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"In the mid-nineteenth century, women entered a challenging, competitive technological field - the telegraph industry. They competed directly with men, demanding and occasionally getting equal pay. Women telegraphers made up a subculture of technically educated workers whose skills, mobility, and independence set them apart from their contemporaries."
"My Sisters Telegraphic is an accessible and fascinating study designed to fill in the missing history of women telegraph operators - their work, their daily lives, their workplace issue - by using nontraditional sources, including the telegraphers' trade journals, company records, and oral and written histories of the operators themselves. It includes an analysis of "telegraph romance," a largely forgotten genre of popular literature that grew up around the women operators and their work."
"This study also explores the surprising parallels between the telegraphy of the nineteenth century and the work of women in technical fields today. The telegrapher's work, like that of the modern computer programmer, involved translating written language into machine-readable code. And anticipating the Internet by over one hundred years, telegraphers often experienced the gender-neutral aspect of the "cyberspace" they inhabited."--Jacket.… (meer)
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In the 19th Century and for much of the 20th the typical woman’s place in the workplace was restricted to a few gender specific jobs such as line worker (only in certain industries), seamstress, secretary, school teacher, nurse, etc. Regular employment in any kind of technical field was essentially unheard of…and then, in the 1840’s a new technical marvel arrived on the scene – the telegraph - and with it came the demand for a skilled operator to run it.
The telegraph lines spread rapidly across the United States and Canada and the need/demand for qualified telegraphers quickly outstripped supply. The skills required of a trained operator included such things as clean handwriting, excellent command of English and spelling, the ability to quickly translate letters into code for transmission and to decode coded transmissions and convert the code into written English. The operator also needed an understanding of the equipment and the ability to repair it if necessary. This skill set was something possessed by a large number of women of the day. Because the telegraph and the occupation of telegrapher was newly arrived on the world scene, it did not have prior baggage with respect to practitioner gender. As a result, a great many women were able to become professional, full time, telegraphers and found themselves working side by side with their male counterparts.
Author Jepsen does an admirable job of telling the story of this large group of technically educated women whose skills, job mobility, and independence in the workplace (many of the women were station agents who, in addition to being the telegrapher, were also responsible for all of the other aspects of running a town train station) stands in stark contrast to the standard image of women at work in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The book opens with a discussion of women in the telegraph industry and how their job evolved over time. The author provides a detailed description of the day-to-day life in a telegraph office (typically a large building with floors of telegraph operators) as well as the daily life of the lone operator at a distant location such as a railroad depot.
Having set the stage with respect to the work and the workplace author Jepsen moves on to describes the interaction of female telegraphers with society (and conversely), their involvement in the labor movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries and their depiction in literature and the movies.
I think My Sisters Telegraphic is a very well written book. I think it would appeal to anyone interested in general history of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, women’s history, history of the impact of technology, or railroad history. ( )
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When James D. Reid, superintendent of the Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph Company, hired Emma Hunter as an operator in 1851, evidently at her suggestion, he did not attempt to put her in a public office but instead ran the telegraph wires into her sitting room, the proverbial center of the domestic sphere: “We remember well that the wires were introduced into a neat sitting room of a home in Westchester, Pa., where, with the instruments on one side and a work basket on the other, our new assistant sent and received her messages, and filled up the interim in fixing here Sunday bonnet, or embroidering articles of raiment which a gentleman editor is not expected to know or name.” Reid’s well-intentioned but chivalric attempt to preserved the public/domestic dichotomy was ultimately unsuccessful; women workers, including Hunter, soon entered the public sphere in such large numbers that the public ceased to regard their employment as novel. Ironically, though, Reid’s basic conservative gesture presaged a cultural paradigm shift far more radical than he could have imagined; Emma Hunter, receiving and sending messages in her sitting room in 1851, was arguably the world’s first “electronic commuter.”
"In the mid-nineteenth century, women entered a challenging, competitive technological field - the telegraph industry. They competed directly with men, demanding and occasionally getting equal pay. Women telegraphers made up a subculture of technically educated workers whose skills, mobility, and independence set them apart from their contemporaries."
"My Sisters Telegraphic is an accessible and fascinating study designed to fill in the missing history of women telegraph operators - their work, their daily lives, their workplace issue - by using nontraditional sources, including the telegraphers' trade journals, company records, and oral and written histories of the operators themselves. It includes an analysis of "telegraph romance," a largely forgotten genre of popular literature that grew up around the women operators and their work."
"This study also explores the surprising parallels between the telegraphy of the nineteenth century and the work of women in technical fields today. The telegrapher's work, like that of the modern computer programmer, involved translating written language into machine-readable code. And anticipating the Internet by over one hundred years, telegraphers often experienced the gender-neutral aspect of the "cyberspace" they inhabited."--Jacket.
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The telegraph lines spread rapidly across the United States and Canada and the need/demand for qualified telegraphers quickly outstripped supply. The skills required of a trained operator included such things as clean handwriting, excellent command of English and spelling, the ability to quickly translate letters into code for transmission and to decode coded transmissions and convert the code into written English. The operator also needed an understanding of the equipment and the ability to repair it if necessary. This skill set was something possessed by a large number of women of the day. Because the telegraph and the occupation of telegrapher was newly arrived on the world scene, it did not have prior baggage with respect to practitioner gender. As a result, a great many women were able to become professional, full time, telegraphers and found themselves working side by side with their male counterparts.
Author Jepsen does an admirable job of telling the story of this large group of technically educated women whose skills, job mobility, and independence in the workplace (many of the women were station agents who, in addition to being the telegrapher, were also responsible for all of the other aspects of running a town train station) stands in stark contrast to the standard image of women at work in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The book opens with a discussion of women in the telegraph industry and how their job evolved over time. The author provides a detailed description of the day-to-day life in a telegraph office (typically a large building with floors of telegraph operators) as well as the daily life of the lone operator at a distant location such as a railroad depot.
Having set the stage with respect to the work and the workplace author Jepsen moves on to describes the interaction of female telegraphers with society (and conversely), their involvement in the labor movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries and their depiction in literature and the movies.
I think My Sisters Telegraphic is a very well written book. I think it would appeal to anyone interested in general history of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, women’s history, history of the impact of technology, or railroad history. (