Eps 1274: hello,girl

— The too lazy to register an account podcast

Host image: StyleGAN neural net
Content creation: GPT-3.5,

Host

Sophia Fletcher

Sophia Fletcher

Podcast Content
I am here for a week, I cannot tell you where, but I am now in my first army, and no doubt I could learn my duties in a short time. I know French and have some experience as a telephone operator, so I could speak French. After seeing in the New York Times that a woman with knowledge of French and English was wanted as "telephone girl in France," I wrote the information on my application blank.
I added the following sentence, "I am a telephone girl in decline," written in 1889, which I wrote: "You could teach the high Duchess of Arthur's Land gentleness, patience, humility and manners. I give you a letter I have just received from Miss Evelyn Tilleard Cooper from that city. Janet had her photograph taken in uniform and placed on a postcard, which is very common among soldiers.
On January 30, Major Cordray sent a letter to Captain Wessen of the Signal Corps inquiring about the measures taken at Miss Jones's request. On the same day I wrote this letter, the Signal Corps Captain wrote a response to my request. The New York City traffic engineer sent me a letter to Janet telling her that the first attention was on applicants who had phone experience. By February 5, Captain Wessen wrote to Major Cordray saying an interview had been set up to determine eligibility for the telephone unit.
In July, she was ordered back to New York City, where she learned in late August that she was going home. Janet Jones continued her journey across the Atlantic and was taken to France by ship with the other Hello Girls. She continued her journey to the US East Coast, to her home in New Orleans, Louisiana, and then to Florida.
As the war ended and the new year began, the number of calls the girls answered dropped significantly. Pershing noted that the soldiers in the Signal Corps were woefully slow to transmit calls and could not communicate with French operators. Often the callers had to call the nearest intermediary and translate the callers into French. That frustrated Pershed and many other soldiers and Signal Corps employees.
In November 1917, General Pershing asked the War Department to deploy American women who spoke French. Thousands of women applied, and in the spring of 1918 the first Hello Girls travelled abroad. Troops on the front line relied on phones to communicate with friends and family members in France, Germany, Italy and other countries.
Hello Girls served in 75 cities in England and France and were sometimes sent to equip outside the front lines. The convoy reached England without further incident and spent a week in London before it began its service with the American Expeditionary Force. R.M.S. Baltic, assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division.
Alexander Graham Bell hired Emma as the first female operator of the Bell Telephone Company in the United States. Female staff replaced male operators because they were more polite callers and were paid twice as much as their male colleagues. Regular operators earned $60 a month, and the boss was paid for his work; he earned up to $125 a month, but was not paid until the end of his career.
At the end of the war, General Pershing praised the "Hello Girl" for her outstanding work, but her job was over. He asked his superiors for about 240 French skills to be accepted into the Army Signal Corps as soon as possible and sent abroad. Janet was immediately put on a train to Paris, and her first 100 staff arrived in France.
She remembers that her new husband was very proud of her service and that one day he wrote to the Army to receive her victory medal. Soon after her release, she discovered that, while she had sworn allegiance three times, followed military protocol, held rank and worn the uniform of Army Signal Corp, she was not considered a civilian employee by the Army.
The Hello Girls have been asking the government for veterans status for years and have not received it, but they have not been silent like Janet. They received gifts from local businesses in Flint over Christmas, and some sources say they have received veteran status.
The U.S. Commission on the Centenary of World War I has begun to lobby for recognition of veterans of World War I, the first major war in the United States. As such, they helped found the Veterans Memorial Fund, a nonprofit known as "Hello Girls."
In 1898, Harriot and Daley became the first female members of the Signal Corps in the US Army, but they were not officially recognized until 1978. In 1978, President Carter signed a document recognizing the women of the Signal Corps as United Nations veterans, even though they had not been officially recognized until that year.