The Hello Girls
Subtitle: America's first women soldiers
By: Elizabeth Cobbs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 370
ISBN-13: 9780674971479
Subjects: World War, 1914-1918; United States; United States. Army; United States. Army. Signal Corps; Suffrage; Women veterans; Sex discrimination against women; Communications; Telephone operators; Female Participation; Women soldiers; Women; Regimental histories; Legal status, laws; History
Other titles: America's first women soldiers
Description: "In World War I, telephones linked commanding generals with soldiers in muddy trenches. A woman in uniform connected almost every one of their calls, speeding the orders that won the war. Like other soldiers, the "Hello Girls" swore the Army oath and stayed for the duration. A few were graduates of elite colleges. Most were ordinary, enterprising young women motivated by patriotism and adventure, eager to test their mettle and save the world. The first contingent arrived in France just as the German Army trained "Big Bertha" on Paris, bombarding the frightened city as the new women of the U.S. Army struggled through unlit streets to find their billets. A handful followed General Pershing to the gates of Verdun and the battlefields of Meuse-Argonne. When the switchboard operators sailed home a year later, the Army dismissed them without veterans' benefits or victory medals. The women commenced a sixty-year fight that a handful of survivors carried to triumph in 1979. This book shows how technological developments encouraged an unusual band to volunteer for military service at the precise moment that feminists back home championed a federal suffrage amendment. The same desire to participate fully in the life of their country animated both groups, and both struggled after 1920 to reap the rewards of victory. Their experiences illuminate ways in which sex-role change was embraced and resisted throughout the twentieth century, and the ways that men and women struggled together for gender justice."--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: America's last citizens; title: Neutrality defeated, and the telephone in war and peace; title: Looking for soldiers and finding women; title: We're going over; title: Pack your kit; title: Wilson adopts suffrage and the Signal Corps embarks; title: Americans find their way, over there; title: Better late than never on the Marne; title: Wilson fights for a mandate at home; title: Together in the crisis of Meuse-Argonne; title: Peace without victory medal; title: Soldiering forward in the twentieth century.