July 1, 2019 • 50 mins
WWI, women’s suffrage, and one of the most important inventions of the 20th century: the telephone. Interview with historian Elizabeth Cobbs, author of "The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers." Learn more at www.ephemeral.show
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
A federal as a protection of my heart radio. It's
hard to overstate the impact of the telephone in the
last hundred and fifty years. This communications technology has altered
the land, the sky, the makeup of outer space. And
(00:25):
if you trace the contours of history, you'll often find
the telephone in places you wouldn't expect. A background character
in stories inspiring and despicable alike. So I'm not here
to approve of history. I'm just here to tell you
the story. This is Elizabeth Copps. I'm Elizabeth Cobbs. I'm
a historian. Do you want me say Moore? She is
(00:49):
and was being incredibly modest. So I hold the Melbourne
glasscock chair in American History at Texas and n the
author of eight Boom, also a senior fellow at Aford
University's Hoover Institution, made two documentary films. The PBS was
on the Historical Advisory Committee of the U. S. State Department. Previously,
for six years sat the Pulest Surprise Jury for History.
(01:10):
I always think that sounds I think that sounds more
impressimate than it was. Well, yeah, I don't ask for
my CV for the initial spark that would come to
connect well, almost everything. One has to look back to
the mid nineteen century and a young Scottish American immigrant
named Alexander Graham Bell. His mother was deaf, and he
(01:35):
found that he was the only member of his family
who could really communicate with his mother, especially as her
hearing got worse and worse and finally went all together.
He would press his lips to her forehead and talk.
He became a teacher of elocution, a language teacher, and
began teaching at a school for the deaf in Boston,
(01:58):
carrying out his self imposed mission. This interest he had
going back to his mother's disability, so he had this
great empathy for people couldn't hear, and he became very
interested in the way that vibrations communicated electrically. As it
would turn out, it was that interest which led him
to experiment the telephone, was introduced in eighteen seventy six
(02:25):
at the Philadelphia Centennial, saying famously, he was talking with
his assistant, communicating across several rooms, but it was a
way to link people, to bring humans in contact with
each other. Initially, it seems like a parlor trick, and
(02:51):
in fact Bell offered to sell his innovation to Telegraph company.
Another important job handled quickly and efficiently by Western Union
and Telegram, And they said, oh no, who's going to
use a telephone To people who are in profit making enterprises,
their loath to spend money on something that seems gimmicky.
(03:12):
But to the average person, the immediate relevance of this
technology was quite apparent. Within a very short period of time,
a year or two, people started put together what became
known as p b X systems, internal telephone systems where
it's like a closed circuit like the old fashioned hotel,
(03:34):
where someone is getting calls in at some central exchange,
some central switchboard, and connecting people in rooms or within
a military base or a company. Good morning. So pb
X systems were the first ones to get going. But
then right away people started to develop subscription systems. We
(03:56):
would subscribe to a telephone system and you would be
able to talk to other mutual subscribers. They wouldn't be
within your same company, like the PBX system anybody could
join and could get a subscription, and suddenly you be
talking to all kinds of folks. Now, for that reason,
a lot of the initial telephone systems you could only
talk with people within your system. After a dozen or
(04:18):
so years, there was a universalization of the system. They
basically put all the systems together. So even if you
got telephone service from say Verizon, you could call somebody
who had a T and T American Telephone and Telegraph,
that is the company that Bell founded. For the first
half of their history, telephone systems depended on an operator.
(04:43):
Most of the other parts of the technology are really
you know, they're technological. Their machines, you set them up,
you maintain them. They run on their own until they break,
and then if some guy comes in and fixes it right,
a repair person. But the one human being that was
necessary for every single call to be made in this
(05:03):
era was the operator operator. This was in a period
in which telephones didn't have dials, So imagine what they
called a candlestick phone was like a black candlestick. Really
at the base there was no dial. So what would
happen is you would simply lift off the black receiver
and you would speak into it. And what would happen
(05:26):
is that by lifting it, it would trigger an electrical charge.
The act of lifting the receiver would trigger a very
tiny electrical charge which would go down the wire to
the exchange, the telephone exchange wherever that was, whether it
was your pb X exchange in the basement of your
hotel or an exchange across town operated by a T
(05:47):
and T. Then what would happen is a light would
come on on the switchboard of the operator, or sometimes
depending on the way the switchboard was set up, a
flap would drop down. And that's where our current term
I dropped call comes from. Switch to the network with
the fewest dropped calls, So this flap would dropper, the
light would light up, and the operator would say number please,
(06:09):
and she would actually try to say the best I
could because they were trained in a very specific way
of where your voice goes up and where your voice
goes down, and how long you pause number me, thank you.
It was the time of tailorism, where everything is very
scientifically managed. These operators have been trained to provide curfeus
(06:33):
and speed easter. They wanted the human beings in a
way to be as precise as the machines. If you,
like me, weren't born before the implementation of direct distance dialing,
that is, you've never picked up a phone and done
anything besides dial You've probably seen this in films, rooms
(06:54):
crowded with switchboards the size of desks or even walls,
and cables everywhere, dre over and twisted around one another,
hands in continuous motion, unplugging and reaching and replugging. Perhaps
you've also noticed telephone operators are almost exclusively portrayed by women.
And telegraph services, you would have what they call telegraph
(07:16):
boys now often young men, and they would hear the
Morse code and they would transcribe the message and then
the message would be run by a messenger over to
where it was going. And of course telegraphs are very
clumsy for that reason, because it's not a spontaneous communications,
it's a process. So when they first started using telephones
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and they needed operators to switch the calls, you know,
to take one call incoming and switch it to the
correct plug which would take it to the right person,
they initially tried using young men and they found out
a couple of problems. These boys were just not that polite.
They didn't say things like number please. They did feel
that the women just provided more consistent serve. This they
(08:00):
were more consumer friendly. But more importantly, women were really
good at it. Long distance, long distance, long distance. It
was a very high paced, very stressful job with a
(08:21):
lot of multitasking involved. To use some kind of modern term,
words are coming in your ear, you're talking to somebody else,
You're checking the wires to make sure that other people
have completed their calls. You're also making notes about how
long the call last is, because you're going to charge
the customer based on how long the call lasted, note
where the call went to. And you're doing this with
a board of fifty calls that are coming in all
(08:42):
at the same time. One woman described looking at these
women's hands was like looking at hummingbirds darting all around,
and you are being very polite the whole time, and
you are never ever ever losing your temper for some reason.
And when were just really good at this. A lot
of men resisted the job too, because it was so
(09:04):
identified with women. By this point, it was almost kind
of a sex segregated occupation. Men who worked in the
telephone offices in the United States were almost always exclusively
the supervisors, because men were considered very good at supervisor women,
but they were not very good at the phones themselves.
They can't understand it word you're saying, oh boy, well,
(09:25):
congratulations in the nineteen ten telephone operation was one of
a rather limited number of professions available to women. Women's
rights had actually improved some they had women could own property,
oh my gosh, and they could sign contracts, and the
age of consent of marriage had been moved up from
(09:45):
ten to about sixteen, and most states so big strides,
big strides. And yet women didn't have elemental political rights.
You were defined by the man in your life. Literally,
really your nationality was defined by his They couldn't vote,
of course, the right to vote in particular was opposed
(10:07):
because people thought that it would make women less womanly,
that you would lose your girls status or something, and
that men would be less manly, and so you can't
have that. The other reason was that government, in its
most elemental way, it's about the physical defense of the nation.
That's what governments do. They defend the people. And if
(10:30):
you can't pick up a gun and be a soldier,
well then you really shouldn't be in government. That one
is kind of the extension of the other. The interesting
thing about women's soldiers is that one of the things
they helped to prove is that women can defend their government.
In nineteen fourteen is were erupted across Europe, the world's
(10:52):
largest neutral national pledged not to get involved. I know
the United States is the world's largest neutral nation. Well,
it is hard to imagine now, but it was true
historically for most of our history, only until about seventy
years ago. The United States had a longstanding of policy
that went back to George Washington's farewell address, where he
(11:16):
said it should be the great rule of the United States,
um paraphrasing now, to not intervene in other people's quarrels. Yes,
the United States defended itself and sometimes attacked others, but
it was always explicitly because of something that was in
our national interest. So the idea of intervening in other
(11:36):
people's quarrels to help them resolve their problems was not
something we had ever done. Woodrow Wilson initially said, this
is a far away thing with which we have nothing
to do. It can't touch us, which in a way
he was really right. The United States has always been
benefited by the fact that we had these giant oceans.
In fact, that's one reason why people do look to us,
(11:58):
is because we're kind of a global last wild place,
so to make you know, we're less likely to be
attacked than anybody else. But in April of nineteen seventeen,
the United States broke with over one hundred years of
tradition and declared war on Germany. So once the United
States declared war, then there's a question of how do
(12:19):
you go about it. The United States had never been
in a major foreign war, had never had allies in
a war before. Rather than when the French allied with
us to help us get our revolution through, the man
they tapped for this difficult job was decorated General John Pershing.
