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

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SOCIETY AND THE TELEGRAPH OPERATOR
“about twenty-five percent of the operators are women.” The census of
1880, however, showed only 5 percent of telegraph operators to be women. 38
Railroad Operators
Statistics on the number of railroad telegraphers in the nineteenth century
are notoriously unreliable, not only because of the inaccuracy of most census
reporting but also because of the work habits of railroad operators,
“boomers,” who changed jobs frequently. Archibald M. McIsaac, in his
1933 study of railroad telegraphers, guessed that about two-thirds of the
telegraph operators in the United States in 1883 were railroad operators.
Since the census of 1880 recorded about 22,000 telegraph operators, this
would indicate around 14,600 railroad operators in the early 1880s. Likewise,
the census reported about 5 percent of all telegraphers to be female in
1880; this would lead to a figure of about 730 female railroad telegraphers
in 1880. (These figures almost certainly err on the low side, both numerically
and in percentages.) The problem of accurate reporting is compounded
by the fact that railroad operators did not begin to think of
themselves as being occupationally separate from commercial operators
until the late 1880s, when they formed their own labor organization, the
Order of Railway Telegraphers (ORT). 39
In the early twentieth century, figures became more precise as census
figures improved in accuracy and occupations were more clearly differentiated.
U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics show the number of women employed
as railroad telegraphers continuing to climb in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, peaking in the early 1920s. Of the 78,000 railroad
telegraphers employed in the United States and Canada in 1920, 2,500—a
little over 3 percent—were women. 40
Regional Demographics in the United States
In the United States, the largest numbers of female operators were found in
the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states in the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting
not only the early development of the telegraph industry in this
area but also the greater maturity of industry and commerce. As the telegraph
lines began to move southward and westward later in the century as