Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Did you know that female telephone operators were vital to America’s success in WWI?  Did you know that female telephone operators had anything to DO with WWI, let alone served as uniformed members of the Signal Corps in France?  And did you further know that AFTER the war, they were denied any military or veteran’s benefits until the CARTER ADMINISTRATION?

Yes, that’s the Jimmy Carter who was president when I was born.  And yes, I did say WWI–as in the Great War, the War to End All Wars, the war that ended in November of 1918.  And YES, that’s a 60 year gap.

I didn’t know anything about the Signal Corps either–not until I listened to The Hello Girls, Elizabeth Cobbs’ fascinating history of these women and their even more fascinating historical context.  I’ll admit, the context is given in so much detail that I doubted its relevance at first, but by the end of the book, it enriched the story immeasurably.  The fight for women’s suffrage raged all during WWI–looking back, I find myself irritated with Mr. Bennett for not spending more (some??) time on it when we were learning about Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points in 11th grade–and the service of the Signal Corps women weighed significantly into the argument that women couldn’t vote because they couldn’t fulfill one of the basic duties of citizenship, being unable to fight to defend their country in time of war.  (How that made taxation without representation okay for the female half of the population baffles me, but there I go, expecting anything to do with women not being able to vote to make sense.  Besides, the conditions under which a woman could legally own anything upon which to be taxed is an entirely different [although equally absurd!] issue.)  Cobbs taught me things I didn’t know about the suffrage movement, things I didn’t know about WWI (either from history classes or from reading Rilla of Ingleside over and over as a girl), and things I certainly didn’t know about the years afterward.  This is a vital piece of American history that gives an impressively balanced look at the differing viewpoints involved, and it’s compellingly told.  Read it!  Listen to it!  Heck, BUY it!  If you have any feeling in you for history at all, you’ll be glad you did.