A new kind of a war is leif in the world.
(12:41):
General John Pershing was a kind of man from central casting,
you know, square jaw, tall, steely blue eyes looking off
into the distance. He was also a very competent officer.
He had served in the West in command of a
group of African American soldiers which were nicknamed buff those soldiers.
(13:01):
He had served in the Spanish American War. He had
actually led the famous Persian expedition to try to nab
Poncho Villa from Mexico when ponto Via tech the United States.
By the way, Poncho Villa escapes when he finished grammar
school and got his high school diploma. He didn't have
a job, and he so he i took a job
teaching at as would have been described at the time
(13:22):
a school for colored children. Later, when he was a
drill instructor at West Point, he was taunted because he
had led black troops. West Point, of course at that
time all white, all male, and the white cadets didn't
like him, and so they thought they would get back
at him, and he got a nickname. Later, this derogatory
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nickname was commuted to black Jack. He was known as
Blackjack for the rest of his entire career. We often
think of the military as a conservative institution, but it's
also the case that when people are trying to kill you,
that you generally want the person at yours side on
your side who is best at their job. And I
(14:04):
think that that's what Blackjack was like. He was somebody
who recognized that people could be very good at their
jobs and they should be respected for that, and a
place made for them on how to build and install
a US Army abroad. Pershing was largely given carte blanche.
He shipped out in June of v arrived in England
and made his way to France. Pershing when he first
(14:26):
gets there, is largely setting up what's going to happen,
and the dough boys as they're called, don't really begin
arriving in numbers until the spring. He takes by the
way with him telephone equipment, knowing that the French have
(14:47):
very little, very good telephone equipment. Telephones have been invented here,
so all of the best telecommunications technologies on this side
of the Atlantic, so they take some of that with
them in the first ship that sales they get over
to us, and they spend about five six months just
sort of setting up and figuring out what they're gonna do.
And one of the things that becomes really clear early
on is that they cannot dog on it make a
(15:09):
dang telephone call. The army is operating largely p b
X boards, but to get outside the Army to call
anywhere else, you have to connect with the local exchange.
The local exchange is run by a French person and
they all speak believe it or not, they all speak French.
(15:31):
So one of the problems for these American der boys
is that they're connecting with French operators, they can't speak
the language and The other problem too, is that men
just have not proved very good at this job. In
November of nineteen seventeen, Pershing sends a memo back home,
and he says, I have got to have women operators.
(15:53):
Get them to France as soon as you can, make
sure they're in uniform, put them under command, and get
them over here. So immediately the War Department sends out
press releases all over the country saying we want women operators.
Women are needed to go over there. To quote that
George M. Cohen song, What was put out was that
(16:22):
women were needed as soldiers. Women would serve in uniform,
They should leave their civilian garb at home. They would
be subject to the same military discipline as the men,
making the same kind of contribution, as important a contribution
as even men who went over the top, because they
said over the tops of the trenches in New Orleans
(16:44):
be getting In early December of nineteen they are all
these newspapers all around the country, you know, from from
Atlanta to Seattle, Washington asking women to volunteer. Seventies si
hundred women volunteer for the first one positions, so seventh
thous and six women volunteer. They do it so fast
the army doesn't even have applications, so then it takes
(17:05):
him a few weeks to get that on board. One
of the things is that they had to speak French
without hesitation. They had to be able to simultaneously translate. Pronunciation,
have to be very very good. They had to be
very quick witted, They had to be very good listeners.
They had to be just very adept physically. At these operations.
They did sort of assume anybody who had all those
(17:27):
kind of native characteristics could be taught telephone operating, and
so they also trained them in that, and some people
washed out of that. In the end, they did get
the people who were their very best, whether by natural
aptitude you're by practice. The keenness of American citizens to
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volunteer for the war effort speaks volumes about the attitudes
of the time. There was really a sense of public service.
The idea was that you were to do for your government.
It wasn't what your government was to do for you.
The notion that America was a democracy, that it was
this government was its people was still a very present sentiment.
(18:09):
Funds and daughters of pioneers, cousins of the people, who
built America, especially because there was no professional army, or
a very tiny one, so if the nation needed defending,
it meant, well, gosh, it's up to us. It's our nation.
We're the ones who've got to do this. And almost
(18:37):
five hundred switchboard operators had become the first female soldiers
of the U. S. Army. Two and twenty six would
cross the Atlantic with the Signal Corps. Women served in
myriad other capacities for the war effort. The U. S.
Navy enlisted women for the first time to serve domestically.
Red Cross nurses and y m c A volunteers risked
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life and limb abroad. But the Hello Girls, as these
operators would be called, we're special. They have been vetted
by the army. They have been investigated repeatedly by Army intelligence.
Because keep in mind, these people are going to be
handling national secrets literally in their hands, and through their headsets,
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they can hear every command that's going to go out,
because in World War One almost all commands retreat fire.
The actual business end of war is handled by the telephone,
and through telephone operators. One of the most important persons
is Grace Banker, who was a twenty five year old woman.
She had been a telephone supervisor in New York City,
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recent college graduate of Barnard College, all women's college associated
with Columbia University, which didn't yet admit women. One week
she applies to go into the signal Corps and she
doesn't hear back, and she writes them again a week
later and says, you know, I hope you didn't lose
my letter. And then the week after that she's inducted
and fingerprinted and told, oh, actually you're gonna be in
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charge of the first contingent. There had never been women soldiers,
so there weren't women officers. So they immediately looked around
and said, okay, well you know who might be officer material.
And here's a young woman who's done this very rare
thing at the time, which is to become a college graduate.
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It's the blame of old Montana Little, the cowboy girl,
Amana Bell, the Golden Well. Grace. Banker's good friend Merle
Egan was from Montana. They didn't know each other they
met going in, but they could be paying good friends.
She always described yourself as stubborn gal. I also have
I have a particular weakness for I might say Louise
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and Raymond le Breton, this was oh you too too.
They were the sisters who were just you know, they
were well, they weren't very truthful at times. They lied
like a rug. They wanted to get in the war.
They were French descent, they spoke French fluently. Louise was
eighteen and she told the army she was twenty one,
and her sister Remoaned was sixteen and told the army
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she was eighteen when Army intelligence interviewed them. As all
these women were interviewed multiple times, Army intelligence reports wrote back,
and of course I saw the reports in their personnel files.
They're very mature for their ages. We think they're going
to do very well. They were very mature for the
ages they had lied about. There were others. There were
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just so many wonderful women with all these crazy nicknames
for each other's like you know, there was Esther Tutsie
to you Tutsie Frisnell, and Suzanne Prevo who was known
as the wild Cat. And it's funny. I think often
we look back and people from previous generations and we
assumed that they were all just kind of prudish and
that they were all just very staid and sedate and
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never uttered cuss words. Since things and they were different,
their values were different, but they were just as young
and vibrant as any millennial, doing what they believed in,
doing what they loved, you know, wanting to be a
part of the wider world. While the women, by the way,
were being inducted and trained and shipped to France. Internally,
in the army's own internal administration, there was a conversation
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that went on for about five months where the army
ultimately says, you know what, we're going to consider them
contract workers. So although the army gave them no contracts
and in fact had them where the same oath as
all of the men swore who were inducted, the women
never knew that the Army, at least internally and its
upper bureaucracies, did not see them as full soldiers. The
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women thought they were, Let's be clear, they were. In
early March of the first contingent of thirty three women
ship out. They all went to France, which itself was
a little dicey because you know, your ship could be
sunk at any moment. They're on constant alert until they
get to England. You're wearing your life jacket even to bed.
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When they arrive, Paris itself is under bombardment. The first
night they're there, they have to go down into the
bomb shelters because there's incoming from the German artillery, which
is now within twenty miles of Paris. It's rainy, it's cold,
it's freezing. They walk out to work and the mud
is so deep that they have to put where they
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called duck boards over the muck. Once the battles start,
they're working sometimes around the clock. There's bombs going off,
there's artillery concussions are shaking their boards. When the German
guns got so close the windows would blow out. At
one point the group of men Russian and tell the women,
you've got to get out, and the women say we
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will as soon as you do. You're not getting handed
night towards the end of the war, at one point
the women were and the men were in these very
flimsy wooden barracks that look more or less like chicken
coops that the French had left behind after the Battle
of Redunda, that they move into and operate. They both
sleep in them, and their telephone equipment is in them,
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and they messed together, meaning they have breakfast, lunch, and
dinner together, the women and the men, the officers. The
prison of work Hampan is right next door to and
the army field evacuation hospitals right next door, so they
see all the people coming back torn apart. In fact,
in their spirit time, the women often went into the
hospitals to talk to the men because it was very
cheering to the men to see an American woman a face,
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you know, to hold their hands as they're dying, and
it was They didn't write about it a lot, but
they were that's what they were doing. Um you know,
they had these descriptions they wrote in their diaries. So
these scenes they saw in those hospitals, which is one,
as Grace Banker said, would make a pacifist of anyone,
and she was a soldier. At one point, the German
prisoner of work knocks over an oil stove and their
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barracks goes up in flanks. The women lose all of
their possessions, and right next door they're connecting telephone calls
in a very we're building me out of the same
chicken cook got of construction and it starts filling with smoke.
