There were a lot more telephone companies back then, and cities often had competing telephone companies. (That’s why there’s still an FCC rule requiring that they all interconnec & provide service, so that your phone can call any other phone number, even if it’s from a different phone company. They had to make a rule about this, because early on, bigger phone companies tried to drive out the smaller ones by refusing to connect to them.) The monopoly of ‘Ma Bell’ wasn’t achieved until a while later.
Also, many people were just deciding if they wanted to install their first telephone or not. Poor customer service would encourage people to just not have a phone at all.
And remember that this was before dialed long distance, or often even dial phones at all. To make a call, you had to talk to the operator. For a long distance call, at least 3 different operators. There was a lot more ‘customer service’ required to use the early phone systems compared to today.
I wonder if that is simply an after-the-fact perception, though. I can imagine that in the early days of the telephone’s development, it might have seemed scandalous for a young single woman to take a job where she would be talking to strangers all day, including unmarried young men.
Contrast to old-style women’s jobs like governess (working with children) or nurse (working with sick people), where her virtue might be less threatened.
There are a number of reasons why females became telephone operators. For one thing, there was a readily available work force of women, and the job was not seen as ‘men’s work’.
For another, women are generally better at multi-tasking than men, and the job of switchboard operator often required maintaining several conversations and tasks at the same time. Women may have just been more suited to the job.
The other reason is that women’s voices were much more understandable over noisy, low bandwidth connections. For the same reason you often hear female voices on shortwave radio stations such as ‘numbers’ stations.
Finally, many studies have shown that people simply respond better to female voices. When a female voice says, “Please hold…”, it’s tolerated better than when a male tells you to hold. Human psychology at work. This applies to both men and women - all respond better to female voices over the phone than to male voices.
No doubt there are a million other factors. Employment organization is a complex system within a complex system, and the forces acting on it can be inscrutable and even unknowable. How come a large majority of teachers are female? How come the large majority of nurses are female?
Actually the world’s first commercial telephone exchange was near Berlin, on November 12, 1877 in Friedrichsberg. I can’t discover how soon they adopted a female work-force, but probably very quickly.
Although I found a nearly interesting book — more of a dissertion — on ARCHIVE from 1910 which I may read some day: PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF TELEPHONES ON THE CONTINENT OF EUROPE by A. N. HOLCOMBE, Ph.D. — Harvard.
Telephone operators worked in a protected public environement. Nursing was a /most unsuitable/ job for young women, until Florence Nightingale changed that. And young attractive governesses were always considered to be in moral hazard.
This is anecdotal, but my great-aunt, who was a phone operator in the Depression and for about 40 years after said that she was once told that the phone company preferred women as operators because when people get frustrated and are abusive because their call isn’t going through, or there is some other technical difficulty, usually beyond the operator’s control, women stay calm and speak to them politely while men get belligerent. Probably why they went from teenaged boys to adult women, and not teenaged girls or men.
Women’s voice being clearer is probably the most important factor, but I’m guessing there are a few others:
Men probably were rougher on the equipment; because it was a faceless job, women could work while pregnant, and no one judged the company for working a pregnant woman, and a woman could leave when she had a baby at home, then come back, and wasn’t “missed” the way someone missed a face; back when it was less common to be expected to work evenings and weekends, and the few jobs available with non-traditional hours were rarely open to women (other than domestic service, which was usually closed to married women), this was a job women with families could fit in around school schedules and husband’s work schedules.
Wait, what? You think in the 1880s it was “less common to be expected to work evenings and weekends”? On the contrary: the movement for the eight-hour workday didn’t get going at all until the mid-1860s, and for decades thereafter was perceived as a ridiculously radical notion. Employees in general worked 10- to 14-hour days, six days a week, and ought to think themselves damn lucky to get the chance, by Jove. Harrumph.
Also, there were plenty of jobs that women could do where they had some control over their own hours. But those were overwhelmingly working-class jobs such as washerwoman or cleaning woman. The big employment bottleneck for female labor in the 19th century was owing mostly to ideas about what work it was proper for “ladies” to do: i.e., middle-class and/or educated women.
Wait, what? You think in the 1880s it was “less common to be expected to work evenings and weekends”? On the contrary: the movement for the eight-hour workday didn’t get going at all until the mid-1860s, and for decades thereafter was perceived as a ridiculously radical notion. Employees in general worked 10- to 14-hour days, six days a week, and ought to think themselves damn lucky to get the chance, by Jove. Harrumph.