In the library of the OTE Group Telecommunications Museum we find a small literary book, a novel entitled “Mathilde Serrao. Women’s Telegraph Department. Published by Homer, Athens 1929”. It is a Greek translation of the work of the Italian writer Matilde Serao (1856-1927). Serao was of Greek descent on her mother’s side, was born in Patras, in the same house where Kostis Palamas would be born three years later, was the first woman newspaper director in Italy and was nominated six times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Il romanzo di una fanciulla
In her youth, in 1874-77, she had worked in Naples as a telegraph operator. She recorded her experiences in the novel Il romanzo di una fanciulla (A Girl’s Novel), which was republished in 1895 under the title State Telegraph Office. A novel for women.
A novel for women
Telegraphers “…none of them looked up to look out of the window”.
Until the end of the 19th century in almost all European countries, with the exception of Greece, women worked as telegraph operators. They often demanded and sometimes achieved equal pay with men and hierarchical advancement.
Serao’s book is a testimony to the difficulties women faced in this demanding workplace: “These young women would begin their work without a laugh, mechanically busy in their preparations, bent over their tools: one would unscrew the rosette that prints the signs, another would change her ribbon, another would apply ink, another would test the elasticity of the transmitter. Then, in the quiet of the morning, the ticking of the machines began (…). The winter sun bathed the room. But no one looked up to look out of the window.”
Women’s movement
The telegraph industry is male-dominated and the female telegraphers are terrified of the strict manager. In an outburst of indignation one female telegraph operator exclaims: “To hell with Galvanis, Volta, the Lugdunian lounge, Daniel’s column, copper sulphate and the emancipation of women”. The telegraphist anathematizes the inventors of electricity, inventions (Leiden’s flask, Daniel Rumkorf’s induction coil) and the women’s movement, which at that time was taking its first steps.
Telegraphy and courtship
But there is no lack of flirtation among the clerks. The young women use the telegraph irregularly to have erotic conversations with male colleagues whom they have never seen, always in secret so as not to be noticed by their old-maid supervisor: “Indeed, the holidays [it was Christmas] would be said to have been deliberately set aside for the forbidden conversations. The employees had nothing to do in their offices and were distressed. So the appetite for chatting came alone (…). All this was done in secret. But you could see the pleasure painted on the guilty woman’s face’.
Paper, ink, pens, ribbons & especially Solidarity
The novel is not of the telegraphic romance genre that flourished in America in the 19th century. Nor is it in the genre of the ethnographic narrative that denounces social conditions. Serao brings out the contradictions and inner psychological processes of the heroines. Above all, she emphasizes the solidarity between the telegraph operators: “That day all the clerks (…) helped each other with love, giving each other paper, pens and ink. The less skilful ones registered, wrote the time on the telegrams, changed the words, changed the cords, collected the telegrams that had been sent. There were no more dislikes, skills, nothing. They helped each other like sisters and had one desire: how to serve the others.”