They refused to leave, and the men or climb on
top of the building are pouring water on it, trying
to preserve obviously not only the women, but also this equipment,
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because this American made equipment is not available anywhere else
in the world, has been brought across the ocean for
this very purpose. Finally, the situation is too dire and
they tell the women to get out. We're now ordering
you to get out. They pull out the equipment into
the nearby field. Somehow they managed to get the fire out,
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put the equipment back in, and they start up operating
again within half an hour. I mentioned half an hour
because General George Squire later reported to Congress that in
a modern war, if communications meaning basically the telephone goes
down for even an hour, the whole military machine collapses.
So they were only down for thirty minutes, and the
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women felt pretty proud about that. A renaissance of human engineering.
The First World War one of the deadliest in history.
It's the first war of the Industrial Revolution. It's the
first technological war. So all the amazing cool stuff that's
been invented in the nineteenth century gets applied to killing
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other human beings, planes and motorized transport and rapid fire
guns and telephones. This is the first big war with
modern communications. Unreliable wartime communication dated back to antiquity smoke signals,
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passenger pigel flags, lights and sales signaling. Each had their drawbacks.
People think, well, radio that was the hot new technology,
and it was, but it was very clumsy. It took
three mules to drag a radio set to the field.
Radio transmissions were wireless and so therefore they can be intercepted.
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And also if there are a lot of messages coming
from one area, even if you couldn't decode it, you
at least know that a lot of messages are coming
from this one place, which means its headquarters. The other
problem with radios is that they as a form of communication,
they did not yet carry voices. So radios at this
time were a form of wireless telegraph. It was Morse code,
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so it required someone to decode the radio transmission. So
the telephone is amazing. Anybody can talk the other person
hears immediately what's being said and understands it. It's wired,
which means that if you want to intercept a call,
you have to find these specific wire which goes to
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these specific place and then tap into it. Now, even
the tapping into it would create a kind of funny
sound on the wires, and experienced operader could often tell.
And the other thing is that it was easy and lightweight.
You could put wire in a spindle and run it
out across the battlefield. The best method is to carry
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the reel and dust the wire. You go jumping craters
and getting to the other side, and making sure that
your men have communication all times back home. This method
is the bathest of all where it can be used.
A T and T put whole battalions of men in France,
a T and T line workers and supervisors and engineers.
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They all went together as what we're called the bell battalions,
and the diamond wish at the center of it. All
all that wire and all that equipment. It doesn't mean
anything if you do not have an operator. In her
book on the Hello Girls, Elizabeth writes telephones became the
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central nervous system of the U. S. Army switchboards where
its synapsis. The Army did have to use men sometimes,
and they found that it took the average infantrymen sixty
seconds to complete a call. It took the average woman
ten seconds, So in war time, the difference between sixty
seconds and ten seconds is the difference between living or
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getting your head blown off. Even after the US officially
entered the conflict, more than a year passed before American
troops engaged in combat. General Pershing felt that the most
significant blow to German morale and to the German war
machine would be to hit all at once with a
full sized American army. America had no army, so I
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had to recruit and train all those men and equip
them and ship them across the ocean. It just took
a long time. It's not until the fall of night.
The war has now gone on longer than four years,
and the Americans are finally there in mass. There were
seven women who accompanied General Pershing at the Great American
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battles of the war, which were the two big battles
towards the end, Saint Miel and the Battle of muzar Gone.
Pershing needed women, wanted women there because this is really
where the rubber meets the road. The few women who
were initially taken to that first great American battle at
San Miel, it was kind of an experiment. Their secret
orders were just written as a note. We have that
(30:19):
note now. It's just recently on Earth and it says
secret orders to misprovo Ms. Presnell, Miss Banker, you're going
to the front and get ready to lead a roving life.
They had gas masks on their chairs, they had trench
helmets which they were required to wear outdoors at all times.
They were trained in how to use pistols should their
position be overwhelmed. That was a very short battle, is
(30:42):
actually really three to four day battle. At the end
of it, General Pershing actually spied the women. Things were
calming down and some of the women were walking down
the street and he said to Colonel Parker Hit, their supervisor,
how are the women doing? And Hits said, well, let's
go across the street and ask them. So Pershing crosses
the street and the women salute him, and he says,
how's it going at ladies, And they said very well, sir,
(31:04):
And he said, is there anything more you want and
they said, we just want to be as close to
the action as we can get. He at that point
turned to Colonel Hit and he said, take them where
they want to go. Was at that point that then
they're committed to going to the Battle of Musargne, which
goes on for forty seven days, and there's this epic
scale battle that was what helps to end the war.
(31:28):
The Battle of Mozargone would put all their logistics to
the test. Fresh American soldiers marched into battle alongside their
European allies. They would hit the Germans with everything they had.
Everybody ramps up to execute the last engagements of the war,
and even then nobody knows that Germans are fantastic fighters.
(31:50):
In some ways, persian Is is deluded as all the
other officers of the French and the German and the British.
He does what they did, throws bodies against protected trenches,
against machine gun and placements, and people are mowed down.
The ballamas are gone. Itself. Is just one of the
bloodiest battles in all of American history, one of the
(32:12):
longest battles. The tempo in the switchboard room, the women said,
you just can't imagine it, just cannot imagine the speed
of this. There's all this effort to just get the
men into place, and then Coban it starts and the
women are fielding calls this whole time, Calls of all
(32:33):
sorts including friendly fire. We've now overrun our position, and
our men behind us are now firing into where Americans
have advanced, and so our own troops are story need
to get hit. And how do they communicate that. They
get on their telephones and they call back to the
switchboard operators who put them into command, into touch with
the artillery command, who tells the man stop. And they're
(32:54):
also air basis. They don't go open the planes until
they get the phone call, which says, Okay, now you go,
and this is where you're going to go. So everything
is coordinated through these telephones. Nobody knew how long it
would go. Most people thought the war would probably last
another year into nine, but the American presence really did help. Ultimately,
(33:18):
it is the combined efforts of all the armies, the French, British,
the Americans that convinces the Germans that the war is
just never going to go their way. The war ends
at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month. On November eleven, Germany signed the armistice, ending
(33:38):
World War One. But for the Hello Girls and millions
more women across the Atlantic, the battle at Home raged
on since at least the Seneca Falls Convention of eighteen,
(33:59):
activists in America had been formally petitioning for a federal
amendment to enfranchise women, but the nineteen tens not much
had changed. There's a tipping point for the nineteenth amendment
simply it is World War One. Women's participation in World
War One, which was much broader than the telephone operators.
Women had served as nurses, just volunteers at home as
(34:21):
well and yes on the battlefields. In that way, women's
rights and their women's right to vote is in parallel
with the earlier right of African American men to vote
because they pick up arms in the Civil War. Similarly,
at the beginning of the United States, men who didn't
own property picked up muskets at Lexington and Concord. President Wilson,
(35:01):
who initially resisted entering the war, had also positioned himself
against women's suffrage. Woodward Wilson, who had staunchly opposed a
national amendment to the Constitution to enfranchised women, he comes
around to their point of view, and in fact, he
gives this beautiful speech to the U. S. Senate in
(35:23):
October of from paraphrasing, but he says something like are
we going to ask for and take all that women
can give, and say, we still do not see what
rights this gives him. And he noted the fact that
by this point twenty other countries, largely because of World
War One, had enfranchised women. Bolshevik Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada,
(35:47):
and all kinds of countries set enfranchised women. And he said,
are we going to be the last to learn the lesson?
I think of the irony of that. You're the first
modern democracy, every public and it's one of the last
to give women the vote. As he says in his
speech to the U. S. Senate, We're going to have
(36:09):
to resign the leadership of liberal minds around the world
if we cannot do this thing that everybody else is doing,
if we cannot honor the citizenship of women. One of
the reasons why he's so reluctant to do so has
(36:30):
much less to do with gender than it has to
do with race. Race is actually the uninvited guest to
the party. Has it is so often in American politics,
a lot of the opposition to a federal suffrage amendment
for women is too full. First of all, Southern states
do not want the federal government telenom pretty much anything,
but especially about voting rights. The second problem is that
(36:53):
the federal Suffrage Amendment is worded that it will include
all women, So this will mean African American women and
can vote too. And the really remarkable thing when you
actually read the records of the U. S. Congress at
this time, again and again in the U. S. Congress
has said very openly and repeatedly, well, we all know
that the fifteenth Amendment was a mistake, meaning that the
(37:16):
amendment that enfranchise black men. And there is not a
single moment in the US Congressional record where someone stands
up and says, no, the fifteenth Amendment that was right. Okay,
I might not agree with votes for women, but certainly
African American mentioned vote. So there was this turning away
from what had been accomplished in the Civil War itself.
