Did you know that in 1878 a woman named Emma Nutt made history and all she did was pick up the phone? She didn’t just connect calls and answer customers’ questions, she helped bring in a new era of telecommunications and create a new job field for women because of her soothing voice.
TELEPHONE OPERATORS USED TO BE RUDE TEENAGE BOYS UNTIL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL HEARD A WOMAN’S VOICE…
Boy operators were common and often made jokes, conducted wrestling matches on the job and shouted “ahoy!” into the phones when they answered, which was preferred by Alexander Graham Bell himself. Edward Holmes, the owner of a bustling home security company, quickly realized that his immature boy employees were endangering his business.
Unlike the male employees, Emma Nutt was patient and polite on the phone. She used a voice that was soothing and cultured and she navigated with ease. Many other companies saw the benefit of having a female operator and began to hire more women instead of men. By the turn of the 20th century, more and more single women were joining the workforce. Married women were expected to be responsible for duties at home so most companies only hired single women.
Working in the telephone industry was highly looked upon, since many jobs were in a factory or sweatshop setting. Women looked at telecommunications as a way to achieve class mobility and were passionate, which made telephone companies abandon male labor and opt for women’s work.
However, not every woman got a job. As voices became more and more important, operators often had to take lessons and elocution classes to ensure they sounded poised on the phone. Any woman with an accent of any kind most likely didn’t get hired as an operator.
Emma Nutt set the tone for what was to come with her friendly voice one call at a time and she truly created the era of telecommunications. If you’re looking for a phone service provider who is a leader in the industry and an innovator in the field, contact Vaspian today!
ONE RESPONSE TO “HISTORY BEHIND TELEPHONE OPERATORS”
Linda Hurley I miss telephone operators – sigh! They were a friendly helpful voice on the phone – and I think if you asked for the local time or weather report they would tell you!!
The Woman Who Made History by Answering the Phone
Telephone operators sitting in front of a long switchboard at the Cortlandt Exchange in New York City around the turn of the century
The first telephones were hard enough to use without the added harassment of the teenage boys who worked as the earliest switchboard operators — and who were, per PBS, notoriously rude.
It was Alexander Graham Bell himself who came up with a solution: replacing the abrupt male operators with young women who were expected to be innately polite. He hired a woman named Emma Nutt away from her job at a telegraph office, and on this day, Sept. 1, in 1878, she became the world’s first female telephone operator. (Her sister, Stella, became the second when she started work at the same place, Boston’s Edwin Holmes Telephone Dispatch Company, a few hours later.)
As an operator, Nutt pressed all the right buttons: she was patient and savvy, her voice cultured and soothing, according to the New England Historical Society. Her example became the model all telephone companies sought to emulate, and by the end of the 1880s, the job had become an exclusively female trade.
Many women embraced the professional opportunity, which seemed like a step up from factory work or domestic service. But the work wasn’t easy, and telephone companies were draconian employers, according to the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, which notes:
Merely to get the job, a woman had to pass height, weight, and arm length tests to ensure that she could work in the tight quarters afforded switchboard operators. Operators had to sit with perfect posture for long hours in straight-backed chairs. They were not permitted to communicate with each other. They were to respond quickly, efficiently, and patiently — even when dealing with the most irascible customers.
It soon became clear to these operators why the teenage boys who preceded them had so often talked back to their customers. One woman, in an anonymous 1922 op-ed for the New York Times, reported saying “number please” an average of 120 times per hour for eight hours a day (and sometimes at night) — and biting her tongue when she was excoriated for every possible connection problem, “including the sin of sending your party out to lunch just when you wanted to reach him.”
Working under these conditions for impossibly meager pay (Nutt herself made $10 a month working 54 hours a week) ultimately drove the women to organize. In 1919 they went on strike, paralyzing the telephone-dependent New England region — and winning a wage increase.
Nearly a century after Nutt first connected a call, switchboards remained almost entirely staffed by women. In 1973, a group of women filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about this hiring disparity — and the corresponding dearth of women employed in other telecommunications positions. The EEOC persuaded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (later known as AT&T) to sign an agreement opening every job in the company to both sexes.
The agreement backfired in its intended effect, however. “[It] is producing many more male operators than female linemen or telephone installers,” TIME observed later that year. Boys, it seemed, had retaken their place at the switchboard.
Read more about the 1973 case, here in the TIME archives: Crossed Wires at Bell
EMPLOYMENT: Crossed Wires at Bell
Monday, Oct. 22, 1973
Ever since 1878, when one Stella Nutt and her sister Emma invaded what had been an exclusively male profession, the Bell System’s telephone operators have been almost all women, while its higher-paid skilled jobs have nearly all been held by men. The situation has long outraged feminists, and last January they won what seemed a significant victory: their complaint to the Government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced American Telephone & Telegraph Co. to sign a consent decree under which it agreed to throw open every job in the system to both sexes.* Nine months later, that decree is having a topsy-turvy effect; it is producing many more male operators than female linemen or telephone installers.
Ma Bell has made a conscientious effort to live up to the decree; the system’s managers have set goals (critics call them quotas) for the percentage of job openings in every category to be filled by women and by men. They also distribute to every employee brochures describing every job for which he or she might apply. But women simply have not been seeking traditionally male jobs in anything like the numbers that had been expected. During the second quarter of 1973, the latest period for which system-wide figures are available, Bell placed a grand total of 1,744 women in formerly male jobs—considerably less than half the 4,301 men who took jobs customarily filled by women.
Women have shown some interest in inside-the-plant men’s jobs, such as that of a “frameman,” who connects wires in a central office. During the second quarter, women filled 890, or 63%, of the semiskilled “inside” craft jobs that opened up. But surprisingly few women are applying for “outside” men’s jobs, such as lineman or installer—even though they pay more than most women’s jobs. (In Columbia, S.C., for example, repairmen make as much as $124 a week, v. $101.50 a week for an information operator.) Only 389 women were moved into such jobs in the second quarter, filling a mere 4.7% of the openings, v. a company goal of 19%.
Why? Some women say they fear that the outside jobs will take greater strength than they possess, or subject them to more discomfort than they want to endure; others seem to feel that the jobs are incompatible with their femininity. Men seem to have no such compunctions about applying for women’s jobs, despite the traditionally lower pay. During the second quarter, 2,656 were hired as operators, filling 17% of the openings (the company’s goal was 10%). Some possible explanations: many men as well as women may prefer the relative comfort of tedious indoor work to the rigors of outside jobs, and many men may still consider white-collar work more socially prestigious than better-paying blue-collar jobs.
Whatever the reason, the way that the consent decree has worked so far suggests that it may eventually have a wholly unintended effect. If the Bell System continues to offer men’s jobs to women who will not take them, and to offer women’s jobs to men who snap them up, employment of women throughout the system may go down.
Did you know that in 1878 a woman named Emma Nutt made history and all she did was pick up the phone? She didn’t just connect calls and answer customers’ questions, she helped bring in a new era of telecommunications and create a new job field for women because of her soothing voice.
Linda Hurley 