Jepsen 2000

Jepsen, My Sisters Telegraphic

Jepsen - My Sisters Telegraphic_ Women In Telegraph Office 1846-1950 (2001, Ohio University Press)

In the mid-nineteenth century, women telegraph operators entered a challenging, competitive technological field in which they competed di- rectly with men, demanding, and occasionally getting, equal pay and some- times moving into management and senior technical positions. Women telegraphers constituted a subculture of technically educated workers whose skills, mobility, and independence set them apart from their contempo- raries. The story of these women has remained untold, partly because the telegraph itself has been forgotten—and partly because these women were so far ahead of their time.

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The role of the telegrapher in the mid-nineteenth century was similar to that of the contemporary software programmer/analyst. A rapidly grow- ing industry had a sudden need for persons with technical skills, creating opportunities for ambitious women as well as men. To be a telegrapher, one had to be extremely literate and a good speller, be capable of learning Morse code, and have some knowledge of electricity and telegraphy. Women played an important role in the telegraph industry from the 1840s onward, yet almost no written documentation on their activities ex- ists. Numerous stories of male telegraphers who went from “rags to riches,” like Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, have entered the popular litera- ture, but there are few corresponding stories about women. This book describes daily life in the telegraph office and discusses the impact that women telegraphers had on culture and society, both in the United States and in other parts of the world. It discusses women’s part in the telegraphers’ labor movement and details the lives of some women telegraphers. Finally, it offers some thoughts on how women’s presence in technical fields today has been influenced by the work of these pioneers.

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Unlike many of the occupations women entered for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century, telegraphy admit- ted women to its ranks before its gender roles had solidified. During much of the nineteenth century, men and women performed the same tasks using the same equipment, working cooperatively and often anonymously at ei- ther end of the wire.

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As the telegraph lines began to spread across the United States in the late 1840s, the demand for telegraph operators quickly exceeded the supply, especially in rural areas. The entrepreneurs who organized the early tele- graph companies quickly seized on the idea of employing women as opera- tors, including members of their own families who often already had some hands-on experience with the new invention.

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followed the rail right-of-way, no attempt was made to use the telegraph as a signaling system for the rail- road until 1851, when Charles Minot, superintend- ent of the Erie Railroad, first used the telegraph to monitor and control the movement of trains.

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The presence of women in the telegraph office was noted by Virginia Penny, who included women telegraphers in her encyclopedic book How Women Can Make Money. Although first published in 1870, much of the ma- terial was collected earlier, in the 1860s.

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While men feared the loss of their livelihoods because women might be employed at a lower rate, this prospect never materialized. Likewise, women were not “driven from the trade,” as some men recommended, or completely mar- ginalized. Women continued to work in the telegraph industry after the Civil War in part because of the support of the industry itself, and Western Union in particular, but also because of the active efforts of women opera- tors to defend and justify their role.

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Telegraphy as an occupation became gendered, in the sense that we understand today, only after the in- troduction of the teletype and the creation of a separate role for women teletype operators.

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Use of the telegraph for sending commercial messages and routing trains reached its peak around 1900. The number of telegraphers began to decline in the early part of the twentieth century as the telegraph was replaced by the telephone for sending personal messages and by Centralized Train Control for routing trains. Although Morse instruments remained in serv- ice in remote parts of the world until the 1970s, they were largely replaced by Teletype devices for transmitting commercial messages.

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Various experimental Teletype systems were developed, beginning around 1900; telegraph companies were using them extensively by 1915.

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Following the development of the Teletype, the functions of the tele- graph operator began to resemble those of a typist. Messages were entered on a machine with a typewriter keyboard; at the receiving end, automatic printers printed out the text. A skilled operator who could decipher the Morse code dots and dashes was no longer needed. The introduction of the Teletype led to gendering of the occupation of telegrapher; almost all Tele- type operators were women. Thus as the total number of telegraphers de- clined in the mid-twentieth century, the percentage of women employed in the industry increased.

