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

DEMOGRAPHIC COMPOSITION OF THE WORKFORCE 59
nationwide, while less than 3 percent were women in the Midwestern/
Prairies and Far West/Plains regions combined (see Table 2). By 1900,
when the census showed 13 percent of operators nationwide to be women,
the West still trailed the East with only 12 percent of woman operators. Reflecting
the general westward population shift, however, the proportion of
women operators employed in the western states grew from around 20 percent
of all women operators in 1870 to 40 percent in 1900.
Demographics in Other Parts of the World
As in the United States, the highest percentages of women telegraphers in
Canada tended to work in the large telegraph offices in the eastern part of
the country. Shirley Tillotson found that in 1902, 42 percent of the operators
at the Toronto office of the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company
were women, as were 28 percent of the operators at the offices of the Canadian
Pacific Railway (CPR) Telegraph in the same city. A smaller percentage
of women worked in offices in western Canada, particularly before 1900;
only 5 percent of the operators in Winnipeg were women in 1894, but the
figure was 18 percent by 1917. 46
The percentage of female operators in England and Europe during the
late nineteenth century seems to have been somewhat higher than in the
United States, at least in urban areas. In England, women were employed
both in the large commercial telegraph offices in London and in smaller offices
in towns and rural areas. In 1870, shortly after the telegraphic service
came under the control of the British Post Office, 1,535 of the total of 4,913
telegraphers, or 31 percent, were women. 47
In France, women worked both at large offices in the major cities and
in small rural offices. In the Paris Central télégraphique in 1880, 230 of the
624 operators, or 37 percent, were women in 1880; two years later, the
number of female operators had increased to 300, or nearly half of the
total. 48
As in the United States, the percentage of women employed as telegraphers
in Europe continued to rise in the early twentieth century. In Austria
in 1930, 2,735 of the 5,900 employees of the telegraphic administration
were women, or 48 percent; this figure includes all telegraphic administration
employees, from housecleaning personnel to senior administrators. Of