Listening in
CAIT MCKINNEY

My mother, who was otherwise busy working and taking care of three kids, spent hours on the phone some weekends catching up with an old friend. This was the early 1990s so she used the landline in our house: a recently upgraded cordless handset kept in the kitchen. I used to stay nearby, out of sight but within earshot, so I could listen in. It seemed like the phone transformed my mother into a different sort of person, one with concerns, desires, and inside jokes that predated me and extended beyond our family life. Her telephone talk with other women felt conspiratorial and beyond the grasps of me and my sisters, who wanted all her attention and labour, but couldn’t have it for those precious hours she carved out to talk on the phone. My mother busied herself with other, mindless things during the call: cleaning the kitchen, starting on dinner, whatever. But her focus was always with this small group of women she kept in touch with by telephone. The phone made her more than my mother: a woman with a past and present network I could eavesdrop on but didn’t totally understand.
 
As a technology that connects people over a distance, voice-to-voice, from one semi-private, domestic space to another, the telephone has long offered stealthy ways for women to episodically escape the social hierarchies defining their lives. Feminist media studies scholar Lana Rakow writes, ‘If we are genuinely interested in learning how gender differences are carried out in and through communication technologies, clearly we must investigate the uses of the telephone. Also, even more than other technologies, the telephone must be examined in relationship to the network of people it holds together.’1 The telephone’s influence on drawing networks of women together extends beyond the individual in her home, to how telephone talk organizes labor and outreach.
 
Think, for example of the switchboard operator, sitting at a bank of desks alongside dozens of other clerical workers, routing calls through the telephone company’s network using a maze of cables and plugs laid out in front of her. Before the introduction of automatic routing in the 1940s, operators followed instructions from callers about how to direct their calls. An operator manually switched cables to route each call to the desired number, deftly avoiding electric shocks from the board as she pulled and inserted switches. She worked quickly, hands moving impossibly fast over memorized switchboard positions in order to meet her quota of routing five to seven calls each minute.

I gaze at archival photographs of these women, arranged in rows along seemingly endless banks of cable-switches. The image freezes them in time, frenzied hands still for a moment. If an operator looks back at the camera at all, it’s always over her shoulder because there is no time to stop answering for a pose and a smile. The women all look the same in their dark, late 19th century dresses, long hair drawn back into a functional bun that won’t interfere with a headset. In later, war-time images, shorter, more practical skirts and blouses frame modern, even more practical hairstyles. I wonder if these women found time to gossip silently about callers while they worked, sharing a quick, knowing glance with a neighbor at the next board.

Switchboard operation was a feminized profession for many reasons, the most important being the perception that women’s affect suited the even keel and moral upstanding needed of operators, who were supposed to be discreet while routing calls, which they could hear through their headsets.2 Though women were discouraged from listening in on calls while they were working, many did. In an anonymous 1907 article in the Saturday Evening Post, an American switchboard operator wrote of the joyful mischief she found by discreetly listening in.

‘It’s so queer to press down the row of “listening keys” one after another and get bits of the different conversations!  Different voices, different dialects, different emotions, tempers, subjects! All sliced off like Neapolitan ice cream—little bits of pulsing human lives. The girls do awfully mean things when they’re exasperated by angry subscribers. You can, for instance, switch three or four couples together—a pair of lovers, maybe, two business men and one woman gossiping to another—and then sit and hear them rage at each other.’3
 
I love this operator’s description of her trouble making as queer. In 1907, this word was on the verge of becoming a slur for “homosexual,” but still meant something more like strange, odd, or eccentric, albeit inflected by ideas about sexuality and stigma. By naming as queer her clandestine efforts to listen in on calls and deliberately misdirect callers into unexpected relations with strangers, this operator gets at the peculiar intimacies produced by telephone talk: the simultaneous feeling of being at a distance produced by the phone’s mediation, alongside the weird closeness of hearing another person’s voice and breath right in your ear; or the discomfiting public nature of calling through a human operator to speak to your lover or friend about private things.
 
The switchboard as a metaphor for women working with the phone persisted long after automation replaced human switchboard operators. In previous work I’ve written at length about New York City’s Lesbian Switchboard, a volunteer-run telephone hotline that operated from the 1970s through 1990s, answering calls from lesbians in need. Night after night, a single volunteer sat in a small office at the local gay and lesbian community centre, in front of a regular handset. She answered calls about where to find a lesbian-friendly therapist or what bars to visit, and gave advice about coming out and relationships. Each of these calls was logged briefly but meticulously in a spiral-bound notebook, leaving behind an archive that is plentiful in some ways, but unable to account for the cadence and feeling exchanged through decades of telephone talk. The choice to call this hotline a “switchboard” locates this caring work in a longer legacy of what the telephone has meant to women’s networks and labour.
 
In all these scenarios of telephone talk, the bell, buzz, or ring are summons: an invitation to work, gossip, or give support by stepping outside of oneself into a wider network held together by the telephone.  

1. Lana F. Rakow, Gender on the Line: Women, the Telephone, and Community Life (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 5.
2. Michèle Martin, “Feminisation of the Labour Process in the Communication Industry: The Case of the Telephone Operators, 1876-1904,” Labour/Le Travail 22 (1988): 139–62.
3. Quoted in Jeff Nilsson, “What the Operators Overheard in 1907, Saturday Evening Post, 30 June 2012, saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/06/operators-heard-1907.