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(In telegraphic termi- nology, a “letter” had a fixed length, say fifty words, and a flat-rate charge, while a “message” was of unspecified length and was charged for by the word.) A full rate message had priority over everything except government messages, wh…

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Pen

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Good handwriting was an important skill for early telegraphers because messages had to be copied onto message blanks as they were received. Telegrapher’s script, an elaborate form of cursive handwriting that con- nected the letters in a continuous line, was the preferred form of transcrib- ing messages.

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Around 1890, the typewriter was introduced into the telegraph office, and operators were allowed to type messages directly onto message forms as they received them. The typewriter quickly became the predominant means for copying messages; it proved to be a boon to those whose careers had been hindered by deficient handwriting skills. The typewriter was in turn replaced by the Teletype, beginning around 1915.

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It was important to have a smooth, graceful sending style; beginners were often accused of sending in an awkward, choppy style. “Clipping” was an af- fected sending mannerism in which the proper duration was not given to each dot or dash; male telegraphers frequently accused women of clipping…

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To qualify as a first-class operator, one had to be able to send and re-

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ceive error-free code at thirty to forty words per minute. Typically, five years of experience were re- quired to become a first-class operator.

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In smaller offices, partitions and even cabinets were occasionally built to ensure privacy for the female operators.

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This segregation did not occur in England, where male and female op- erators generally worked together.

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In earlier versions of Teletypes (the multiplex), the Tele- type would output a punched tape containing the text in Baudot code, the ancestor of modern computer ASCII code. (Another early Teletype, the Morkrum, was able to send messages directly without requiring an interme- diate punched tape.) The punched tape would then be fed into a multiplex- ing unit for transmission and was merged with the data of as many as eight other messages and transmitted as a common data stream to a remote loca- tion. There, the stream would be demultiplexed and each message fed to an automatic printer that printed it out either on a sheet of paper or on paper tape. Later Teletype units transmitted data directly, eliminating the need for the paper tape.

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Morse operators saw the Teletype as a threat because it did not require skilled telegraphers to operate it.

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Since the speed at which messages could be sent was limited only by the typing speed of the operator, messages could be sent at a phenomenal rate of speed compared to using a Morse key. While the average rate of trans- mission using a Morse key was approximately 60 messages an hour in the New York Western Union office in 1917, one operator, Lillian Wagen- hauser, was able to send a phenomenal 173 messages in one hour using a Morkrum Teletype unit.

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Many of the Teletype operators were women employed at a lower rate than their male counterparts.

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They were “infor- mation workers” and “technicians” well before these familiar late twentieth- century job classifications existed, making attempts to discuss them in nineteenth-century terms particularly elusive. As Edwin Gabler notes in his 1988 study The American Telegrapher, “Nothing comparable to telegraphy existed before the mid-nineteenth century.”2

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In the United States, telegraphers believed their technical skills set them apart from members of the traditional working class. Their expressed opinions of other workers contain a note of elitism, perhaps an intimation of underlying anxieties about the narrow social gap that separated them from their own working-class origins.

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Most telegraphers in the United States in the early years tended to be native- born Americans with English-speaking ancestry, primarily because of the need for proficiency in written and spoken English. Later, immigrants of many nationalities began to see telegraphy as a means of gaining entry into the American middle class.

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As part of its program to encourage the employment of women as telegra- phers, Western Union sponsored a school in New York City to teach teleg- raphy to women.

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The school, known as the Cooper Insti- tute, was jointly supported by Western Union and Cooper Union. Its course of instruction lasted almost five months and covered bookkeeping, battery maintenance, and report preparation, as well as Morse sending and receiving.

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The telegraph company ra- tionalized hiring of women at lower rates of pay than men by claiming that the majority of women operators were not permanent members of the workforce but temporary workers who would leave when they married: “Marriage to them is h…

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Many business colleges began to teach telegraphy in the late 1860s and 1870s; in Cleveland in the late 1860s, a would-be telegrapher could choose between the Cleveland Business and Telegraphic College and the Cleveland branch of the Bryant and Stratton Business and Telegraphic College. Bryant and Stratton was a chain, with schools in thirty-three cities.

