Women and the telephone
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. For this year’s blogging festivities, I want to highlight the contributions of the late-Victorian women who changed how we use the telephone today. In her book, Hello Central? Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems, Michèle Martin examines the development of the telephone system in central Canada from its invention to the system’s automation (1876 to 1920) with a feminist perspective that new technologies tend to be closely linked to prevailing power structures, and that this influences their diffusion and utilization. Martin claims that women profoundly influenced the telephone’s ultimate uses, both in their roles as telephone operators and as telephone users. It’s a fascinating look into the unintended consequences of women’s use of a specific technology. She points out that if women had restricted their use of the telephone usage to the business-oriented imperatives of Bell Telephone, this technology that we take for granted today would not be as ubiquitous as it has become.
In 1880, Bell Telephone was a newly incorporated company that, in the next few decades, leveraged its strong corporate position with dubious business strategies in pursuit of swift domination of the urban and long-distance phone business in central Canada. Delving into Bell Canada’s archives, Martin argues that Bell’s marketing and financial strategies, its notion of telephone etiquette and usage, supported the male business elites exclusively. The phone was marketed as an expensive business tool, the connection between the businessman’s home and his office; it’s purpose, the accumulation of profit. The communication needs of the late-Victorian urban working-class and most rural residents were met with indifference and even veiled hostility. However, through women’s extensive, everyday use of the telephone to socialize with family and friends, Bell Telephone was eventually forced the to revise some of its plans:
Telephony for daily activities appeared in cities and towns towards the end of the 1890s. Very specific telephone practices were prescribed by the companies: the use of the telephone for shopping and making appointments during daytime, for personal conversations during the evening and for protection during the night (BCHC, Quebec Daily Telegram 1911). By the early 1900s, however, bourgeois and petty bourgeois women were already using the telephone extensively for social purposes, at all times of the day (BCHC, Saturday Evening Post 1907). Telephone activities became part of some women’s social practices in urban areas, not only changing the notion of “acceptable” uses developed by Bell Company, but also affecting the development of the system. Women’s extensive use of the telephone obliged Bell to take domestic development into account. Urban residential sectors began to look attractive to the company, and houses were later equipped with extensions or supplementary lines in order to allow both the husband’s business calls and the wife’s social calls. Most of these changes were due to practices unforseen by Bell’s management. The “social” aspect of telephone technology had not been anticipated by the early capitalist developers of the telephone system.
In rural areas, women saw the telephone as an antidote to their isolation. “Meeting on the line” was an important activity on party lines for women who wanted to stay connected to the community. It enhanced the perceived value of their residential phone.
Together such practices constituted a telephone culture. In the 1920s, Bell came to accept that social calls were a legitimate use of the phone. Still, the story serves as a reminder that as with the telephone, today’s technologies also have a range of alternative uses. The twitters and Facebooks are neither neutral instruments that can be used any which way, nor simply deterministic technologies. As Martin points out in Hello Central?, “technologies have a valence: a limited range of uses are possible, and conflicts between developers and consumers determine which use or uses will predominate” (p. 4). Ada Lovelace Day offers an opportunity to remember that some of those developers and consumers are women.
This post is part of Ada Lovelace Day 2010 international day of blogging. For more stories honouring woman in technology, visit the story collection.
Acknowledgement: Postcard, c. 1912, included in exhibition called Mechanical Brides: Women and Manchines from Home to Office, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design. Via Annmarie Adams.
23 Mar 2010
