Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (review)

Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980. By Venus Green. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. xv+370. $59.95/$19.95.

Race on the Line is one of the best historical studies so far on the anatomy of racism. Venus Green demonstrates how the Bell System, aided by labor unions and compliant workers, bent technology to serve its white corporate interests. Focusing on telephone operators, Green argues that the dominant culture's racial and gender ideologies saturated the development and deployment of telephone technology and the organization of work. Intrigued by the patterns of gender and race segregation she observed while working for the New York Telephone Company between 1974 and 1990, she undertook this study as a graduate student at Columbia. Her scholarly skills combined with her personal experience make this book special.

Organized into sections corresponding to three eras of telephone technology, Race on the Line places each new technological step—from manual switchboards (1878-1920) to automated switching and dial telephones (1920-60) to Traffic Position Service (TPS) computerization (1960-80)—in the context of gender and race ideologies. Before 1900, Bell's technological innovations and workplace designs aimed to improve service, not control workers. Still, a whites-only policy gave a coercive twist to the developing construction of the operator: she was a protected "white lady." In return for white privilege, women operators endured growing surveillance and, after 1900, increased managerial control. As technology proceeded, women's workplace autonomy dissolved and the "white lady" image grew stronger.

White women's resistance to de-skilling meant union organizing and spectacular strikes, especially during the World War I era. Though militant, these striking "white lady" operators relied on white male unionists for leadership and thus failed to develop their own analyses of technological change. This failure persisted until the 1980s, when the Communications Workers of America (CWA) finally admitted that industry unions had mistakenly traded higher wages for the company's complete control over technology.

In the second period, Bell reacted to women's wartime militancy with long-delayed automation and elimination of personalized service, which resulted in unending waves of displacement, expanding workloads, and speedups. Unions disappeared in the 1920s, reappeared in the 1930s, and were finally transformed into the CWA in the 1940s, but Green argues that they all remained wedded to outdated goals. White women's lost skills made their identities as "white lady" operators even more precious. The company encouraged white operators to feel threatened both by continuing automation and by the demands of black operators for access to jobs during the 1930s and 1940s.

While black women got a few jobs as operators during World War II, they were given only low-level clerical jobs thereafter. Company and union officials agreed that technology was simply a matter of "progress" and the number of operators dropped sharply during the 1950s as dial technology spread to nearly every home with telephone service. By the late 1960s, Bell could no longer find enough white women in large cities to work for such low wages, so the company hired thousands of black women. Within the space of only a few years, operators' jobs went from lily white to nearly all black. The white lady image and its accoutrements, including attractive rest rooms, genteel dining rooms, and escorts for night workers, abruptly disappeared. In their place came company and white coworkers' taunts and hostility. On the day of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, black women endured remarks about "killing coons out of season." Black women fought for over fifty years to gain access to these jobs, but once there they experienced segregation and degradation.

The new TPS computer systems created additional job stress, and technology also enabled circumvention of civil-rights measures. When racial discrimination suits resulted in consent decrees in 1973 and the...