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Women who attended these colleges had to deal not only with the general prejudice against hiring women but also with the prejudice against hiring graduates of telegraphic colleges.

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When the Teletype came into general use around 1915, Western Union set up a school to teach Teletype operation in New York City. Located two floors above the operating department at 24 Walker Street, the school taught touch typing and printer operation, as well as geography, spelling, and copy-reading. These courses, together with a six-month apprentice- ship, were required in order to become a printer operator.

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The number of women telegraphers listed in the U.S. census ranged from 355 in the 1870 census to almost 17,000 in 1920, the peak year for the num- ber of telegraphers reported by the census. Thus the number of women em- ployed as telegraphers was far less than those employed in more traditional occupations for women, such as domestics or teachers, but greater than the number of female attorneys. Female physicians outnumbered telegraphers in 1870 but were outnumbered by telegraphers by 1920.

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Women operators in the West seemed to have encountered less gender- based discrimination than their eastern counterparts. This was probably owing in part to both the more relaxed social codes of the West, which ac- knowledged that women might have to enter nontraditional roles, and the general scarcity of women on the frontier; women wage earners were not seen as a threat to male jobholders, as in the East.

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During the period 1860–90, the average pay of a woman telegrapher was approximately equal to that of a female teacher or bookkeeper in the United

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William Shanks listed the fol- lowing weekly wages as typical for women in 1868: bookbinder, $10; seam- stress, $4.50; telegraph operator, $10; schoolteacher, $12; and actress, $18.

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During the late nineteenth century, the wages of telegraphers were far above those of telephone operators; by the 1920s, as the wages of telephone operators increased and Morse operators were replaced by lower-paid Tele- type operators, the differential narrowed.

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In general, women telegraphers were paid less than men for the same work. It appears that women in the United States were paid two-thirds to three-quarters of what a man would make for the same work.

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A single woman could survive on the pay she made as a telegrapher, but she had little opportunity to save money, especially at entry-level wages. Women telegraphers were expected to dress for their profession; as Martha Rayne commented, a fair proportion of a beginning telegrapher’s income went for her work dresses, hats, and shoes…

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One of the distinguishing characteristics of women telegraph operators in the nineteenth century was a relatively high degree of mobility. Railroads often offered free passes to telegraphers, enabling them to move easily from place to place in search of work.

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As Philip Foner notes in his Women and the American Labor Movement, the debate over the presence of women in the telegraph office in the mid- 1860s took place in the context of a heightened national awareness of the effects of the presence of large numbers of women in the workforce. Em- ployers, who had initially hired women only because of the shortage of men, soon realized that they could reduce operating expenses by employing women at a lower rate of pay.

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Telegraphy was inherently gender-neutral in that an operator had no way of knowing the gender of the person at the other end of the wire. Although claims were made that there was a distinctly female style of sending (and an associated higher level of errors), there are numerous anecdotal accounts of male operators who were surprised to learn that the “man” on the other end of the line was in fact a woman.

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Drawing a comparison to the working conditions of women in other occupations, Smith stated that he had recently visited a printing business in New York City, where he saw “a dozen or more women type-setters penned up in a room not over ten feet square, steaming hot with feted [sic] air,” while “in the adjoining room, (100 x 30 feet) were half a dozen men com- positors, enjoying plenty of room and air.” He added, “These women are probably never allowed to go beyond mere composition, and are then spo- ken of as being unequal to their brothers, and denounced as reducing prices of labor.”

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Women entering the craft in large numbers after 1870 did not displace male operators; women supplemented the male force by primarily occupying lower-skilled positions that offered correspondingly lower pay. Yet by debating their opponents in print and in- sisting on their right to earn a living as telegraphers, women operators cre- ated their own legitimacy and visibility in the industry.

