In The Hello Girls, Elizabeth Cobbs vividly recounts the experiences of women operators in the Signal Corps serving with the American Expeditionary Force in France during the First World War. Cobbs has mined memoirs, diaries, correspondence, application letters, selection committee interview notes, personnel files, and other rich archival materials with care and to great effect, documenting women's experiences from application to training to service in France and demobilization. Cobbs links the operators’ service with the fight to pass the Nineteenth Amendment placing women's voting rights in the federal constitution, arguing that the story of female operators in the World War One Signal Corps “completes the picture of how women around the globe not only demanded but also earned the vote” (6). A final chapter and epilogue address the postwar consequences of Signal Corps operators’ ambiguous place in the military, and the decades-long fight for recognition of their military service that culminated in 1977 legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter recognizing their official military and veteran status.

In the First World War, “telephones solved ancient problems of communication in battle” (41). The telephone industry had burgeoned in the nation's cities and in some rural areas before the war, and most operators were women. As the United States entered the conflict, “poor staffing tormented army communications,” as did inexperienced male soldiers who took on the job (68). Therefore, the military had to turn to women to make full and immediate use of this vital technology. Cobbs notes an “unprecedented” collaboration between the corporate telecommunications industry and “the war making Signal Corps,” as telephones became weapons of war and “turn[ed] women into soldiers” (40–41). Many male leaders in the war department and army resisted, but ultimately General John Pershing's support, pragmatism, and the need for bilingual operators won out as “reports emphasized the stakes that dwarfed any inconveniences.” The entire “military machine would collapse” without translingual communication (71).

In cantonments in the United States, Signal Corps operators were civilian workers for the war effort. The 223 women who served with the American Expeditionary Force in Europe wore uniforms and were subject to military discipline but had only a partial and ambiguous status within the military structure, for the duration of the war only. Cobbs details the convoluted and contradictory excuses that male administrators gave for this situation, which led to a temporary status with little in the way of veteran safety-net support or real recognition after the conflict.

Cobbs frames the subsequent narrative of the operators’ AEF experience with a strategic balance among the voices and experiences of Signal Corps operators such as Merle Egan, Grace Banker, and Louise LeBreton, and the perspectives of administrators and policy makers such as Pershing, Secretary of War Newton Baker, and female Signal Corps supervisor Ernest Wessen. With varied reasons for volunteering and a range of skills and experience, women responded to the call for wartime service. Cobbs notes the additional work in which applicants of Jewish or German heritage or those with “foreign sounding names” had to engage to prove loyalty and “100 percent Americanism” in order to be accepted (94). Military leaders worried about bathrooms, sexuality, and sexual intimacy as they crafted the ambiguous place for women operators in the army. Finalists trained and passed language and medical examinations in six regional centers: New York City; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; Lowell, Massachusetts; Chicago; and San Francisco (96). Twenty-five percent of recruits came from the West Coast (100).

Signal Corps operators arrived in France in May 1918 and followed the Military Telephone Regulations handbook, which was based on corporate training in the telephone industry and the strenuous imperatives of Taylorism's scientific management. The army transferred the hierarchies of civilian employment in the telephone industry to the women's Signal Corps workplace by linking positions of “operator, supervising operator, and chief operator” to their army titles (106). As women seeking a place in the army hierarchy in the face of skepticism, Signal Corps operators had to exceed expectations in order to gain some acceptance by officers. They did this by tripling the rate of army telephone service in France in 1918 (160). They also worked to establish rapport with enlisted men through humor, compassion, and authenticity. The army built a public/private partnership for operators by housing them together and inviting the staff of the Young Women's Christian Association to provide support and “supervision” through “Signal Corps Houses” (167). Cobbs’ chapter “Together in the Crisis of Meuse-Argonne” is a particularly strong presentation of U.S. Army's goals and actions in the bloody final battle of the conflict, the consequential part operators had in the victory, and the dangers they faced in common with other soldiers. They carried gas masks and pistols, worked twelve-hour shifts, and lived in flimsy barracks “next to a bomb shelter that contained an underground switchboard for emergencies” (229). Operators proved themselves to be soldiers and demonstrated that their work was essential for the war effort (238). The wartime accomplishments of women were vital in the final push for the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But, as the final chapters demonstrate, it took a variety of civilian, legal, and military supporters and a post-Second World War women's movement for First World War operators to gain military and veteran status in 1977.

Histories that bridge popular and scholarly audiences as this one does are important and needed. Such bridges can also create challenges. Let me identify three here. Cobbs discusses Woodrow Wilson's journey to acceptance of woman suffrage as a political reality, and the path to the Nineteenth Amendment with the national debate and congressional wrangling over nativist and racial fears, states’ rights, and sexist arguments against women's civic empowerment in chronological chapters interspersed with the Signal Corps narrative. Much of this is information covered in existing secondary literature on suffrage and women's wartime service and does not relate directly to the operators’ own activities. Cobbs could still make her point that women's wartime service helped claims for votes for women by streamlining the suffrage narrative and not diverting from the important narrative of the Signal Corps operators. The author also had the opportunity to engage more completely with comparative frameworks in the secondary sources on women's World War I military and auxiliary service, their ambiguous status, and women's postwar roles. And finally, an analysis of the consequential female telephone operator unions and strikes of 1917 and 1919 on the home front, and the nationalization and re-privatization of the telephone industry over the course of the war and its aftermath, would provide rich analytical possibilities linking telephone operators’ wartime service in France with the broader problems and successes of women in this vital industry, and women's political and economic citizenship in the war's aftermath.

Rich in detail, Cobbs's Hello Girls strengthens the understanding of women, war, and citizenship for both popular and academic audiences. By making the experiences of First World War Signal Corps operators visible, Cobbs does much to rectify their historic erasure in the long history of activism for equality.