses with an emphasis on their personal style: “Miss Ledden has a suave, easy manner; takes things easy, and while patients say things that would irritate … Miss Judge, they would not her.” Another nurse she described as “quiet and not excitable.” In the end, government officials decided Margaret Judge should be fired, and the grounds they gave concerned her temperament: “I believe her to be thoroughly competent professionally. I confess, however, that her youth and slight frame, together with her extreme nervous excitement impresses me that she was not among the best suited to the hard conditions of nursing on the Isthmus.”85
Judge complained and tried to refocus the investigation on her superior’s work record. She declared that the chief nurse was herself inefficient and was prejudiced against her. But the chief of hospitals, H. R. Carter, found Judge’s claim of prejudice unconvincing. Whenever he had witnessed a disagreement between a nurse and a chief nurse, he declared, the former had always charged the latter with bias. He attributed this to the fact that “a sense of absolute justice does not seem to be a feminine characteristic.” While he had qualms about the way the medical staff determined the efficiency rankings, and felt sure they were not entirely correct, he also believed that no “intentional injustice has been done,” and he could not think of any way to make the efficiency rankings perfectly accurate. He recommended that the government let the rankings stand. Margaret Judge caught the next ship home for the United States.86
