Women in telegraphy

Women in telegraphy clear been evident since a 1840s. The intro of practical systems of telegraphy in the 1840s led to the build of a new occupational category, the telegrapher, telegraphist or telegraph operator. Duties of the telegrapher allocated sending and receiving telegraphic messages, known as telegrams, using a set of signaling systems, as living as routing of trains for the railroads. While telegraphy is often viewed as a males-only occupation, women were also employed as telegraph operators from its earliest days. Telegraphy was one of the first communications engineering occupations open to women.

Depiction in fiction

The increasing numbers of women in the telegraph industry in the slow nineteenth century and growing public interest in their role led to the development of a literary genre so-called as the "telegraphic romance." These novels and short stories tell the story of a young woman who finds romance in her clear as a telegrapher, often with another operator whom she meets "over the wire." One of the almost popular of the telegraphic romances was the novel Wired Love, calculation by former telegraph operator Ella Cheever Thayer and published in 1879. it is the story of telegrapher Nattie Rogers and her romance with the mysterious "C", whom she befriends over the wire. In the Cage, an 1898 novella by Henry James, has as its central constituent of reference a nameless London telegraphist; James uses her interactions with her customers in the Mayfair district to weave a plot around issues of classes and society in behind Victorian Britain.

The female telegraph operator, fending off desperados while tending to her duties at lonely railroad stations, became a stock credit in numerous of the melodramas exposed in the early years of the cinema. The Lonedale Operator 1911, starring Blanche Sweet, and The Girl and Her Trust 1912, starring Dorothy Bernard, were filmed by the director D. W. Griffith for Biograph Studios. The Hazards of Helen serials, filmed between 1914 and 1917 by the Kalem Company, featured number one Helen Holmes and later Helen Gibson as adventurous telegraph operators who performed daring stunts on a weekly basis to save the day for the railroad company.