![]() In WWI, telephones then were called candlestick phones. Telephones were secure and immediate they were the primary way men communicated. The signal could be plucked out of the air and you could trace where it came from. ![]() The other problem with radios was that there wasn’t any measure for disguising the transmission so they weren’t secure forms yet. To get a radio field unit required three mules to carry it. ![]() As a general, you couldn’t talk to somebody directly. Telegraphs operated on Morse code and it was a slower process. The way this worked in WWI was the telephone was the key instrument in the war. What role did the telephone play in getting women to the front? These were the things the women brought back from WWI, which also gives you a peek into their own mindset, their sense of humor, their willingness to laugh at their circumstances and themselves. But then I’m looking through them and on the other side are these perfectly crisp pictures of naked women! French pornography of the 1910s, it was very tasteful. I see a glimmer and I think it’s his shelves, the room. He said, ‘Take a peek, you can see in them.’ I put this penny-sized pair of binoculars on, and I took a peek. ![]() One of the first things he showed me was a charm-bracelet-size pair of binoculars. He had a box that was memorabilia the women shared with him. I worked with them for several years to get. I’ve been in Bosnia and Iraq for eight years, and I have three boxes of materials from the Hello Girls. I went to the Seattle Bar Association, contacted them, asked can you get me in touch with him? They had an old email, tried a few times and didn’t hear back, and after a couple months I heard back. When I talk with some people they say, ‘How can you write this story? These are obscure people.’ I was aware that Mark Hough, a young man in his 20s in the 1970s, became a champion for the women. How did you find information about the women featured in your book? The women of the Signal Corps prepare to depart for the war.Ĭourtesy of Robert, Grace and Carolyn Timbie is one of those problems that seems very new, and yet it’s something women were experiencing 100 years ago. In the context of all that, I can’t remember how I tripped across these women, but it struck me there was an important story here. I was searching for a topic for a new book a couple years go, thinking about centennial, and we probably didn’t need another thing about Woodrow Wilson, though someone will write it. To learn more about these women and the role of telephones in the war, talked to Cobbs about her research. Eventually 223 American women were sent across the ocean to work at Army switchboards across Europe. In the first week of December 1918, before the War Department even had the chance to print out applications, they received 7,600 letters from women enquiring about the first 100 positions in the Signal Corps. Fortunately, women were quick to respond. The Army needed more operators, bilingual ones especially, and it needed them quickly. When the United States declared war, the Signal Corps had only 11 officers and 10 men in its Washington office, and an additional 1,570 enlisted men around the country. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. This is the story of how America's first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the U.S. The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers At the start of the 20th century, 80 percent of all telephone operators were women, and they could generally connect five calls in the time it took a man to do one. “Telephones were the only military technology in which the United States enjoyed clear superiority,” Cobbs writes, and women were by far the best operators. ![]() These intrepid women are the subject of Elizabeth Cobbs’ new book, The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers. The women would work for the Signal Corps, and came to be known as the “Hello Girls.” But by late 1917, General John Pershing declared he needed women on the frontlines for an even more crucial role: to operate the switchboards that linked up telephones across the front. Initially, they worked as clerks and journalists. It was a measure of how desperate the country was for soldiers and personnel to assist with operations stateside, and American women seized the opportunity to prove their patriotism. Several weeks before President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, the United States became the world’s first modern nation to enlist women in its armed forces. ![]()
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