March 8, 2018

Members of the U.S. Army Signal Corps operating the switchboards in France during World War I.

Today is International Women’s Day, and we’d like to recognize a group of 223 women.
In 1917, on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I, Washington drafted 2.8 million men into military service. The Army realized that its success would rely on the Allies’ use of a new technology: the telephone.
Enter the Hello Girls, a group of bilingual telephone operators selected for working the switchboards in France, connecting the front lines with supply depots and military command. They often handled more than 150,000 calls a day.
But because they were women, the U.S. government denied them veteran status for more than 60 years after the war.
“The unfortunate reality is their service wasn’t officially recognized with veteran status until 1979, when a small fraction of those who served was still alive,” Doran Cart, a senior curator at the National World War I Museum and Memorial, said. “To achieve that point of hard-won recognition took a monumental effort.”

***Reprinted from The New York Times 03-08-2018