I 
116TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION H. R. 1953 
To award a Congressional Gold Medal to the female telephone operators 
of the Army Signal Corps, known as the ‘‘Hello Girls’’. 
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
MARCH 28, 2019 
Mr. CLEAVER (for himself, Ms. STEFANIK, Mr. COMER, Ms. DAVIDS of Kan-
sas, and Ms. BROWNLEY of California) introduced the following bill; 
which was referred to the Committee on Financial Services, and in addi-
tion to the Committee on House Administration, for a period to be subse-
quently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such 
provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned 
A BILL 
To award a Congressional Gold Medal to the female tele-
phone operators of the Army Signal Corps, known as 
the ‘‘Hello Girls’’. 
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘ ‘Hello Girls’ Congres-
sional Gold Medal Act of 2019’’. 
SEC. 2. FINDINGS. 
Congress finds the following: 
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(1) On April 6, 1917, the United States de-
clared war against Germany. As a historically neu-
tral nation, the United States was unprepared to 
fight a technologically modern conflict overseas. The 
United States called upon American Telephone and 
Telegraph (referred to in this section as ‘‘AT&T’’) 
to provide equipment and trained personnel for the 
Army Signal Corps in France. AT&T executives in 
Army uniform served at home under the provisions 
of the Act entitled ‘‘An Act for making further and 
more effectual provision for the national defense, 
and for other purposes.’’, approved June 3, 1916 
(referred to in this section as the ‘‘National Defense 
Act of 1916’’), which allowed for the induction of in-
dividuals with specialized skills into a reserve force. 
(2) When General John Pershing sailed for Eu-
rope in May of 1917 as head of the American Expe-
ditionary Forces (referred to in this section as the 
‘‘AEF’’), he took telephone operating equipment 
with him in recognition of the inadequacy of Euro-
pean circuitry and with the understanding that tele-
phones would play a key role in battlefield commu-
nications for the first time in the history of war. 
(3) From May to November of 1917, the AEF 
struggled to develop the telephone service necessary 
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for the Army to function under battlefield condi-
tions. Monolingual infantrymen from the United 
States were unable to connect calls rapidly or com-
municate effectively with their French counterparts 
to put calls through over toll lines that linked one 
region of the country with another. The Army found 
that the average male operator required 60 seconds 
to make a connection. That rate was unacceptably 
slow, especially for operational calls between com-
mand outposts and the front lines. 
(4) During this time, in the United States, tele-
phone operating was largely sex-segregated. Hired 
for their speed in connecting calls, women filled 85 
percent of the telephone operating positions in the 
United States. It took the average female operator 
10 seconds to make a connection. 
(5) On November 8, 1917, General Pershing 
cabled the War Department and wrote, ‘‘On account 
of the great difficulty of obtaining properly qualified 
men, request organization and dispatch to France a 
force of Woman telephone operators all speaking 
French and English equally well.’’. To begin, Gen-
eral Pershing requested 100 women under the com-
mand of a commissioned captain, writing that ‘‘All 
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should have allowances of Army nurses and should 
be uniformed.’’. 
(6) The War Department sent press releases to 
newspapers across the United States to recruit 
women willing to serve for the duration of the war 
and face the hazards of submarine warfare and aer-
ial bombardment. These articles emphasized that pa-
triotic women would be ‘‘full-fledged soldier[s] under 
the articles of war’’ and would ‘‘do as much to help 
win the war as the men in khaki who go ‘over the 
top.’ ’’. All women would take the Army oath. 
(7) More than 7,600 women volunteered for the 
100 positions described in paragraph (5) and the 
first recruits took the Army oath on January 15, 
1918. 
(8) Like nurses and doctors at the time, female 
Signal Corps members had relative rather than tra-
ditional ranks and were ranked as Operator, Super-
visor, or Chief Operator. When promoted, the 
women were required to swear the Army oath again. 
(9) Telephone operators were the first women 
to serve as soldiers in non-medical classifications 
and the job of the operators was to help win the 
war, not to mitigate the harms of the war. In pop-
ular parlance, they were known as the ‘‘Hello Girls’’. 
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(10) Signal Corps Operators wore Army uni-
forms and Army insignia always, as well as stand-
ard-issue identity disks in case of death, and were 
subject to court martial for infractions of the mili-
tary code. 
(11) Unbeknownst to the women operators and 
their immediate officers, the legal counsel of the 
Army ruled internally on March 20, 1918, that the 
women were not actually soldiers but contract em-
ployees, even though the women had not seen or 
signed any contracts. Military code allowed only for 
the induction of men and the code remained un-
changed despite the orders of General Pershing. 
Nevertheless, legal counsel also recognized that the 
National Defense Act of 1916, which allowed for the 
induction of members of the telephone industry of 
the United States into the Armed Forces, imposed 
no gender restrictions. 
(12) Four days later, on March 24, 1918, the 
first contingent of operators began their official du-
ties in France. The operators arrived before most in-
fantrymen of the Armed Forces in order to facilitate 
logistics and deployment and spent their first night 
in Paris under German bombardment. 
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(13) After the arrival of the operators, tele-
phone service in France improved immediately, as 
calls tripled from 13,000 to 36,000 per day. 
(14) The Army quickly recruited, trained, and 
deployed 5 additional contingents of female Signal 
Corps operators. With these personnel, calls in-
creased to 150,000 per day. 
(15) In addition to standard telephone oper-
ating, bilingual Signal Corps members provided si-
multaneous translation between officers from France 
and officers from the United States, who were com-
municating by telephone. 
