The year 1878 marked a great era when women were allowed to work as telephone operators for the first time. Emma Nutt was the fortunate one vested with this job and was appointed by Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the first practical operational telephone in the company of Edwin Holmes Telephone Despatch Company.
It was one of the first celebrations of the idea of feminism where the need for women in running the society at large was felt. It was a time when telephone operators were an indispensable element for connecting people across long distances. Mugging up the fat telephone directory and keeping it at the tip of their tongue was an arduous job performed by boys earlier. But then slowly the harshness of their tones, the pranks and curses became unacceptable by for live phone contact. As a result of which, the women were called for.
The voice of women was looked up to as a telephone operator was a need that had diluted the thoughts of discrimination of the society. However, Afro-American and Jewish women were still discriminated, as the job of a telephone operator needed a woman with long arms to reach the top cabinet of the telephone, which were then a huge machine and too tough to operate. But soon the sweet voice of women was something that was expected and female telephone operators became common. Emma Nutt was appointed on 1 September 1878.
Till date this day is celebrated as the Telephone Operators day, which had the great ideals of feminism backed at it. However, nowadays machine automated operator voices have also become common. The art of communication, the wait for a telephone call is long lost with mobiles assisting our need for communication but then these dates and memories are there to make one feel the emotions that were so attached to such old telephonic conversations.
The accuracy of work, the ability to know the telephone directory at the tip of her tongue and the reflex at the tip of her hands, makes Emma Nutt stand out as the greatest epitome of a successful working woman. Moreover, fortunately enough or rather co-incidentally, after a century Miss Emma Nutt connected the first call from the office of these telephone operators. To be an operator, a woman had to be unmarried and between seventeen and twenty six.
She had to look prim and proper, and have arms long enough to reach the top of the tall telephone switchboard. Her role as a working woman led to a fight for equal wage for equal work as women broke out in USA in 1973, marking and reiterating the fact that they are not a piece of negligence in the society. They have the strength to work equally well as men do thereby celebrating the ideals of feminism at all time frames.
(Coordinator, Class XII, St Thomas’ Boys’ School)