(37:38):
So when Woodrow Wilson becomes an advocate for women's suffrage,
he knows he's enfranchising African American women. Of course, in
the South, because of Jim Crow and Pole to access
the South will pretty readily disenfranchise those who legally should
be able to vote. But at least on paper, black
men and and now African American women will have vote,
(38:00):
And that's because of Woodrow Wilson. He's the one who
really pushes that across the finish line. The Nineteenth Amendment
was officially adopted on August, but of course that's not
the end of the story. While the Amendment was a
major achievement, issues of voting rights and equal rights for
(38:21):
all people were and are far from being resolved in
this country. History is not a light switch. You don't like,
go oh, let's all be good people now switch Every
generation has this tax. Can we all I like to
think we all push the marker forward? To make that
(38:42):
perfectly clear, all one has to do is follow the
soldiers home from World War One. After the eighteen Armistice,
the US Congress has vote a bonus for any person
who served in the U s. Armed Forces in an
official capacity. Women who were in the Navy and Marines,
like all the men, of course, get victory medals saying yes,
(39:04):
thank you for serving the country. They get hospitalization benefits
that they've endured some sort of disability or injury. They
get to join groups like the Veterans of Foreign Warrors
and Foreign Legion, and these organizations that are formed around
that same time. They get all of the kind of
recognition and they literally monetary benefits that come to soldiers.
(39:25):
The women who were in the U. S. Army come
home and they find out that the army does not
consider them eligible for anything. The army considers them soldiers
up until the moment they are discharged. The minute they're
out of the army, the army says, oh, well, wait
a minute, you were contract employees. I've been in army
uniform for months now, and I've been trained, and I've
(39:47):
been sworn into the army. What do you mean I'm
not army. Of course, in France, the women are being
told oil, you can't go home. You're in the army now,
you know, stay put until we tell you can. Operator
General George Squire was one of those people who was
(40:07):
shocked and dismayed and horrified that these women veterans, who
had served so honorably and so effectively, they didn't get
the things that the men they served alongside did get.
He several times petitioned Congress for the veterans Medals, for
the Victory Medal, for the disability of benefits, for the
(40:28):
bonuses that the men got and each time was told no,
the War Department did not support that effort. Ironically, by
the way, the War Department was is headed by a civilian,
so within the army itself there was much more favorable
attitude towards the women. And then in the administration at
(40:49):
the executive level, which was supervising the army, one might say,
beginning in the nineteen twenties, and then in the nineteen thirties,
and in the nineteen forties, and in the nineteen fifties,
and in the nineteen sixties, and in the nineteen seventies,
these women get their local congressmen to introduce legislation. They
write the president's they write Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower
(41:12):
and Kennedy and Johnson and on all the way up
through Jimmy Carter, saying all we want is to be recognized,
so the army just doesn't see them. And over time
the story gets fainter and fainter, like a bad telephone
transmission itself, and the static crackles over and the stories
(41:36):
lost altogether. They get to the point, by the nineteen
thirties they're telling women who ride in and asking for
their benefits. They're saying, well, you didn't even swear oaths.
Now I have to do is look in the records
as I did, and the personal records, and there's oath
upon oath upon oath upon oath upon. Merle Egan became
the leading voice in this charge. As a senior citizen,
(41:57):
she was still seeking recognition for the Hello Girls. At
some point, she writes to a friend that people sometimes
ask me why I am still campaigning for this deep
into my eighties, Because I love my country, and so
I want my country to be worth loving. Merle Egan
would go to elementary schools and she's made this doll.
(42:19):
It's like a Barbie doll, and she's so's a teeny
tiny uniform, and she puts her old brass and signey
on the cap, and she goes to school children. She
wants to tell them the story of the Hello Girls,
so that somebody won't forget. People won't forget that there
were these women who served in World War One. In July,
the Seattle Times published an article on Merle Egan and
(42:40):
her campaign. A young attorney named Marco happened to catch
this story in the newspaper. He reads this article and
he calls her up, and he said, I think you've
got a legal case here. Do you need any help?
And she says, well, yes, young man, I love that.
So he assembles this case and begins to put it
together and collects all this documentation. Me while there is
(43:01):
a paralleled legislation that's underway in the U. S. Congress
to acknowledge the women of World War Two, these women
also had been not recognized as veterans. So it's the
signal core telephone operators and the Women's Air Force Service
pilots of World War Two. On the same legislation. Mark
Ho testifies to the US Congress and he makes this
incredible legal argument which essentially revolves around these uniforms. Do
(43:27):
you realize that it is against the law to impersonate
an officer of the United States government. It's against the
law to impersonate a police officer. So if your government,
your federal government, gives you a uniform and tells you
you must never take it off, you must never take
off that uniform unless you're in bed with the door closed.
You may never remove those dog tags. You have made
(43:49):
them into representatives of the American government. You have made
them into soldiers by telling them they must always wear
this uniform. Essentially, he says, you know, we're prepared to sue.
And the US Congress realizes that this is not only
the right thing to do, but also the Hello girls
as well as the women of World War who have
(44:10):
a pretty powerful legal argument. And so finally, in nineteen seven,
sixty years after the women were initially recruited, this legislation
has passed. And then in ninety nine they are finally
given their discharge papers from World War One, which entitled
them to the flags on their coffin, to their victory medals.
(44:31):
And Merle Egan, who gets her discharge papers at a
formal ceremony in Seattle, Washington, she gives us great speech.
She says, I'm so proud. I'm so excited not only
to receive my victory medal for serving in World War One,
but I consider it a medal for having fought the U. S.
Army for sixty years and winning meal. Eagan passed away
in she was buried with military honors. In researching this topic,
(44:59):
Elizabeth On covered diary entries, letters, photographs, army gear, ephemera
that in some cases had not been seen in a
hundred years. The National Archives is very very recently released
film footage, old archaic film footage of World War One.
Grace Banker's granddaughter calls me one day. She says, I
(45:20):
think I found my grandmother. Do you think this is Grace?
And she sends me the link and I go on it,
and I've actually seen probably more photographs of Grace than
she has in World War One. I say, oh, my gosh,
of course that's Grace. And she's talking and laughing and
connecting phone calls. And then we get footage that shows
after the armistice, General Pershing at a reviewing stand with
(45:42):
thousands of men lined up in these long lines you
know that go off into the distance, and he's up
there giving a speech to the men about you know,
this great victory and it's because of you that this happens.
And we don't hear his voice, we just see him
speaking because it's silent film. And in the front row
of the reviewing stand are the women at attention in
(46:02):
their uniforms in the front row. And then the army
later can't see them, can't see them at all. They
just vanish, which is what I think has been the
record of women in history and the people of color
to it. It vanishes. Everybody knows it at the time,
and then it's not documented and recorded, and so we think, well,
maybe it wasn't very important, maybe they didn't play a
(46:23):
very significant role, maybe it never really happened. We're all
people of modern political correctness. We're just kind of amping
it up. But it's they were there, and they did
really important things, and if we take the time to look,
we'll find them say that. I Femeral is written and
(47:16):
assembled by and produced by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and
Tristan McNeil, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson, and special
thanks this episode to Gretchen Prairie and Miranda Hawkins. Elizabeth
Cobbs is the author of The Hello Girls, America's First
Women's Soldiers, which was adapted into a documentary. Her newest
(47:39):
book is The Tubbman Command, a novel following Harriett Tubber.
Find links to all her work at Elizabeth Cobbs dot
com and links to ours at Femeral dot Show. And
thanks to work as Folk and musical director Sandra Kerr
for sharing their rendition of the March of the Women,
a Suffragist so composed by Ethel smythe in nineteen ten
(48:03):
thanks on our website. Ways as a very days as
a dreary sory day by baby have all, as he says,
wherey may that the break walls lie strike He's to
(48:30):
our no, it's candy win. But by day and day,
all that she had done for the work of to
day grea biry for and realize love device love sure
(48:52):
is he nuch much, shows shower Friend. Next time on
a semi two doors, set down at the piano, placed
(49:14):
the score in the stand, took out a stop watch
and closed the lid over the keys. He started to
stop watch. Thirty seconds later, he opened the lid, then
closed it back over the keys. He did the same
thing two minutes and three seconds later, turning the pages
of the score, all the while performing each of the
actions as quietly as possible. And a minute and forty
(49:38):
seconds after that, he stood as if to receive applause.
