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December 2001
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Now more than a century of adventures and photographic memories from the magazine’s archives are just a click away.
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Smooth Operators
“The telephone companies early found that women were temperamentally far better suited to be operators than the boys,” wrote F. Barrows Colton. His article “The Miracle of Talking by Telephone” appeared in the October 1937 Geographic, where this early 1880s photograph of a Richmond, Virginia, switchboard was published. Male operators, according to the caption, “‘talked back’ to customers and were otherwise unsatisfactory, so girls soon replaced them.” The women, wrote Colton, were “an instant success...they paved the way for women to enter many other fields of employment.”
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