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

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CONCLUSIONS
female railroad telegraphers. Women operators were frequent and vocal
contributors to these journals; they used the telegraphers’ journals to debate
the status of women in the telegraph industry.
Researching the Work and Lives of Telegraph Operators
As Ava Baron notes in her essay “Gender and Labor History: Learning
from the Past, Looking to the Future,” researching the lives of nineteenthand
early twentieth-century women workers, including telegraphers, requires
a different approach from that used to study their male contemporaries.
Nontraditional sources and techniques borrowed from genealogy are helpful
in this work. Women operators tended to leave their traces in birth,
death, and marriage records, while men are more commonly recorded in
land transactions, court records, and military service records. In a “traditional”
sense, birth and marriage records are used by genealogists, while
historians rely on legislative, legal, and military records. Of course this has
changed with the introduction of social history and women’s history. And
the following paragraph adds a few more examples. 12
The stories of women telegraph operators can be found in railroad and
telegraphic journals, in census records, and in their obituaries. Railroad Retirement
Board records are also a valuable source of information on telegraphers
who retired after its establishment in 1935. Local newspapers and
historical societies often can provide information on the lives of telegraphers
in their communities. Perhaps the most important sources of information,
however, are the oral histories of the operators themselves. The
recollections of retired telegraph operators are rich sources of facts and observations.
The Importance of Rediscovering History
The story of women telegraph operators provides insight into the role that
women played in the growth and expansion of technology in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. While the current historical record incorrectly
suggests that women did not encounter electricity until it appeared in
the home in the form of appliances, the story of women in telegraphy indicates
that women played an active role in the development of electrically