“Hello, Central?” Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems by Michèle Martin

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 597 “Hello, Central?” Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. By Michèle Martin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 219; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95. “Hello, Central?” is a useful addition to the small but growing research literature on the social history of telephony, a significant subset of which concerns the role of gender. Like Carolyn Marvin (When Old Technologies Were New, 1989) and Lana Rakow (Gender on the Line, 1991), Michèle Martin is intrigued by the affinity between women and the telephone and makes that the core of her book. In particular, focusing on the Bell Company’s Montreal system between 1878 and 1920, Martin argues that women helped shape telephony. They did so both as operators and as callers. Drawing on memoirs and other documents, Martin describes the history of telephone operators. Brought in to replace unruly boys, young women initially provided personal service that compensated customers for the inconveniences of the balky technical service. As the equipment improved, Bell constrained and made impersonal the operators’ role. The company taught the young women to give up tbeir working-class tones and to develop a bourgeois voice, one which “disarms anger, repels insolence” (p. 94). Time was money, so the company trained operators to speak quickly—rolling r’s took too long—and gave them specific, short phrases to use. Operators’ private use of the telephone, to chat with one another or customers, was severely restrained. Nevertheless, Martin argues, operators found ways to resist, to gossip, to eavesdrop. In the early years, Bell managers disdained women customers and the social calls they made. But women persisted in using the technol­ ogy to sustain friendships and family ties. Martin suggests that, among other reasons for their favoring the telephone, calling allowed Victorian women to “visit” without getting dressed up in those hor­ rendous clothes (p. 151). The telephone companies eventually sur­ rendered to the customers, she argues. Bell managers recognized, and finally even marketed, the telephone as a “psychological support against loneliness, stress, and fatigue” (p. 149). The practice and sell­ ing of telephone sociability was therefore created by women. “Hello, Central?” also describes, by way of background, the history to 1920 of Canadian telephony. Martin recounts the development of the hardware, especially noting efforts to maintain privacy during calls; Bell’s no-holds-barred fights against competitors; tfie coming of regulation; and so on. The treatment of the general history is thinner and less persuasive than the gender material. She often returns to the unremarkable conclusions that the Bell Company was trying to make money (instead of providing a public good) and that, because of its cost, telephone service was largely a privilege of the privileged classes. (For example, “Bell made its decision to open an exchange not 598 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE according to the needs of the majority, but rather with a view to ‘seejing] a fair margin of profit’ ” [p. 31].) Martin presents a variety of materials—industry journals, letters, news clippings, ads, and so on—from the ample and well-organized archives of Bell Canada. Unfortunately, she often accepts at face value the claims that these sources, usuallyjournalists and industry officials, made—for example, that telephone calling “tamed” loud American voices (p. 96), that calling provided more intimate conversations (p. 158), and that novelty uses of the telephone, like listening to concerts, were widespread. Martin reserves her skepticism only for statements in the industry press or the general press (not always separable in actuality) that were derogatory of women or the working class. Also, the historical sequence of evidence occasionally does not match that of her argument. For example, Martin’s claim that a concern for the privacy of calls only emerged over the years is undercut by a journalistic complaint dated 1877 (p. 143). Despite these objections, the essential elements of Martin’s story ring true. And she has done the emerging field of telephone history a service in marshaling evidence about the early, gendered culture of telephony. Claude S. Fischer Dr. Fischer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, America Calling: A...