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Technology and Culture 42.4 (2001) 786-787



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Book Review

My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846-1950


My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846-1950. By Thomas C. Jepsen. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Pp. x+231. $49.95/$21.95.

In his 1791 Report on Manufactures Alexander Hamilton suggested that as industry developed in the United States, women and children could be employed to make up for the labor shortage until immigrants could be brought over from Europe. Later, he said, mechanization would alleviate the need for the labor of women and children in industry. Hindsight shows that his suggestion was practically a prediction of patterns in industrial employment over the next hundred years. Women and children labored in the New England textile mills from the 1790s until they were replaced by Irish immigrants. Thomas Jepson's My Sisters Telegraphic traces the employment of women in telegraphy, a field that opened up in the later 1840s, the pressure they felt from men to leave the workplace, and finally their displacement by machinery in the twentieth century. It is a lovely book, and in many ways an excellent model for social history.

The text begins with the realities of telegraphic employment in the middle of the nineteenth century. Pay, hours, training, the hierarchy of the office, the telegraph equipment itself, and the sexual politics of life in the telegraph office are lucidly set out. The illustrations, personalities, and choice of quotations also evoke the charm of the nineteenth-century publications from which most of the information comes. Indeed, the chapters on the social problems women encountered on the job could be a serialized melodrama. The perils of the woman telegrapher would also have a familiar ring for today's working women: the vulgarity of male coworkers, charges of sexual irregularities, sabotage, and, especially, pay differentials. Even today's internet relationships had their counterpart in nineteenth-century telegraphic relationships, where women ran the risk of becoming attached to men they had never met.

These perils spilled over into the fiction of the times, although the fictionalized versions favor romantic attachments to male telegraphers over issues of low pay and harassment. While a fictional heroine struggles with "a body crashing against the office door" and her love for a coworker (p. 126), real women telegraphers participated in a series of strike actions that did not, for the most part, succeed, until they were replaced by more sophisticated means of sending messages in the early twentieth century.

While Jepsen is not a professional historian, his research, organization, and writing are elegant and appropriate. And I am glad that he finds the humor and shock of the office worth reproducing, because it does seem to be the case that any new invention fosters ironies for the people using it between traditional standards and those required by technology and business practice. The telegraph, like the railroad train and the automobile, did [End Page 786] in fact change norms of human contact, marriage, and family. The bemused or shocked reactions to telegraphic weddings had parallels, Jepson concludes, in the humor and shock engendered by similar escapades on today's internet. But the chapter on union issues also makes clear that human standards are not infinitely adaptable to technology and the norms of business, as our long history of labor unrest has shown.

Sarah H. Gordon

 

Dr. Gordon teaches history at Quinnipiac University and Yeshiva of New Haven, Connecticut. She is the author of Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929 (1996).

Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

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