Telegraphy and the “New Woman” in Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe

Müller, Simone M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20837-4_2

Simone M. Müller^3,4

Part of the book series: History of Computing ((HC))

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Abstract

This article explores the history of telegraphy in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of class and gender. It brings together approaches from social history and the history of finance with communication studies. The article demonstrates that our understanding of telegraphy as a masculine undertaking in terms of science, technology, and technology-in-use needs to be expanded. Contemporary discourses of telegraphy included practices of exclusion for the woman engineer and the female telegraph user based on constructions of femininity as “the other.” Yet, telegraphy also afforded women new avenues of independence, which resulted in an expansion of the domestic sphere. Middle-class women in particular used the opportunities telegraphy offered as a means for employment as a female telegraph clerk or investment in telegraph shares. At the end of the nineteenth century, telegraphy thus helped the “new woman” carve out a new social geography for herself.

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Notes

1.
The Lady and the Telegraph , Belfast News-Letter, November 30, 1877.
2.
Idem.
3.
Latham, Jean L., and Victor Mays. 1958. Young man in a hurry: the story of Cyrus W. Field. New York: Harper; Bright, Charles. 1908. The life story of sir Charles Tilston Bright civil engineer: with which is incorporated the story of the Atlantic cable, and the first telegraph to India and the colonies. London: Archibald Constable; Cookson, Gillian. 2003. The cable: the wire that changed the world. Strout: Tempus publishing; Appleyard, Rollo. 1939. The history of the institution of electrical engineers (1871–1931). London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers.
4.
Staiti, Paul J., and S.F.B. Morse. 1989. Samuel F.B. Morse. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press; Mackay, James A. 1997. Alexander Graham Bell: a life. New York: J. Wiley.
5.
On intersectionality, see Berger, Michelle T., and Kathleen Guidroz. 2010. The intersectional approach: transforming the academy through race, class, and gender. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and Chow, E.N., M.T. Segal, T. Lin, and V.P. Demos. 2011. Analyzing gender, intersectionality, and multiple inequalities: global, transnational and local contexts. Bingley: Emerald.
6.
On gender as performance, see Jagger, Gill. 2008. Judith Butler: sexual politics, social change and the power of the performative. London: Routledge.
7.
Ledger, Sally. 1997. The new woman: fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis. 2002. The new woman in fiction and fact: Fin-de-siècle feminisms. Basingstoke/Hampshire/New York: Palgrave.
8.
Jepsen, Thomas C. 2000. My sisters telegraphic: women in the telegraph office, 1846–1950. Athens: Ohio University Press.
9.
Jepsen 2000: 2.
10.
Beachy, Robert, Béatrice Craig, and Alastair Owens (eds.). 2006. Women, business, and finance in nineteenth-century Europe: rethinking separate spheres. Oxford: Berg Publishers; Deere, Carmen D., and Cheryl R. Doss. 2006. A special issue on women and wealth. Feminist Economics 12: 1–2.
11.
Doe, Helen. 2010. Waiting for her ship to come in? The female investor in nineteenth-century sailing vessels. The Economic History Review 63(1): 85–106.
12.
North, Michael (ed.). 1995. Kommunikationsrevolutionen: Die neuen Medien des 16. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Köln: Böhlau; Osterhammel, Jürgen, and Niels P. Petersson. 2007. Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen. München: C. H. Beck Wissen; Müller-Pohl, Simone. 2010. ‘By Atlantic Telegraph’: a study on Weltcommunication in the 19th century. Medien & Zeit 4: 40–54.
13.
Winseck, Dwayne R., and Robert M. Pike. 2007. Communication and empire: media, markets, and globalization, 1860–1930. Durham: Duke University Press; Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company. 1950. The Telcon story 1850–1950. London.
14.
Field, Cyrus W. 1879. Ocean telegraphy: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organization of the first company ever formed to lay an ocean cable. See http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/617519
15.
Bright, Charles. 1898. Submarine telegraphs: their history, construction and working. London: C. Lockwood; Wenzlhuemer, Roland. 2013. Connecting the nineteenth-century world: the telegraph and globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
16.
Rosenberg, E.S. (ed.). 2012. A world connecting: 1870–1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
17.
Bright 1898: 144; Wenzlhuemer 2013: 119.
18.
Coe, Lewis. 1993. The telegraph: a history of Morse’s invention and its predecessors in the United States. Jefferson: McFarland; Bunch, Bryan H., and Alexander Hellemans. 2004. The history of science and technology: a browser’s guide to the great discoveries, inventions, and the people who made them, from the dawn of time to today. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; or contemporary see Cooke, William F. 1857. The electric telegraph: was it invented by professor Wheatstone? or by William Fothergill Cooke. London: W.H. Smith and Son.
19.
Silverman, K. 2003. Lightning man, the accursed life of Samuel F.B. Morse. New York: Knopf; John, Richard R. 2010. Network nation: inventing American telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