World nine Man and in Acus and free from shoe
(49:59):
pack us from imot Radian. These like the irt radio
or Apple podcasts, you know everythings in your favorite shows
A federal as a protection of my heart radio. It's
hard to overstate the impact of the telephone in the
last hundred and fifty years. This communications technology has altered
the land, the sky, the makeup of outer space. And
(00:25):
if you trace the contours of history, you'll often find
the telephone in places you wouldn't expect. A background character
in stories inspiring and despicable alike. So I'm not here
to approve of history. I'm just here to tell you
the story. This is Elizabeth Copps. I'm Elizabeth Cobbs. I'm
a historian. Do you want me say Moore? She is
(00:49):
and was being incredibly modest. So I hold the Melbourne
glasscock chair in American History at Texas and n the
author of eight Boom, also a senior fellow at Aford
University's Hoover Institution, made two documentary films. The PBS was
on the Historical Advisory Committee of the U. S. State Department. Previously,
for six years sat the Pulest Surprise Jury for History.
(01:10):
I always think that sounds I think that sounds more
impressimate than it was. Well, yeah, I don't ask for
my CV for the initial spark that would come to
connect well, almost everything. One has to look back to
the mid nineteen century and a young Scottish American immigrant
named Alexander Graham Bell. His mother was deaf, and he
(01:35):
found that he was the only member of his family
who could really communicate with his mother, especially as her
hearing got worse and worse and finally went all together.
He would press his lips to her forehead and talk.
He became a teacher of elocution, a language teacher, and
began teaching at a school for the deaf in Boston,
(01:58):
carrying out his self imposed mission. This interest he had
going back to his mother's disability, so he had this
great empathy for people couldn't hear, and he became very
interested in the way that vibrations communicated electrically. As it
would turn out, it was that interest which led him
to experiment the telephone, was introduced in eighteen seventy six
(02:25):
at the Philadelphia Centennial, saying famously, he was talking with
his assistant, communicating across several rooms, but it was a
way to link people, to bring humans in contact with
each other. Initially, it seems like a parlor trick, and
(02:51):
in fact Bell offered to sell his innovation to Telegraph company.
Another important job handled quickly and efficiently by Western Union
and Telegram, And they said, oh no, who's going to
use a telephone To people who are in profit making enterprises,
their loath to spend money on something that seems gimmicky.
(03:12):
But to the average person, the immediate relevance of this
technology was quite apparent. Within a very short period of time,
a year or two, people started put together what became
known as p b X systems, internal telephone systems where
it's like a closed circuit like the old fashioned hotel,
(03:34):
where someone is getting calls in at some central exchange,
some central switchboard, and connecting people in rooms or within
a military base or a company. Good morning. So pb
X systems were the first ones to get going. But
then right away people started to develop subscription systems. We
(03:56):
would subscribe to a telephone system and you would be
able to talk to other mutual subscribers. They wouldn't be
within your same company, like the PBX system anybody could
join and could get a subscription, and suddenly you be
talking to all kinds of folks. Now, for that reason,
a lot of the initial telephone systems you could only
talk with people within your system. After a dozen or
(04:18):
so years, there was a universalization of the system. They
basically put all the systems together. So even if you
got telephone service from say Verizon, you could call somebody
who had a T and T American Telephone and Telegraph,
that is the company that Bell founded. For the first
half of their history, telephone systems depended on an operator.
(04:43):
Most of the other parts of the technology are really
you know, they're technological. Their machines, you set them up,
you maintain them. They run on their own until they break,
and then if some guy comes in and fixes it right,
a repair person. But the one human being that was
necessary for every single call to be made in this
(05:03):
era was the operator operator. This was in a period
in which telephones didn't have dials, So imagine what they
called a candlestick phone was like a black candlestick. Really
at the base there was no dial. So what would
happen is you would simply lift off the black receiver
and you would speak into it. And what would happen
(05:26):
is that by lifting it, it would trigger an electrical charge.
The act of lifting the receiver would trigger a very
tiny electrical charge which would go down the wire to
the exchange, the telephone exchange wherever that was, whether it
was your pb X exchange in the basement of your
hotel or an exchange across town operated by a T
(05:47):
and T. Then what would happen is a light would
come on on the switchboard of the operator, or sometimes
depending on the way the switchboard was set up, a
flap would drop down. And that's where our current term
I dropped call comes from. Switch to the network with
the fewest dropped calls, So this flap would dropper, the
light would light up, and the operator would say number please,
(06:09):
and she would actually try to say the best I
could because they were trained in a very specific way
of where your voice goes up and where your voice
goes down, and how long you pause number me, thank you.
It was the time of tailorism, where everything is very
scientifically managed. These operators have been trained to provide curfeus
(06:33):
and speed easter. They wanted the human beings in a
way to be as precise as the machines. If you,
like me, weren't born before the implementation of direct distance dialing,
that is, you've never picked up a phone and done
anything besides dial You've probably seen this in films, rooms
(06:54):
crowded with switchboards the size of desks or even walls,
and cables everywhere, dre over and twisted around one another,
hands in continuous motion, unplugging and reaching and replugging. Perhaps
you've also noticed telephone operators are almost exclusively portrayed by women.
And telegraph services, you would have what they call telegraph
(07:16):
boys now often young men, and they would hear the
Morse code and they would transcribe the message and then
the message would be run by a messenger over to
where it was going. And of course telegraphs are very
clumsy for that reason, because it's not a spontaneous communications,
it's a process. So when they first started using telephones
(07:37):
and they needed operators to switch the calls, you know,
to take one call incoming and switch it to the
correct plug which would take it to the right person,
they initially tried using young men and they found out
a couple of problems. These boys were just not that polite.
They didn't say things like number please. They did feel
that the women just provided more consistent serve. This they
(08:00):
were more consumer friendly. But more importantly, women were really
good at it. Long distance, long distance, long distance. It
was a very high paced, very stressful job with a
(08:21):
lot of multitasking involved. To use some kind of modern term,
words are coming in your ear, you're talking to somebody else,
You're checking the wires to make sure that other people
have completed their calls. You're also making notes about how
long the call last is, because you're going to charge
the customer based on how long the call lasted, note
where the call went to. And you're doing this with
a board of fifty calls that are coming in all
(08:42):
at the same time. One woman described looking at these
women's hands was like looking at hummingbirds darting all around,
and you are being very polite the whole time, and
you are never ever ever losing your temper for some reason.
And when were just really good at this. A lot
of men resisted the job too, because it was so
(09:04):
identified with women. By this point, it was almost kind
of a sex segregated occupation. Men who worked in the
telephone offices in the United States were almost always exclusively
the supervisors, because men were considered very good at supervisor women,
but they were not very good at the phones themselves.
They can't understand it word you're saying, oh boy, well,
(09:25):
congratulations in the nineteen ten telephone operation was one of
a rather limited number of professions available to women. Women's
rights had actually improved some they had women could own property,
oh my gosh, and they could sign contracts, and the
age of consent of marriage had been moved up from
(09:45):
ten to about sixteen, and most states so big strides,
big strides. And yet women didn't have elemental political rights.
You were defined by the man in your life. Literally,
really your nationality was defined by his They couldn't vote,
of course, the right to vote in particular was opposed
(10:07):
because people thought that it would make women less womanly,
that you would lose your girls status or something, and
that men would be less manly, and so you can't
have that. The other reason was that government, in its
most elemental way, it's about the physical defense of the nation.
That's what governments do. They defend the people. And if
(10:30):
you can't pick up a gun and be a soldier,
well then you really shouldn't be in government. That one
is kind of the extension of the other. The interesting
thing about women's soldiers is that one of the things
they helped to prove is that women can defend their government.
In nineteen fourteen is were erupted across Europe, the world's
(10:52):
largest neutral national pledged not to get involved. I know
the United States is the world's largest neutral nation. Well,
it is hard to imagine now, but it was true
historically for most of our history, only until about seventy
years ago. The United States had a longstanding of policy
that went back to George Washington's farewell address, where he
(11:16):
said it should be the great rule of the United States,
um paraphrasing now, to not intervene in other people's quarrels. Yes,
the United States defended itself and sometimes attacked others, but
it was always explicitly because of something that was in
our national interest. So the idea of intervening in other
(11:36):
people's quarrels to help them resolve their problems was not
something we had ever done. Woodrow Wilson initially said, this
is a far away thing with which we have nothing
to do. It can't touch us, which in a way
he was really right. The United States has always been
benefited by the fact that we had these giant oceans.
In fact, that's one reason why people do look to us,
(11:58):
is because we're kind of a global last wild place,
so to make you know, we're less likely to be
attacked than anybody else. But in April of nineteen seventeen,
the United States broke with over one hundred years of
tradition and declared war on Germany. So once the United
States declared war, then there's a question of how do
(12:19):
you go about it. The United States had never been
in a major foreign war, had never had allies in
a war before. Rather than when the French allied with
us to help us get our revolution through, the man
they tapped for this difficult job was decorated General John Pershing.
A new kind of a war is leif in the world.
(12:41):
General John Pershing was a kind of man from central casting,
you know, square jaw, tall, steely blue eyes looking off
into the distance. He was also a very competent officer.
