Voice on the Line: Ma Bell’s Forgotten Workforce

There’s a retro yellow rotary phone on the mid-century Telefunken console in my house. It’s a Bell Model 500 from the late 1970s; perhaps ‘78, by my best guess. Dialing is a unique type of exercise – getting all the way around to zero takes forever, and you need to want to talk to whoever it is you’re dialing to invest this much effort.

Funny side note: my four-year-old, who has never actually used a phone like this, somehow knows exactly what it is. He pretends to call people, mostly my mother or my co-worker, Ash, on it regularly.

It’s all very charming, but at one time, before any call ever connected to its recipient, it almost certainly passed through a woman. Like, literally.

Before automation, many women worked as telephone operators, routing calls through complicated switchboards, managing snarky customers and being the endlessly polite voice of early telecommunications. These women were the literal infrastructure. And their story, quiet, efficient and mostly forgotten, is worth revisiting.

Let’s pick up the line where history left off.

A Powerful Network of Women

The role of telephone operator was one of the first white-collar jobs widely open to women, and it came with some, shall we say, specific, expectations. Operators were to be pleasant, unflappable and invisible (nothing like today, right?). 

The ideal operator was neither too assertive nor too slow. The role was part customer service, part docile obedience and part highly technical skill that nobody wanted to acknowledge as technical, because, well, woman.

The very first operators were teenage boys. Shockingly, their obedience and customer service skills were questionable. The first female operator was Emma Nutts, who started in 1878. She was hired by none other than Alexander Graham Bell himself.

By 1910, women were a majority of the operator workforce in the US. We were seen as more polite, more controllable and, let’s be honest, cheaper. Ms. Nutts worked 54-hour weeks for $10 a month (just under $320 today - per month). 

Operators had to memorize hundreds of numbers, respond to dozens of calls in rapid-fire succession and work under intense scrutiny. In some offices, managers would straight-up unplug an operator’s headset (rude) if she wasn’t speaking “correctly.” Those managers were men in the early days, but over time, more women began to take on that role.

Ma Bell Was Watching

Many of these operators worked for the Bell System, which you might know by its nickname, Ma Bell. Bell operated as a massive monopoly until January 1982. Until then, it controlled much of the local and long-distance telephone service in the US.

Ma Bell dictated everything, and I mean everything, from each phone’s design to the style of the women who operated the switchboards. Telephone operators followed strict dress codes, weren’t allowed to talk to one another, had to follow scripts, needed to smile and be patient at all times, and were encouraged to speak only under a certain volume level. Cool.

I once had a job that didn’t allow people to speak to each other in the office; speaking was only allowed with prospects on the phone. We also weren’t allowed access to the internet and had to apply for each individual website we needed to do our job. This was in the late-aughts. I didn’t last very long.

But I digress. One unwritten rule was that once an operator married, she lost her job. I suppose because now she was on baby-making duty instead. Sure, the Bell System was named after Alexander Graham Bell, but it was built on the backs of hundreds of women whose names have been lost to history.

The First Call Center

If this is starting to sound familiar – scripts, monitoring, relentless cheer – it should. This was the prototype for the call center. Every person who has ever uttered the phrase, “your call is important to us,” should remember the women who said it first, while getting docked for talking too slowly (or too loudly).

Operators were trained to be fast, pleasant and unseen. They were measured on the number of calls per minute, friendliness and adherence to script. They were the perfectly polished, fully overlooked backbone of our entire system of early telecommunication.

But they weren’t just cogs in a machine. They were hard-working women, and, at least occasionally, troublemakers…

More Than Just “Nice Voices”

In 1919, operators across the country walked off in a coordinated strike led by the National Telephone Operators' Department of the IBEW. Their demand? Higher wages and better treatment. Within a week, entire cities were scrambling, businesses had slowed and Ma Bell was forced to concede. More strikes followed in 1947, with similar aims. One outcome of the labor movement was the creation of a union: the Communications Workers of America.

Even within the rigid confines of the early switchboard, many women were able to create small moments of control, compassion and rebellion. They were so more than just patient, bodiless voices. For a while, they were the underlying connection of a growing nation, and they fucking knew it.

>>> For more on the history of women-led labor strikes, read: Women Labor Leaders in the Tobacco Industry: A Story Behind My Edgeworth Tin.

The Future Arrives

By the 1960s and '70s, around the time my rotary phone came off the assembly line, automation had begun to replace human operators. Instead of answering, “number, please,” people could dial directly. Writing this, I can’t help but notice how all of this once-human interaction, including the call center, has now been replaced by automation, voice commands, Siri and Alexa (both female-voiced assistants, I’ll note), AI chatbots and more. 

Yes, technology liberates us. But it also quietly erased one of the largest female workforces in the country. For those women, there was no retirement party; no gold watch. Just a dial tone at the end of a career.

The next time your chatbot says, “how can I help you today?”,  take a moment to remember the original voices on the line. They were underpaid, over-monitored and absolutely essential. They were holding the whole goddamn system together, and doing it with perfect posture in clingy hose and uncomfortable AF heels.

The least we can do is acknowledge that they existed. This one’s for Emma.