20.
John 2010: 59; Coe 1993: 32.
21.
Meucci, S. 2010. Antonio and the electric scream: the man who invented the telephone. Wellesley: Branden Books.
22.
John 2010: 164.
23.
Abir-Am, Pnina G., and Dorinda Outram. 1987. Uneasy careers and intimate lives: women in science, 1789–1979. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; Schwartz Cowan, R. 2005. Foreword: musings about the woman engineer as muse. In Crossing boundaries, building bridges. Comparing the history of women engineers 1870s–1990s, ed. Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann, xii–xv. London: Routledge.
24.
Pursell, C.W. 2005. ‘Am I a Lady or an engineer?’: the origins of the women’s engineering society in Britain, 1918–1940. In Crossing boundaries, building bridges, ed. Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann, 51–73. London: Routledge.
25.
Pursell 2005: 51.
26.
Schwartz Cowan 2005: xv.
27.
Abir-Am and Outram 1987: 3.
28.
Abir-Am and Outram 1987: 3.
29.
Buchanan, Robert A. 1989. The engineers: a history of the engineering profession in Britain, 1750–1914. London: Kingsley; Institute of Electrical Science, “Hertha Ayrton. Online Biographies,” http://www.theiet.org/resources/library/archives/biographies/ayrtonh.cfm (last accessed March 11, 2015).
30.
Pursell 2005: 51.
31.
Occasional notes, Pall Mall Gazette , June 25, 1870.
32.
A telegraphic evening party, Illustrated London News, July 2, 1870.
33.
Occasional notes, Pall Mall Gazette , June 25, 1870.
34.
A telegraphic evening party, Illustrated London News, July 2, 1870.
35.
Occasional notes, Pall Mall Gazette , June 25, 1870.
36.
Idem.
37.
Punch 35, 1858: 244.
38.
Punch 38, 1860: 181; on electricity and the domestic sphere, see Gooday, Graeme. 2008. Domesticating electricity: technology, uncertainty and gender, 1880–1914. London: Pickering & Chatto.
39.
Jepsen 2000: 3.
40.
Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, “Women telegraphers in the First World War ,” 19. August 2012.
41.
Reader, William J. 1987. A history of the institution of electrical engineers, 1981–1971. London: P. Peregrinus.
42.
Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, December 11, 1889.
43.
Scott, Alison M. (ed.). 1994. Gender segregation and social change: men and women in changing labour markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
44.
Gardey, D. 1999. The standardization of a technical practice: typing (1883–1930). History and Technology 364(15): 313–343.
45.
Freeman, Ruth, and Patricia Klaus. 1984. ‘Blessed or Not?’: the new spinster in England and the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. Journal of Family History 9: 394–414. On the railway, see Dorré, Gina M. 2006. Victorian fiction and the cult of the horse. Aldershot: Ashgate. On the telephone, see Martin, Michèle. 1991. “Hello, Central?”: gender, technology, and culture in the formation of telephone systems. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press.
46.
Jepsen 2000: 2.
47.
Electron, telegraph instruments, and how to understand them, in The Telegraphist. A Monthly Journal for Postal, Telephone, and Railway Telegraph Clerks, December 1, 1883: 3.
48.
Women who work, Liverpool Mercury, June 23, 1868; The Examiner, June 21, 1873.
49.
Idem.
50.
Tarrant, Donald R. 1999. Atlantic sentinel: Newfoundland’s role in transatlantic cable communications. St. John’s Nfld: Flanker Press.
51.
Rutterford, J., G. David, M. Josephine, and O. Alastar. 2011. Who comprised the nation of shareholders? Gender and investment in Great Britain, c. 1870–1935. The Economic History Review 64(1): 157–187.
52.
Müller, Simone M., and Heidi Tworek. 2015. ‘The telegraph and the bank’: on the interdependence of global communications and capitalism, 1866–1914. J. Glob. Hist. 2: forthcoming.
53.
Rutterford et al. 2011: 157.
54.
On the Victorian shareholder, see Maltby, A., and J. Rutterford (eds.). 2006. She possessed her own fortune: women investors from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Business History 48(2):220–253 or Davis, Lance E., and Robert A. Huttenback. 2010. Mammon and the pursuit of Empire: the political economy of British imperialism, 1860–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
55.
“Visitors by Old Electric,” The telegraphist. A monthly journal for postal, telephone and railway telegraph clerks, January (1886), 14.
56.
Direct United States Cable Company Ltd., Annual list of members and summary of capital and shares of the Direct United States Cable Company Limited, Public Record Office, National Archives Kew. The analysis is based on samples from the years 1873, 1877, 1887, and 1909.
57.
Müller, Simone M. 2015. Wiring the world: the social and cultural creation of global telegraph networks. New York: Columbia University Press.
58.
Of those 784 female shareholders, we find 395 spinsters = 50.4 %, 225 married women = 28.7 %, 158 widows = 20.2 %, 4 ladies, and 2 misses = 0.7 %.
59.
Gordon, E., and G. Nair. 2003. Public lives: women, family, and society in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press.
60.
Robb, G. 2009. Ladies of the ticker: women, investment, and fraud in England and America 1850–1930. In Victorian investments: new perspectives on finance and culture, ed. Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt, 120–142. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
61.
Robb 2009.
62.
Robb 2009: 122.
63.
Robb 2009: 121.
64.
Preda, Alex. 2001. The rise of the popular investor: financial knowledge and investing in England and France, 1840–1880. The Sociological Quarterly 42(2): 205–232.
65.
Summary of this morning’s news, Pall Mall Gazette , January 27, 1876.