He had served in the West in command of a
group of African American soldiers which were nicknamed buff those soldiers.
(13:01):
He had served in the Spanish American War. He had
actually led the famous Persian expedition to try to nab
Poncho Villa from Mexico when ponto Via tech the United States.
By the way, Poncho Villa escapes when he finished grammar
school and got his high school diploma. He didn't have
a job, and he so he i took a job
teaching at as would have been described at the time
(13:22):
a school for colored children. Later, when he was a
drill instructor at West Point, he was taunted because he
had led black troops. West Point, of course at that
time all white, all male, and the white cadets didn't
like him, and so they thought they would get back
at him, and he got a nickname. Later, this derogatory
(13:43):
nickname was commuted to black Jack. He was known as
Blackjack for the rest of his entire career. We often
think of the military as a conservative institution, but it's
also the case that when people are trying to kill you,
that you generally want the person at yours side on
your side who is best at their job. And I
(14:04):
think that that's what Blackjack was like. He was somebody
who recognized that people could be very good at their
jobs and they should be respected for that, and a
place made for them on how to build and install
a US Army abroad. Pershing was largely given carte blanche.
He shipped out in June of v arrived in England
and made his way to France. Pershing when he first
(14:26):
gets there, is largely setting up what's going to happen,
and the dough boys as they're called, don't really begin
arriving in numbers until the spring. He takes by the
way with him telephone equipment, knowing that the French have
(14:47):
very little, very good telephone equipment. Telephones have been invented here,
so all of the best telecommunications technologies on this side
of the Atlantic, so they take some of that with
them in the first ship that sales they get over
to us, and they spend about five six months just
sort of setting up and figuring out what they're gonna do.
And one of the things that becomes really clear early
on is that they cannot dog on it make a
(15:09):
dang telephone call. The army is operating largely p b
X boards, but to get outside the Army to call
anywhere else, you have to connect with the local exchange.
The local exchange is run by a French person and
they all speak believe it or not, they all speak French.
(15:31):
So one of the problems for these American der boys
is that they're connecting with French operators, they can't speak
the language and The other problem too, is that men
just have not proved very good at this job. In
November of nineteen seventeen, Pershing sends a memo back home,
and he says, I have got to have women operators.
(15:53):
Get them to France as soon as you can, make
sure they're in uniform, put them under command, and get
them over here. So immediately the War Department sends out
press releases all over the country saying we want women operators.
Women are needed to go over there. To quote that
George M. Cohen song, What was put out was that
(16:22):
women were needed as soldiers. Women would serve in uniform,
They should leave their civilian garb at home. They would
be subject to the same military discipline as the men,
making the same kind of contribution, as important a contribution
as even men who went over the top, because they
said over the tops of the trenches in New Orleans
(16:44):
be getting In early December of nineteen they are all
these newspapers all around the country, you know, from from
Atlanta to Seattle, Washington asking women to volunteer. Seventies si
hundred women volunteer for the first one positions, so seventh
thous and six women volunteer. They do it so fast
the army doesn't even have applications, so then it takes
(17:05):
him a few weeks to get that on board. One
of the things is that they had to speak French
without hesitation. They had to be able to simultaneously translate. Pronunciation,
have to be very very good. They had to be
very quick witted, They had to be very good listeners.
They had to be just very adept physically. At these operations.
They did sort of assume anybody who had all those
(17:27):
kind of native characteristics could be taught telephone operating, and
so they also trained them in that, and some people
washed out of that. In the end, they did get
the people who were their very best, whether by natural
aptitude you're by practice. The keenness of American citizens to
(17:48):
volunteer for the war effort speaks volumes about the attitudes
of the time. There was really a sense of public service.
The idea was that you were to do for your government.
It wasn't what your government was to do for you.
The notion that America was a democracy, that it was
this government was its people was still a very present sentiment.
(18:09):
Funds and daughters of pioneers, cousins of the people, who
built America, especially because there was no professional army, or
a very tiny one, so if the nation needed defending,
it meant, well, gosh, it's up to us. It's our nation.
We're the ones who've got to do this. And almost
(18:37):
five hundred switchboard operators had become the first female soldiers
of the U. S. Army. Two and twenty six would
cross the Atlantic with the Signal Corps. Women served in
myriad other capacities for the war effort. The U. S.
Navy enlisted women for the first time to serve domestically.
Red Cross nurses and y m c A volunteers risked
(18:57):
life and limb abroad. But the Hello Girls, as these
operators would be called, we're special. They have been vetted
by the army. They have been investigated repeatedly by Army intelligence.
Because keep in mind, these people are going to be
handling national secrets literally in their hands, and through their headsets,
(19:19):
they can hear every command that's going to go out,
because in World War One almost all commands retreat fire.
The actual business end of war is handled by the telephone,
and through telephone operators. One of the most important persons
is Grace Banker, who was a twenty five year old woman.
She had been a telephone supervisor in New York City,
(19:42):
recent college graduate of Barnard College, all women's college associated
with Columbia University, which didn't yet admit women. One week
she applies to go into the signal Corps and she
doesn't hear back, and she writes them again a week
later and says, you know, I hope you didn't lose
my letter. And then the week after that she's inducted
and fingerprinted and told, oh, actually you're gonna be in
(20:02):
charge of the first contingent. There had never been women soldiers,
so there weren't women officers. So they immediately looked around
and said, okay, well you know who might be officer material.
And here's a young woman who's done this very rare
thing at the time, which is to become a college graduate.
(20:29):
It's the blame of old Montana Little, the cowboy girl,
Amana Bell, the Golden Well. Grace. Banker's good friend Merle
Egan was from Montana. They didn't know each other they
met going in, but they could be paying good friends.
She always described yourself as stubborn gal. I also have
I have a particular weakness for I might say Louise
(20:52):
and Raymond le Breton, this was oh you too too.
They were the sisters who were just you know, they
were well, they weren't very truthful at times. They lied
like a rug. They wanted to get in the war.
They were French descent, they spoke French fluently. Louise was
eighteen and she told the army she was twenty one,
and her sister Remoaned was sixteen and told the army
(21:15):
she was eighteen when Army intelligence interviewed them. As all
these women were interviewed multiple times, Army intelligence reports wrote back,
and of course I saw the reports in their personnel files.
They're very mature for their ages. We think they're going
to do very well. They were very mature for the
ages they had lied about. There were others. There were
(21:36):
just so many wonderful women with all these crazy nicknames
for each other's like you know, there was Esther Tutsie
to you Tutsie Frisnell, and Suzanne Prevo who was known
as the wild Cat. And it's funny. I think often
we look back and people from previous generations and we
assumed that they were all just kind of prudish and
that they were all just very staid and sedate and
(21:58):
never uttered cuss words. Since things and they were different,
their values were different, but they were just as young
and vibrant as any millennial, doing what they believed in,
doing what they loved, you know, wanting to be a
part of the wider world. While the women, by the way,
were being inducted and trained and shipped to France. Internally,
in the army's own internal administration, there was a conversation
(22:21):
that went on for about five months where the army
ultimately says, you know what, we're going to consider them
contract workers. So although the army gave them no contracts
and in fact had them where the same oath as
all of the men swore who were inducted, the women
never knew that the Army, at least internally and its
upper bureaucracies, did not see them as full soldiers. The
(22:43):
women thought they were, Let's be clear, they were. In
early March of the first contingent of thirty three women
ship out. They all went to France, which itself was
a little dicey because you know, your ship could be
sunk at any moment. They're on constant alert until they
get to England. You're wearing your life jacket even to bed.
(23:06):
When they arrive, Paris itself is under bombardment. The first
night they're there, they have to go down into the
bomb shelters because there's incoming from the German artillery, which
is now within twenty miles of Paris. It's rainy, it's cold,
it's freezing. They walk out to work and the mud
is so deep that they have to put where they
(23:27):
called duck boards over the muck. Once the battles start,
they're working sometimes around the clock. There's bombs going off,
there's artillery concussions are shaking their boards. When the German
guns got so close the windows would blow out. At
one point the group of men Russian and tell the women,
you've got to get out, and the women say we
(23:48):
will as soon as you do. You're not getting handed
night towards the end of the war, at one point
the women were and the men were in these very
flimsy wooden barracks that look more or less like chicken
coops that the French had left behind after the Battle
of Redunda, that they move into and operate. They both
sleep in them, and their telephone equipment is in them,
(24:08):
and they messed together, meaning they have breakfast, lunch, and
dinner together, the women and the men, the officers. The
prison of work Hampan is right next door to and
the army field evacuation hospitals right next door, so they
see all the people coming back torn apart. In fact,
in their spirit time, the women often went into the
hospitals to talk to the men because it was very
cheering to the men to see an American woman a face,
(24:30):
you know, to hold their hands as they're dying, and
it was They didn't write about it a lot, but
they were that's what they were doing. Um you know,
they had these descriptions they wrote in their diaries. So
these scenes they saw in those hospitals, which is one,
as Grace Banker said, would make a pacifist of anyone,
and she was a soldier. At one point, the German
prisoner of work knocks over an oil stove and their
(24:52):
barracks goes up in flanks. The women lose all of
their possessions, and right next door they're connecting telephone calls
in a very we're building me out of the same
chicken cook got of construction and it starts filling with smoke.
