‘Hello Girls’ fought for U.S., women’s rights
They answered call in WWI, led efforts to secure vote, benefits
In 1917, U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker disliked the idea of female workers on Army bases so intensely that he didn’t even want to build toilets for them. But the more forwardthinking Navy already had welcomed women into its ranks to replace men in landlubber assignments.
America’s ongoing Industrial Revolution gave the “Hello Girls,” as the first female recruits came to be known, their opportunity to serve the nation and earn full rights as citizens. In particular, American telephones were the only military technology in which America enjoyed superiority over both allies and enemies. Commands to advance or retreat, and to fire or stand down, were relayed by phone during the Great War.
At home, telephone operating was sex-segregated. Callers rang female operators, who connected nearly every call made. Their job was demanding. With hands darting like hummingbirds, operators connected hundreds of impatient callers each hour. Diligent and quick, they talked with customers while manipulating plugs in a constantly changing pattern.
When Gen. John Pershing arrived in France in 1917, he found male recruits ill-suited for this work. They were inefficient, and prone to frustration when dealing with rude callers. Few doughboys possessed the foreign language skills necessary to cooperate with French telephone operators when making long-distance connections. Necessity required innovation, so Pershing departed from precedent, law, and the wishes of the Army itself to recruit bilingual women. They withstood submarine warfare, cannon fire, influenza, bombardment, and petty-minded bureaucrats to send the word, over there.
Most worked behind the lines in safer regions of
France. But one small group, led by Grace Banker, a 25-yearold graduate of Barnard College, followed Pershing from the short but intense Battle of St. Mihiel to the desperately extended Meuse-Argonne Offensive, lasting 47 days. The women ran switchboards 24 hours a day within range of artillery fire that lit up the horizon and shook their equipment. Enemy planes buzzed overhead. A German prisoner of war overturned an oil stove and burned their barracks to the ground. Yet the indomitable women embraced every challenge.
Their efforts, along with those of female Army nurses and private volunteers, helped shape another great debate: whether or not to grant women the vote. By war’s end, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden and 10 other countries had enfranchised females.
Not surprisingly, the nation latest to the war was also late to the vote. Accustomed to congratulating itself as the vanguard of democracy, the United States brought up the rear. Its suffrage movement had struggled for 70 years without producing victory.
But the war — and female recruits’ efforts in battle — changed the mind of President Woodrow Wilson. Prior to his election in 1912, he told an aide that he was “definitely and irreconcilably opposed to woman suffrage; woman’s place was in the home, and the type of woman who took an active part in the suffrage agitation was totally abhorrent to him.”
Six years later, at the height of American fighting in France, Wilson told the U.S. Senate that the women’s vote was vital to the “realization of the objects for which the war is being fought.” He hoped America might eventually organize an enduring democratic peace, guaranteed by a League of Nations. But how could the United States lead the free world if it was behind everyone else? Once women’s suffrage was entangled with Wilson’s foreign policy goals, it became necessary, not discretionary. The president made two arguments: The United States could not hold itself aloof from world opinion, and women had amply earned the privileges of citizenship.
“Are we alone to ask and take the utmost women can give — service and sacrifice of every kind — and still say that we do not see what title that gives them?” the president asked. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and of right?”
Once operators returned home in 1919 (two died in France), the Army denied them veterans’ bonuses, victory medals, hospitalization for disabilities and even a flag on their coffins. As a result, the Hello Girls commenced a new struggle for recognition as veterans that eventually caught the second wave of feminism. In 1979, assisted by the National Organization for Women, 31 survivors received their World War I Victory Medals at last.
Women’s activism laid the basis for women’s suffrage, which was ratified by the 19th Amendment in 1920. World War I secured it. The Hello Girls fought on both fronts. Cobbs, author of “The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers,” holds the Melbern Glasscock chair at Texas A&M University and is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She wrote this for Zócalo Public Square.