My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office ... - Monoskop

SEX AND MORALITY IN THE TELEGRAPH OFFICE 113
the perception of the female operator as being at risk for “moral corruption.”
The railroad station in the late nineteenth century was located at the
exact edge of respectable middle-class society; while it was a place where
businessmen and even their wives and children might venture safely, it was
also a place where they would encounter persons from vastly different levels
of society, including common workmen, drunkards, gamblers, and prostitutes.
Even today, when we speak of someone as coming from “the wrong
side of the tracks,” we are invoking the railroad depot symbolically as a
point of social demarcation.
In many small towns, houses of prostitution were located near the railroad
depot for the convenience of traveling salesmen and other itinerant
men who frequented them. “Railroad hotel” became a common euphemism
for such establishments. The expression “red light district,” denoting a part
of town where houses of prostitution existed, may have had its origin in the
practice of railroad brakemen leaving their lanterns outside the door at
houses of prostitution. Ma Kiley noted that a house of prostitution and a saloon
were directly across the tracks from the railroad depot at Baker, Montana,
when she worked there in 1908; it was, she said, the first time she had
ever seen “women of that reputation.” 57
Women telegraphers working in railroad depots certainly knew that
these places existed in the vicinity of railroad depots and knew what went on
in them. It was the sort of knowledge of the world and its evil ways from
which patriarchal society tried to shield women; female telegraphers were
seen as being in danger of moral corruption simply by possessing this
knowledge.
Anxieties about the corrupting influence of the working environment of
female telegraphers were expressed by women reformers as well as by men.
Writing to her sister Mary in 1907, Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the
National Women’s Trade Union League, claimed that a combination of low
wages and the “easy tolerance” shown by some women operators toward the
“sporting element” that frequented their offices had led them into the “red
light district.” She noted that in many Chicago hotels and drugstores,
women were employed as telegraphers on a commission basis, with a base
salary of between $5 and $20 a month, to which was added a percentage of
the total business conducted. There was, however, “another side to this