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One reason for the relative absence of conflict in Europe regarding the employment of women as telegraphers was that men did not see women as competitors to the extent that they did in the United States. Employment for men as well as women in the European postal service was relatively se- cure and less subject to layoffs and job reductions as was working in the pri- vate sector in the United States.

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Running a telegraph office was an area of business activity by women in the nineteenth century that has been largely overlooked by business histori- ans. Although typically run as an agency rather than a proprietorship, a tele- graph office required bookkeeping, regular remittances to corporate headquarters, filing of telegrams, and inventory of equipment.

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Another possibility for the aspiring entrepreneur was to set up and op- erate a private telegraph line and compete with the industry giants by offer- ing lower rates and faster service. Although the barriers to women entering the business world in the Gilded Age were formidable, a few women teleg- raphers made use of their knowledge of the telegraph business to start up independent companies.

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Women also invented and marketed telegraphic instruments. Clara M. Brinkerhoff, a former music teacher in New York City, became associated with the telegrapher George Cumming in the early 1880s. They worked on a new design for contact points for telegraph keys and were jointly issued a patent for periphery contact points in 1882…

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The growing numbers of women in telegraphy in the 1870s and the public awareness of their role created an entirely new literary genre, the “telegraphic romance.” In either novel or short story form, this consisted of the story of a young woman telegrapher who finds romance as well as a livelihood in her occupa- tion. The romantic interest is often another telegrapher, and the relation- ship is often carried on by means of the telegraph lines. In the end, the two lovers marry, bringing the woman’s telegraphic career to an end as she be- comes a devoted wife and mother.

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Telegraphic romances began to appear in print in the early 1870s, coinci- dent with the opening of the Cooper Institute and Western Union’s efforts to bring more women into the industry.

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It is intriguing to speculate on the effect the telegraphic romances had on patterns of courtship, both among telegraphers and among the general public. Probably one direct effect was the sudden popularity of marriage by telegraph in the late 1870s. One such marriage occurred in 1876, when G. Scott Jeffreys, Western Union operator at Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, and Lida Culler, the telegrapher at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, were wed by tele- graph after a courtship that began over the wires.

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LTHOUGH most telegraphers in the United States came from a working-class background and were familiar with the role of trade unions in improving wages and working conditions, they tended to “hang back from public demonstrations” of working-class solidarity, partic- ularly in times of economic prosperity. Instead, they gravitated toward the behavioral patterns of the traditional middle class of clerks and officials by displaying diligence at the workplace in an effort to gain the attention of management and secure raises and promotions.

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…labor historians have tended to focus on the introduction of women into gendered roles in the workplace as a result of industrializa- tion, which largely took place after 1870, whereas women entered the tele- graph industry much earlier and participated in its preindustrial phase…

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Although the work was gendered to a degree through inequity in pay and status, the work was not fully stratified by gender until the introduction of the Tele- type around 1915, when telegraphers were divided into the highly paid and predominantly male Morse operators and the predominantly female Tele- type operators.

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The technological aspects of telegraphy force us to reconsider our assumptions that nineteenth-century electrical technology was a “man’s world,” in which women did not participate. The story of women in teleg- raphy shows that women not only participated in all aspects of telegraphic activity, from invention to management to the labor movement, but in- cluded telegraphy in the set of skills they passed to one another through ties based on shared profession, labor solidarity, and kinship.

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The computer itself is the direct descendant of the telegraph; as Carolyn Marvin observed in When Old Technologies Were New: “In a histori- cal sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work.”

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…the telegraph can be seen as subverting the predominant gender ideology of the age by creating a space (which we would call “cyberspace” today) that belonged to neither the predominantly masculine public sphere nor the predominantly feminine domestic sphere…

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Why was the story forgotten? Forgetting the story of women telegraph operators was a twentieth-century phenomenon, caused in part by method- ological, if not ideological, bias on the part of business and labor historians.

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It is instructive to go through the telegraphic historical literature in chrono- logical fashion and note first the appearance, then the gradual disappear- ance, and finally the reappearance of references to women.

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