Women of the Great War: The Hello Girls
As I’ve mentioned before here in the Margins, now and then a bit of history begins to track me down. A name, event, or idea piques my interest and suddenly I stumble across it everywhere. Or at least in the footnotes to books on tangentially related subjects.
Lately the “Hello Girls” of the first World War have been dogging my heels.
I had long known that the U.S. Navy had enlisted young women as yeomen (F) in the war, with the idea that they would “free a man to fight”. I had no idea that the army “enlisted” female telephone operators to serve on the western front.*
The telephone transformed military communications in the first World War, just as the telegraph did in the Crimea War and the American Civil War. For the first time, commanders could be in instant communication with front line officers hundreds of miles away, connected by lightweight wire and the help of an operator.
General John Pershing soon realized that the operators were the weak point in the system. When the United States entered the war, the army’s Signal Corps had 55 officers and 1,570 enlisted men–most of whom were involved in maintaining telegraph cables.** Adding trained operators to the system wasn’t as simple as recruiting men from AT&T.*** Eighty percent of American telephone operators were women. If the army was going to use the telephone, they needed to recruit women.
Pershing placed a request with the US Department of War for one hundred uniformed female telephone operators who spoke fluent French.**** While upper level bureaucrats and military lawyers fussed over whether the women would be the army equivalent of “yeomen-ettes” or civilian contractors, more than 7600 trained women operators applied for the first hundred positions. (Just for the record, the original advertisement, sent out by a Lieutenant responding to Pershing’s request, called for women to serve overseas in the army.)
Called “Hello Girls” by the soldiers, they made army communications possible. Most worked behind the lines, but a few traveled with Pershing. Like the soldiers with whom they worked, they risked their lives. Unlike those soldiers, they did not receive any military benefits and had to fight to be recognized by their country when they returned. *Sigh*
If you’re interested in a more detailed account of the Hello Girls, I recommend Elizabeth Cobb’s The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers.
*I put enlisted in quotations because there was a great deal of ambiguity about the relationship between the army and the women who worked for them as switchboard operators. Ambiguity that was not resolved until 1979, when they were finally recognized as World War I veterans–too late to do most of them any good.
**Armies always prepare to fight the last war.
***Though the army did just that. Fourteen Bell Battalions, staffed entirely by AT&T employees with their supervisors as officers, joined the Signal Corps. But they weren’t operators. Their job was installing and maintaining equipment alongside the advancing armies. No small task.
****In addition to being ham-handed at managing the switchboard, hastily trained enlisted men for the most part didn’t speak French, a liability when working with their counterparts in the French telephone system.
Women of the Great War: Yeomanettes
Yeomen (F) being inspected by Rear Admiral Victor Blue. Photograph courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command
On March 17, 1917, United States Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels took what was then the bold—and controversial—step of admitting women into the navy as yeomen.(1) Hundreds of women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five headed to recruiting stations to enlist. By the time the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, two thousand women had enlisted as “Yeoman (F).” By 1918, the number of female yeomen had increased to eleven thousand.
Daniels had no intention of creating women warriors. The navy recruited women to “free a man to fight” by taking over clerical positions. Most “Yeomanettes” (2)were indeed assigned to clerical jobs, but the list of jobs the navy considered suitable for women grew as the war went on. Women also worked as radio operators, supervisors for naval shipments, telegraph operators, commissary stewards, fingerprint experts, and camouflage designers.
Once the navy realized that young women in uniform were good publicity, female yeomen were trained to march and perform basic military drills so they could parade in support of war bond drives, troop send-offs, and other official events where goodwill was valuable. Although they were not allowed to serve at sea, female yeomen received the same pay as sailors and marines at the same rank, a uniform allowance, medical care, and war risk insurance. (3)
Daniels is sometimes given credit for being the first to allow women to join the modern military, but both Britain and Russia beat the United States to the punch. Britain recruited women to become “the girl behind the man behind the gun” as part of Queen Mary’s Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) in 1916. Under the supervision of their own noncommissioned female officers, “female Tommies” traveled to the front, drove ambulances, ran printing presses, and dug graves. Bolshevik Russia took things one giant step further: in the short period between the Russia Revolution in February 1917 and the Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917, roughly four thousand Russian women served in combat. But that’s another story.
(1) In what many Americans found to be a shocking oversight, regulations in the Naval Act of 1916 did not specify that US citizens had to be male to join the navy. Oops.
(2) Adding a feminine or diminutive suffix to a noun does more than make the noun feminine in a grammatical sense. It also trivializes female accomplishment by presuming that the base noun is masculine: a poet is a more serious creature than a poetess, for example. Daniels, who objected to the nickname, summed up the issue: “I never did like the ‘ette’ business. If a woman does a job, she ought to have the name of the job.” (Can I get an “amen”?)
The official designation, “Yeoman (F),” made it clear women were the institutional equivalent of men who held the same rank. A revolutionary concept that we still haven’t come to terms with as a society.
(3) As we’ll see in a future blog post, the US Army didn’t do as well by the young women it “enlisted” to serve as telephone operators in France. Don’t touch that dial.
Women of the Great War: Before Rosie the Riveter
A generation before Rosie the Riveter, munitionettes “wo-manned” Britain’s factories and mines, replacing the men who volunteered for General Kitchener’s New Army in 1914 and 1915.
Women were initially greeted in the work force with hostility. Male trade unionists argued that the employment of women, who earned roughly half the salary of the men they replaced, would force down men’s wages.** Some argued that women did not have the strength or the technical skills to do the work.
When universal male conscription was passed in 1916, need out-weighed social resistance. By the 1918, 950,00 women worked in Britain’s munitions industry, outnumbering men by as much as three to one in some factories.
The hours were long and the work was dangerous. Munitionettes were popularly known as “canary girls” because prolonged exposure to toxic sulfuric acid tinged their skin yellow. Deadly explosions were common.
Munitionettes were not the only women to enter Britain’s work force in World War I. Another 250,000 joined the work force in jobs that ranged from dockworkers and firefighters*** to government clerks, nurses, and ambulance drivers. The number of women in the transport industry alone increased 555% during the war.
At the end of the war, most of the munitionettes and their fellow war workers were replaced by returning soldiers. Many of them were probably glad to go. But the definition of “women’s work” had been permanently changed. The thin edge of the wedge had been inserted.
* Evidently the simple solution of negotiating for women to be paid an equal wage for equal work did not occur to male-dominated unions. As a consequence, women’s trade unions saw an enormous increase in membership during the war.
** Imagine fighting a fire in a long skirt and petticoats.