As President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant was not nearly so good at picking assistants as he had been when he was a general: his Cabinet, with few exceptions, was far from illustrious. Among Grant’s worst appointments was George S. Boutwell, Secretary of the Treasury. He came to office at a time — 1869 — when the nation badly needed reforms in currency, taxation, and tariff policies; but “the one idea that flowered in his Sahara mind,” historian Allan Nevins remarks, “was the reduction of the national debt.”

One way to reduce the national debt, Boutwell figured, was to cut down on expenses and waste, starting with his own department. He took a tour through the Treasury Building, and announced that he had discovered the source of a serious leak in United States funds: there were too many female clerks employed by the Treasury Department, and most of them were not earning their keep. These excess persons, he decreed, would have to go — forthwith. And go they did.

While this move was regarded with consternation by the nation’s feminists, to whom it was a serious setback in the struggle to improve the lot of the working girl, it struck the weekly magazines as quite amusing. Most of them were inclined to think, anyway, that woman’s place was in the home, preferably a home where a number of weeklies were delivered regularly.

Two of the weeklies — Harper’s Bazar and The Day’s Doings — reacted to Mr. Boutwell’s economy measure. The Bazar’s satirical engraving represented the moment when, supposedly, the new Secretary comes through the door into a room full of lady clerks who are engaged in such nonfiscal pursuits as decorating hats, playing practical jokes, using the ledger books as building blocks, and studying the latest fashions (in the Bazar, of course). One of them, who has moved on from folly to vice, is smoking a cigarette.

The Day’s Doings provided the sequel: the departure of the clerks after the Secretary has issued his stern command. It is an interesting insight into the journalism of the period that whereas in Harper’s Bazar the girls all appear to be rather elegant young ladies, in The Day’s Doings — a salty New York publication that usually specialized in sex and crime stories—they look like trollops.

One of the magazine’s reporters wrote an accompanying story in the sharp style to which his readers had become accustomed:

The female element of the Treasury Department,