Women in telegraphy
While telegraphy is often viewed as a males-only occupation[dubious – discuss], women were also employed as telegraph operators from its earliest days.
In the late 1840s, a shortage of qualified operators led to the hiring of women as well as men to fill this role, as the telegraph spread across the country.
Phoebe Wood (1816–1891), sister of Morse's associate Ezra Cornell and wife of telegraph entrepreneur Martin B.
Wood, became the telegrapher in Albion, Michigan, in 1849, after Cornell's business partner John James Speed pointed out the need for operators in sparsely populated frontier areas.
Initially used to transmit personal messages, business transactions and news reports, the telegraph also began to be used for train routing by the railroads in the 1850s.
[8] During the First World War, employment on "the Home Front" included women telegraphers; for example, Beamsville, Ontario, which was also the location of an dogfighting (aerial combat) school.[9].
Many telegraphers from the United States came to Mexico to work for the railroads during the administration of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911), including several American women.
By 1900, women were employed as telegraph operators in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), as well as in Japan.
[15] Australia's first telegraph line was commissioned in March 1854 between Melbourne and Williamstown and was constructed by Samuel Walker McGowan under contract to the Victorian Government.
The Industrial and Technological Museum in Melbourne ran a telegraphy course in 1870–1880 that became so popular with women that a separate class for men was introduced.
Many of these small post offices were already managed by unmarried females and it was important for them to acquire telegraphy skills to continue in their roles.
[22] By 1880 the classes had become a victim of their own success and the Postmaster-General Langridge announced that there was no prospect of further appointments for lady operators, with "several hundred" applicants registered.
[23] From 1875 the New South Wales Posts and Telegraphs Department also introduced women into its telegraphy operator workforce.
[10] Telegraphers in the U.S. began to form unions in the late nineteenth century as discontent grew over low wages and poor working conditions.
Mathilde Fibiger (1830–1872) was a Danish feminist, novelist, and telegraphist who championed women's rights in her novels.
Mary Macaulay, a strong supporter of women's suffrage in the U.S., served as secretary to Susan B. Anthony while working as a telegrapher in Rochester, New York.
The female telegraph operator, fending off desperados while tending to her duties at lonely railroad stations, became a stock character in many of the melodramas produced in the early years of the cinema.
[27] The number of messages sent by telegraph began to decline in the mid-twentieth century, due to competition with the telephone and the internet.
