“Maiden, Whom We Never See”: Cultural Representations of the “Lady Telephonist” in Britain ca. 1880–1930 and Institutional Responses

Abstract

This article examines attitudes to the female telephone operator in the British press and a range of literary and cultural sources. Perceptions of female telephonists were rooted in both reactions to the increasingly visible employment of women in white-collar work and uncertain responses to the telephone as a new communication medium. Such perceptions of the female telephonist became stereotyped and static, though there were later some challenges to, and attempts to nuance, these. The General Post Office took over the service and implemented a number of changes, but ultimately the organisation and telephonists themselves had to co-exist with these stereotypes. This article traces the emergence and solidification of the highly gendered and often negative discussions of the female telephonist in the public sphere in Britain. To do this it examines a wide range of press coverage, organisational records, and various literary and cultural sources from the late 1870s to the early 1920s to trace the largely static and repetitive nature of these perceptions and the ways they became tropes which were largely, but not exclusively, unchallenged. The article argues, in part, that the coincidence of women's employment as telephonists with gradually increasing telephone use meant that responses to women telephonists were filtered through the dual lenses of frustrations with still-unreliable technology and the wider cultural reaction to increased white-collar work for women. The article then examines the responses of the General Post Office (GPO), the employer of the vast majority of telephonists working at public telephone exchanges from 1912, which had to grapple with the effect of the dominant perceptions of telephonists on its workforce and recruiting. Whilst important work has been carried out by Michele Martin and Jill Galvan on the figure of, and reactions to, the telephonist in Canada and primarily the United States respectively, and as Galvan notes, there was a certain internationalism to the way in which the telephonist was perceived, 2 this article is the first scholarship to consider cultural understandings of the telephonist in Britain.There is a growing literature on the history of telephone systems in Britain but much of this to date concentrates on the ownership, business and network side of the technology as a means to explore the idiosyncratic case of the adoption of the telephone in Britain. 3 There is