My Sisters Telegraphic

"In the mid-nineteenth century, women entered a challenging, competitive technological field - the telegraph industry. They competed directly with men, demanding and occasionally getting equal pay. Women telegraphers made up a subculture of technically educated workers whose skills, mobility, and independence set them apart from their contemporaries." "My Sisters Telegraphic is an accessible and fascinating study designed to fill in the missing history of women telegraph operators - their work, their daily lives, their workplace issue - by using nontraditional sources, including the telegraphers' trade journals, company records, and oral and written histories of the operators themselves. It includes an analysis of "telegraph romance," a largely forgotten genre of popular literature that grew up around the women operators and their work." "This study also explores the surprising parallels between the telegraphy of the nineteenth century and the work of women in technical fields today. The telegrapher's work, like that of the modern computer programmer, involved translating written language into machine-readable code. And anticipating the Internet by over one hundred years, telegraphers often experienced the gender-neutral aspect of the "cyberspace" they inhabited."--Jacket.