They refused to leave, and the men or climb on
top of the building are pouring water on it, trying
to preserve obviously not only the women, but also this equipment,
(25:13):
because this American made equipment is not available anywhere else
in the world, has been brought across the ocean for
this very purpose. Finally, the situation is too dire and
they tell the women to get out. We're now ordering
you to get out. They pull out the equipment into
the nearby field. Somehow they managed to get the fire out,
(25:34):
put the equipment back in, and they start up operating
again within half an hour. I mentioned half an hour
because General George Squire later reported to Congress that in
a modern war, if communications meaning basically the telephone goes
down for even an hour, the whole military machine collapses.
So they were only down for thirty minutes, and the
(25:54):
women felt pretty proud about that. A renaissance of human engineering.
The First World War one of the deadliest in history.
It's the first war of the Industrial Revolution. It's the
first technological war. So all the amazing cool stuff that's
been invented in the nineteenth century gets applied to killing
(26:15):
other human beings, planes and motorized transport and rapid fire
guns and telephones. This is the first big war with
modern communications. Unreliable wartime communication dated back to antiquity smoke signals,
(26:35):
passenger pigel flags, lights and sales signaling. Each had their drawbacks.
People think, well, radio that was the hot new technology,
and it was, but it was very clumsy. It took
three mules to drag a radio set to the field.
Radio transmissions were wireless and so therefore they can be intercepted.
(27:01):
And also if there are a lot of messages coming
from one area, even if you couldn't decode it, you
at least know that a lot of messages are coming
from this one place, which means its headquarters. The other
problem with radios is that they as a form of communication,
they did not yet carry voices. So radios at this
time were a form of wireless telegraph. It was Morse code,
(27:23):
so it required someone to decode the radio transmission. So
the telephone is amazing. Anybody can talk the other person
hears immediately what's being said and understands it. It's wired,
which means that if you want to intercept a call,
you have to find these specific wire which goes to
(27:44):
these specific place and then tap into it. Now, even
the tapping into it would create a kind of funny
sound on the wires, and experienced operader could often tell.
And the other thing is that it was easy and lightweight.
You could put wire in a spindle and run it
out across the battlefield. The best method is to carry
(28:04):
the reel and dust the wire. You go jumping craters
and getting to the other side, and making sure that
your men have communication all times back home. This method
is the bathest of all where it can be used.
A T and T put whole battalions of men in France,
a T and T line workers and supervisors and engineers.
(28:25):
They all went together as what we're called the bell battalions,
and the diamond wish at the center of it. All
all that wire and all that equipment. It doesn't mean
anything if you do not have an operator. In her
book on the Hello Girls, Elizabeth writes telephones became the
(28:49):
central nervous system of the U. S. Army switchboards where
its synapsis. The Army did have to use men sometimes,
and they found that it took the average infantrymen sixty
seconds to complete a call. It took the average woman
ten seconds, So in war time, the difference between sixty
seconds and ten seconds is the difference between living or
(29:11):
getting your head blown off. Even after the US officially
entered the conflict, more than a year passed before American
troops engaged in combat. General Pershing felt that the most
significant blow to German morale and to the German war
machine would be to hit all at once with a
full sized American army. America had no army, so I
(29:35):
had to recruit and train all those men and equip
them and ship them across the ocean. It just took
a long time. It's not until the fall of night.
The war has now gone on longer than four years,
and the Americans are finally there in mass. There were
seven women who accompanied General Pershing at the Great American
(29:56):
battles of the war, which were the two big battles
towards the end, Saint Miel and the Battle of muzar Gone.
Pershing needed women, wanted women there because this is really
where the rubber meets the road. The few women who
were initially taken to that first great American battle at
San Miel, it was kind of an experiment. Their secret
orders were just written as a note. We have that
(30:19):
note now. It's just recently on Earth and it says
secret orders to misprovo Ms. Presnell, Miss Banker, you're going
to the front and get ready to lead a roving life.
They had gas masks on their chairs, they had trench
helmets which they were required to wear outdoors at all times.
They were trained in how to use pistols should their
position be overwhelmed. That was a very short battle, is
(30:42):
actually really three to four day battle. At the end
of it, General Pershing actually spied the women. Things were
calming down and some of the women were walking down
the street and he said to Colonel Parker Hit, their supervisor,
how are the women doing? And Hits said, well, let's
go across the street and ask them. So Pershing crosses
the street and the women salute him, and he says,
how's it going at ladies, And they said very well, sir,
(31:04):
And he said, is there anything more you want and
they said, we just want to be as close to
the action as we can get. He at that point
turned to Colonel Hit and he said, take them where
they want to go. Was at that point that then
they're committed to going to the Battle of Musargne, which
goes on for forty seven days, and there's this epic
scale battle that was what helps to end the war.
(31:28):
The Battle of Mozargone would put all their logistics to
the test. Fresh American soldiers marched into battle alongside their
European allies. They would hit the Germans with everything they had.
Everybody ramps up to execute the last engagements of the war,
and even then nobody knows that Germans are fantastic fighters.
(31:50):
In some ways, persian Is is deluded as all the
other officers of the French and the German and the British.
He does what they did, throws bodies against protected trenches,
against machine gun and placements, and people are mowed down.
The ballamas are gone. Itself. Is just one of the
bloodiest battles in all of American history, one of the
(32:12):
longest battles. The tempo in the switchboard room, the women said,
you just can't imagine it, just cannot imagine the speed
of this. There's all this effort to just get the
men into place, and then Coban it starts and the
women are fielding calls this whole time, Calls of all
(32:33):
sorts including friendly fire. We've now overrun our position, and
our men behind us are now firing into where Americans
have advanced, and so our own troops are story need
to get hit. And how do they communicate that. They
get on their telephones and they call back to the
switchboard operators who put them into command, into touch with
the artillery command, who tells the man stop. And they're
(32:54):
also air basis. They don't go open the planes until
they get the phone call, which says, Okay, now you go,
and this is where you're going to go. So everything
is coordinated through these telephones. Nobody knew how long it
would go. Most people thought the war would probably last
another year into nine, but the American presence really did help. Ultimately,
(33:18):
it is the combined efforts of all the armies, the French, British,
the Americans that convinces the Germans that the war is
just never going to go their way. The war ends
at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month. On November eleven, Germany signed the armistice, ending
(33:38):
World War One. But for the Hello Girls and millions
more women across the Atlantic, the battle at Home raged
on since at least the Seneca Falls Convention of eighteen,
(33:59):
activists in America had been formally petitioning for a federal
amendment to enfranchise women, but the nineteen tens not much
had changed. There's a tipping point for the nineteenth amendment
simply it is World War One. Women's participation in World
War One, which was much broader than the telephone operators.
Women had served as nurses, just volunteers at home as
(34:21):
well and yes on the battlefields. In that way, women's
rights and their women's right to vote is in parallel
with the earlier right of African American men to vote
because they pick up arms in the Civil War. Similarly,
at the beginning of the United States, men who didn't
own property picked up muskets at Lexington and Concord. President Wilson,
(35:01):
who initially resisted entering the war, had also positioned himself
against women's suffrage. Woodward Wilson, who had staunchly opposed a
national amendment to the Constitution to enfranchised women, he comes
around to their point of view, and in fact, he
gives this beautiful speech to the U. S. Senate in
(35:23):
October of from paraphrasing, but he says something like are
we going to ask for and take all that women
can give, and say, we still do not see what
rights this gives him. And he noted the fact that
by this point twenty other countries, largely because of World
War One, had enfranchised women. Bolshevik Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada,
(35:47):
and all kinds of countries set enfranchised women. And he said,
are we going to be the last to learn the lesson?
I think of the irony of that. You're the first
modern democracy, every public and it's one of the last
to give women the vote. As he says in his
speech to the U. S. Senate, We're going to have
(36:09):
to resign the leadership of liberal minds around the world
if we cannot do this thing that everybody else is doing,
if we cannot honor the citizenship of women. One of
the reasons why he's so reluctant to do so has
(36:30):
much less to do with gender than it has to
do with race. Race is actually the uninvited guest to
the party. Has it is so often in American politics,
a lot of the opposition to a federal suffrage amendment
for women is too full. First of all, Southern states
do not want the federal government telenom pretty much anything,
but especially about voting rights. The second problem is that
(36:53):
the federal Suffrage Amendment is worded that it will include
all women, So this will mean African American women and
can vote too. And the really remarkable thing when you
actually read the records of the U. S. Congress at
this time, again and again in the U. S. Congress
has said very openly and repeatedly, well, we all know
that the fifteenth Amendment was a mistake, meaning that the
(37:16):
amendment that enfranchise black men. And there is not a
single moment in the US Congressional record where someone stands
up and says, no, the fifteenth Amendment that was right. Okay,
I might not agree with votes for women, but certainly
African American mentioned vote. So there was this turning away
from what had been accomplished in the Civil War itself.