(16) The AEF fought their first major battles 
in the last 2 months of the war. By that point, the 
Signal Corps considered the contributions of women 
to be so essential that, in telephone exchanges clos-
est to the front line, the Army exclusively used 
women, in rotating 12-hour shifts. In the rear, the 
Army established rotating 8-hour shifts and gave 
male soldiers the overnight shift when telephone 
traffic was slower. 
(17) Seven bilingual operators— 
(A) served at the Battles of St. Mihiel and 
Meuse-Argonne under the immediate command 
of General Pershing; 
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(B) staffed the Operations Boards through 
which orders to advance, fire, and retreat were 
delivered to soldiers in the trenches, to artillery 
units on alert, and to pilots awaiting orders at 
French airfields; and 
(C) were awarded a ‘‘Defensive Sector 
Clasp’’ for the Meuse-Argonne operation. 
(18) The Chief Operator supervising the Hello 
Girls, Grace Banker of Passaic, New Jersey, was 
awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Out of 
16,000 eligible Signal Corps officers, Banker was 1 
of only 18 individuals so honored. 
(19) Thirty additional operators received special 
commendations, many signed by General Pershing 
himself, for ‘‘exceptionally meritorious and con-
spicuous services’’ in ‘‘Advance Sections’’ of the con-
flict. 
(20) The war ended on November 11, 1918. As 
of that date, 223 female operators served in France 
and had connected 26,000,000 calls for the AEF. 
(21) The Chief Signal Officer of the Army Sig-
nal Corps wrote in his official report 2 days after 
the date on which the war ended that ‘‘a large part 
of the success of the communications of this Army 
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is due to . . . a competent staff of women opera-
tors.’’. 
(22) After the war ended, some women were or-
dered to Coblenz in Germany for the occupation of 
that country and to Paris for the Paris Peace Trea-
ty of 1919 to continue telephone operations, some-
times in direct support of President Woodrow Wil-
son. 
(23) Two operators, Corah Bartlett and Inez 
Crittenden, died in France in the service of the 
United States and were buried there in military 
cemeteries with military ceremonies. Those operators 
died of the same influenza pandemic that killed more 
soldiers of the Armed Forces than combat oper-
ations. 
(24) Women of the Army Signal Corps were in-
eligible for discharge until formal release. Because of 
their role in logistics, those women were among the 
last soldiers to come home to the United States. The 
last Signal Corps operators returned from France in 
January of 1920. 
(25) Upon arrival in the United States, the 
Army informed female veterans that they had per-
formed as civilians, not soldiers, even though opera-
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tors had served in Army uniform in a theatre of war 
surrounded by men who were similarly engaged. 
(26) Despite the objections of General George 
Squier, the top-ranking officer in the Signal Corps, 
the Army denied Signal Corps women the veterans’ 
benefits granted to male soldiers and female nurses, 
such as— 
(A) hospitalization for disabilities incurred 
in the line of duty; 
(B) cash bonuses; 
(C) soldiers’ pensions; 
(D) flags on their coffins; and 
(E) the Victory Medals promised them in 
France. 
(27) For the next 60 years, female veterans, led 
by Merle Egan from Montana, petitioned Congress 
more than 50 times for their recognition. In 1977, 
under the sponsorship of Senator Barry Goldwater, 
Congress passed legislation to retroactively acknowl-
edge the military service of the Women’s Air Force 
Service Pilots (referred to in this section as 
‘‘WASPs’’) of World War II and ‘‘the service of any 
person in any other similarly situated group the 
member of which rendered service to the Armed 
Forces of the United States in a capacity considered 
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civilian employment or contractual service at the 
time such service was rendered’’. 
(28) On November 23, 1977, President Jimmy 
Carter signed the legislation described in paragraph 
(27) into law as the GI Bill Improvement Act of 
1977 (Public Law 95–202; 91 Stat. 1433). 
(29) The Signal Corps telephone operators ap-
plied for, and were granted, status as veterans in 
1979. 
(30) Only 33 of the operators who had returned 
home after the war were still alive to receive their 
Victory Medals and official discharge papers, which 
were finally awarded in 1979. 
(31) One of the women, Olive Shaw from Mas-
sachusetts, returned to the United States after the 
war, where she worked on the professional staff of 
Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers. Shaw lived to 
receive her honorable discharge and was the first 
burial when the Massachusetts National Cemetery 
opened on October 11, 1980. Shaw’s uniform is on 
display at the National World War I Museum and 
Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. 
(32) Upon receipt of her honorable discharge at 
a ceremony in her home in Marine City, Michigan, 
‘‘Hello Girl’’ Oleda Joure Christides raised the paper 
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to her lips and kissed it. The only thing Christides 
ever wanted from the Federal Government was a 
flag on her coffin. 
(33) On July 1, 2009, President Barack Obama 
signed into law Public Law 111–40 (123 Stat. 
1958), which awarded the WASPs the Congressional 
Gold Medal for their service to the United States. 
(34) For their role as pioneers who paved the 
way for all women in uniform, and for service that 
was essential to victory in World War I, the ‘‘Hello 
Girls’’ merit similar recognition. 
SEC. 3. CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL. 
(a) AWARD
AUTHORIZED.—The Speaker of the 
House of Representatives and the President pro tempore 
of the Senate shall make appropriate arrangements for the 
award, on behalf of Congress, of a single gold medal of 
appropriate design in honor of the female telephone opera-
tors of the Army Signal Corps (commonly known as the 
‘‘Hello Girls’’), in recognition of those operators’— 
(1) pioneering military service; 
(2) devotion to duty; and 
(3) 60-year struggle for— 
(A) recognition as soldiers; and 
(B) veterans’ benefits. 
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