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Google Scholar
Reader, William J. 1987. A history of the institution of electrical engineers, 1981–1971. London: P. Peregrinus.
Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
Rutterford, J., G. David, M. Josephine, and O. Alastar. 2011. Who comprised the nation of shareholders? Gender and investment in Great Britain, c. 1870–1935. The Economic History Review 64(1): 157–187.
Article Google Scholar
Schwartz Cowan, R. 2005. Foreword: musings about the woman engineer as muse. In Crossing boundaries, building bridges. Comparing the history of women engineers 1870s–1990s, ed. Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann, xii–xv. London: Routledge.
Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Google Scholar
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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Valérie Schafer, Benjamin Thierry, and Torsten Kathke for their invaluable support and feedback.

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Department of History, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Simone M. Müller
Albert-Ludwigs-University, Rempartstraße 15, KG IV, 79085, Freiburg, Germany
Simone M. Müller

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Institute for Communication Sciences, CNRS, Paris-Sorbonne, UPMC, Paris, France
Valérie Schafer
Institute for Communication Sciences CNRS, Paris-Sorbonne, UPMC, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Benjamin G. Thierry

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Müller, S.M. (2015). Telegraphy and the “New Woman” in Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe. In: Schafer, V., Thierry, B. (eds) Connecting Women. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20837-4_2

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