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

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NOTES TO PAGES 33–42
According to the Railroad Telegrapher of November 1910 (page 1705), “There is a rumor
that all the railroads may follow the example of the B. & O. and bar women employees.”
But the railroads continued to employ increasing numbers of women employees until the
1920s, when automation began to reduce the ranks of telegraphers.
33. The Teletype and its printer are the direct ancestors of modern computer keyboards
and printers; designers of early computers simply appropriated Teletype devices
to serve as input/output devices. Thus, in a sense, computers appropriated the language
of the telegraph to communicate with humans.
34. Fison, “Is Morse Telegraphy Doomed to Extinction?” 71.
35. Ibid., 67.
36. Lucile Ross, “Railroads,” in Our Life, 1882–1982, Akron, Iowa (Akron, Iowa:
Akron Register-Tribune and Le Mars Daily Sentinel Job Printing, 1982), 30.
37. Telegrapher, July 15, 1876, 173; July 22, 1876, 180.
38. N. G. Gonzales to Emily Elliott, quoted in Jepsen, “Two ‘Lightning Slingers’
from South Carolina,” 272; Telegraph Age, September 1, 1897, 316.
39. Telegrapher, September 15, 1869, 272; September 23, 1876, 234; Jepsen, Ma
Kiley, 58.
40. Martha L. Rayne, What Can a Woman Do? or, Her Position in the Business and Literary
World (Petersburgh, N.Y.: Eagle, 1893), 140–41; see also Elizabeth Beardsley Butler,
Women and the Trades: Pittsburgh, 1907–8 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1984), 293.
Chapter 3—Society and the Telegraph Operator
1. Thayer, Wired Love, 25; Minnie Swan Mitchell, “Lingo of Telegraph Operators,”
American Speech, April 1937, 155.
2. Gabler, American Telegrapher, 173.
3. “Female School of Telegraphy,” Journal of theTelegraph, November 1, 1869, 271.
4. Alexander H. Bullock, “The Centennial Situation of Woman,” Address of Hon.
Alexander H. Bullock at the Commencement Anniversary of Mount Holyoke Seminary, Massachusetts,
June 22, 1876 (Worcester, Mass.: C. Hamilton, 1876), 6.
5. Edwin Gabler discusses the class status of telegraphers in The American Telegrapher,
85–91 and 123. Stephen Meyer discussed the concept of “rough masculine culture”
in the workplace in “Work, Play, and Power: Masculine Culture on the Automotive Shop
Floor,” a paper presented at “Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology, and Work,”
a conference held at the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley
Museum and Library, in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 3, 1997.
6. For Sarah Bagley’s class origins, see Wright, “Sarah G. Bagley,” 398–413, and
Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (New
York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), 250–74; Mary Stillwell’s background is described in
Robert Conot, A Streak of Luck (New York: Seaview Books, 1979), 46–48, 219.
7. Kieve, Electric Telegraph, 85; Garland, “Women as Telegraphists,” 251.
8. Gro Hagemann, “Feminism and the Sexual Division of Labour: Female Labour
in the Norwegian Telegraph Service around the Turn of the Century,” Scandinavian Journal
of History 10 (1985): 151.
9. Thayer, Wired Love, 54; “The Lady Operators,” New York World, July 27, 1883, 2.