Telephone operation was a good career for women. Then it got automated.

Photo caption: Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania operators in 1945. By that point, the process of automating telephone operation was well underway. Photo credit: Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania / Federal Communications Commission / PhotoQuest / Getty Images. Article by Dylan Matthews. Vox – July 18, 2023.

If you were a young (white) woman looking for work in the early 1920s, you could do worse than becoming a telephone operator. In the early 1920s, AT&T, the telephone monopoly that grew out of Alexander Graham Bell’s Bell Telephone, was America’s largest employer, and specifically employed many women as operators, who manually connected callers by plugging wires into inputs on switchboards. In 1929 […]

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