(37:38):
So when Woodrow Wilson becomes an advocate for women's suffrage,
he knows he's enfranchising African American women. Of course, in
the South, because of Jim Crow and Pole to access
the South will pretty readily disenfranchise those who legally should
be able to vote. But at least on paper, black
men and and now African American women will have vote,
(38:00):
And that's because of Woodrow Wilson. He's the one who
really pushes that across the finish line. The Nineteenth Amendment
was officially adopted on August, but of course that's not
the end of the story. While the Amendment was a
major achievement, issues of voting rights and equal rights for
(38:21):
all people were and are far from being resolved in
this country. History is not a light switch. You don't like,
go oh, let's all be good people now switch Every
generation has this tax. Can we all I like to
think we all push the marker forward? To make that
(38:42):
perfectly clear, all one has to do is follow the
soldiers home from World War One. After the eighteen Armistice,
the US Congress has vote a bonus for any person
who served in the U s. Armed Forces in an
official capacity. Women who were in the Navy and Marines,
like all the men, of course, get victory medals saying yes,
(39:04):
thank you for serving the country. They get hospitalization benefits
that they've endured some sort of disability or injury. They
get to join groups like the Veterans of Foreign Warrors
and Foreign Legion, and these organizations that are formed around
that same time. They get all of the kind of
recognition and they literally monetary benefits that come to soldiers.
(39:25):
The women who were in the U. S. Army come
home and they find out that the army does not
consider them eligible for anything. The army considers them soldiers
up until the moment they are discharged. The minute they're
out of the army, the army says, oh, well, wait
a minute, you were contract employees. I've been in army
uniform for months now, and I've been trained, and I've
(39:47):
been sworn into the army. What do you mean I'm
not army. Of course, in France, the women are being
told oil, you can't go home. You're in the army now,
you know, stay put until we tell you can. Operator
General George Squire was one of those people who was
(40:07):
shocked and dismayed and horrified that these women veterans, who
had served so honorably and so effectively, they didn't get
the things that the men they served alongside did get.
He several times petitioned Congress for the veterans Medals, for
the Victory Medal, for the disability of benefits, for the
(40:28):
bonuses that the men got and each time was told no,
the War Department did not support that effort. Ironically, by
the way, the War Department was is headed by a civilian,
so within the army itself there was much more favorable
attitude towards the women. And then in the administration at
(40:49):
the executive level, which was supervising the army, one might say,
beginning in the nineteen twenties, and then in the nineteen thirties,
and in the nineteen forties, and in the nineteen fifties,
and in the nineteen sixties, and in the nineteen seventies,
these women get their local congressmen to introduce legislation. They
write the president's they write Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower
(41:12):
and Kennedy and Johnson and on all the way up
through Jimmy Carter, saying all we want is to be recognized,
so the army just doesn't see them. And over time
the story gets fainter and fainter, like a bad telephone
transmission itself, and the static crackles over and the stories
(41:36):
lost altogether. They get to the point, by the nineteen
thirties they're telling women who ride in and asking for
their benefits. They're saying, well, you didn't even swear oaths.
Now I have to do is look in the records
as I did, and the personal records, and there's oath
upon oath upon oath upon oath upon. Merle Egan became
the leading voice in this charge. As a senior citizen,
(41:57):
she was still seeking recognition for the Hello Girls. At
some point, she writes to a friend that people sometimes
ask me why I am still campaigning for this deep
into my eighties, Because I love my country, and so
I want my country to be worth loving. Merle Egan
would go to elementary schools and she's made this doll.
(42:19):
It's like a Barbie doll, and she's so's a teeny
tiny uniform, and she puts her old brass and signey
on the cap, and she goes to school children. She
wants to tell them the story of the Hello Girls,
so that somebody won't forget. People won't forget that there
were these women who served in World War One. In July,
the Seattle Times published an article on Merle Egan and
(42:40):
her campaign. A young attorney named Marco happened to catch
this story in the newspaper. He reads this article and
he calls her up, and he said, I think you've
got a legal case here. Do you need any help?
And she says, well, yes, young man, I love that.
So he assembles this case and begins to put it
together and collects all this documentation. Me while there is
(43:01):
a paralleled legislation that's underway in the U. S. Congress
to acknowledge the women of World War Two, these women
also had been not recognized as veterans. So it's the
signal core telephone operators and the Women's Air Force Service
pilots of World War Two. On the same legislation. Mark
Ho testifies to the US Congress and he makes this
incredible legal argument which essentially revolves around these uniforms. Do
(43:27):
you realize that it is against the law to impersonate
an officer of the United States government. It's against the
law to impersonate a police officer. So if your government,
your federal government, gives you a uniform and tells you
you must never take it off, you must never take
off that uniform unless you're in bed with the door closed.
You may never remove those dog tags. You have made
(43:49):
them into representatives of the American government. You have made
them into soldiers by telling them they must always wear
this uniform. Essentially, he says, you know, we're prepared to sue.
And the US Congress realizes that this is not only
the right thing to do, but also the Hello girls
as well as the women of World War who have
(44:10):
a pretty powerful legal argument. And so finally, in nineteen seven,
sixty years after the women were initially recruited, this legislation
has passed. And then in ninety nine they are finally
given their discharge papers from World War One, which entitled
them to the flags on their coffin, to their victory medals.
(44:31):
And Merle Egan, who gets her discharge papers at a
formal ceremony in Seattle, Washington, she gives us great speech.
She says, I'm so proud. I'm so excited not only
to receive my victory medal for serving in World War One,
but I consider it a medal for having fought the U. S.
Army for sixty years and winning meal. Eagan passed away
in she was buried with military honors. In researching this topic,
(44:59):
Elizabeth On covered diary entries, letters, photographs, army gear, ephemera
that in some cases had not been seen in a
hundred years. The National Archives is very very recently released
film footage, old archaic film footage of World War One.
Grace Banker's granddaughter calls me one day. She says, I
(45:20):
think I found my grandmother. Do you think this is Grace?
And she sends me the link and I go on it,
and I've actually seen probably more photographs of Grace than
she has in World War One. I say, oh, my gosh,
of course that's Grace. And she's talking and laughing and
connecting phone calls. And then we get footage that shows
after the armistice, General Pershing at a reviewing stand with
(45:42):
thousands of men lined up in these long lines you
know that go off into the distance, and he's up
there giving a speech to the men about you know,
this great victory and it's because of you that this happens.
And we don't hear his voice, we just see him
speaking because it's silent film. And in the front row
of the reviewing stand are the women at attention in
(46:02):
their uniforms in the front row. And then the army
later can't see them, can't see them at all. They
just vanish, which is what I think has been the
record of women in history and the people of color
to it. It vanishes. Everybody knows it at the time,
and then it's not documented and recorded, and so we think, well,
maybe it wasn't very important, maybe they didn't play a
(46:23):
very significant role, maybe it never really happened. We're all
people of modern political correctness. We're just kind of amping
it up. But it's they were there, and they did
really important things, and if we take the time to look,
we'll find them say that. I Femeral is written and
(47:16):
assembled by and produced by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and
Tristan McNeil, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson, and special
thanks this episode to Gretchen Prairie and Miranda Hawkins. Elizabeth
Cobbs is the author of The Hello Girls, America's First
Women's Soldiers, which was adapted into a documentary. Her newest
(47:39):
book is The Tubbman Command, a novel following Harriett Tubber.
Find links to all her work at Elizabeth Cobbs dot
com and links to ours at Femeral dot Show. And
thanks to work as Folk and musical director Sandra Kerr
for sharing their rendition of the March of the Women,
a Suffragist so composed by Ethel smythe in nineteen ten
(48:03):
thanks on our website. Ways as a very days as
a dreary sory day by baby have all, as he says,
wherey may that the break walls lie strike He's to
(48:30):
our no, it's candy win. But by day and day,
all that she had done for the work of to
day grea biry for and realize love device love sure
(48:52):
is he nuch much, shows shower Friend. Next time on
a semi two doors, set down at the piano, placed
(49:14):
the score in the stand, took out a stop watch
and closed the lid over the keys. He started to
stop watch. Thirty seconds later, he opened the lid, then
closed it back over the keys. He did the same
thing two minutes and three seconds later, turning the pages
of the score, all the while performing each of the
actions as quietly as possible. And a minute and forty
(49:38):
seconds after that, he stood as if to receive applause.
World nine Man and in Acus and free from shoe
(49:59):
pack us from imot Radian. These like the irt radio
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!