; this seemed a crass attempt to
make the acquaintance of strangers.

But phone access in America was to become a popular right; something
like universal suffrage, only more so. American women could not yet
vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners. Phones in
America were not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's Day is by far
the busiest day of the year for the phone network.

The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were among the
foremost employers of American women. They employed the daughters of
the American middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women seemed to enjoy
telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid fairly well
as women's work went, and--not least--it seemed a genuine contribution
to the social good of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of
public service attractive. This was especially true in rural areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural party-lines, enjoyed
considerable social power. The operator knew everyone on the
party-line, and everyone knew her.

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company
did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. AT&T
did this for sound commercial reasons. The first telephone operators
of the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys. They
were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered
technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned
customers for bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all
on the cheap.

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company learned
a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards.
Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and
consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them as "Wild
Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to
subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally
giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without
permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the
switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that
customers found themselves talking