Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America. By Cindy Sondik Aron New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. viii + 234 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, and index. $29.95.

Reviewed by Richard R. John, Jr.

Cindy Aron's Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service is a perceptive and engaging case study of an important segment of the late nineteenth century middie class: the men and women who worked for the federal government in Washington, D.C. Her goal is to sketch an "important transition in middle-class labor"-that from an "old" middle class of independent entrepreneurs to a "new" middle class of salaried employees (p. 6). According to Aron, the federal civil service, and not the modern corporation, was the first large, sexually integrated, …