Voice on the Line: Ma Bell’s Forgotten Workforce

There’s a retro yellow rotary phone sitting on the mid-century Telefunken console in my house. It’s a Bell Model 500 from the late 1970s; perhaps 1978, by my best guess. Dialing is a unique bit 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 time.

Funny sidenote: my four-year-old son, who has never actually seen a phone like this, somehow innately knows exactly what it is. He pretends to call people, mostly my mother and my co-worker, Ash, on it regularly.

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

In the days before automation, many women worked as telephone operators, routing calls through complicated switchboards, managing snarky customers and being the endlessly polite, highly regulated voice of early telecommunications. These women were the literal infrastructure. Their story, quiet, efficient and now 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 that was widely open to women, and it came with some, shall we say, specific expectations. Operators were to be pleasant, unflappable and invisible (doesn’t sound anything like today’s expectations, right?). 

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

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

By 1910, women made up a majority of the operator workforce in the US. Women 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 local numbers, respond to dozens of calls in rapid-fire succession and work under intense scrutiny. In some offices, managers would unplug an operator’s headset if she wasn’t speaking “correctly.” Those managers were men in the early days, but over time, more women began to take on these roles.

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, from each phone’s design to the uniforms of the women who operated the switchboards. Telephone operators followed strict dress codes, weren’t allowed to talk to one another, were given scripts, had to smile and be patient at all times, and were encouraged to speak only under a certain volume level. 

I once had a job that didn’t allow the salespeople to speak to each other in the office; if they were speaking, it was only to prospects on the phone. We also weren’t allowed access to the internet and had to apply for permission to every website we needed, individually. This was in the early 2000s. I didn’t last there very long.

But I digress. Back to the operators: one unwritten rule was that once an operator got married, she lost her job. Sure, the Bell System was named after Alexander Graham Bell, but it was actually built on the backs of women whose names have been lost to history.

The First Call Center

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

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

But these early telephone operators 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 were slowed and Ma Bell was forced to concede. More strikes followed in 1947, with similar aims. One ultimate outcome of the widespread 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 still able to create moments of control, compassion and rebellion. They were so much more than just pleasant, patient voices. For a while, these women were the underlying connection of a growing nation, and they 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 appeared, automation had begun to replace human operators. Instead of asking for “Number, please,” people could just 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), AI chatbots and more. 

Yes, technology liberated 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 system together, and doing it with perfect posture in uncomfortable heels.

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