| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980. By Venus Green. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xvi, 370 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8223-2554-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8223-2573-X.)

In Race on the Line, Venus Green chronicles the development of the United States telephone system and its workers. Green has mined the archives of AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) as well as government and union records to describe the ways in which technological changes shaped and reinforced the Bell system's attempts to employ a compliant work force and simultaneously gain support from the American public. In order to achieve both of these objectives, the Bell system companies also manipulated both race and gender. 1

Green begins by tracing the ways in which early technological changes created a type of technical control over the early telephone operator work force. Once the industry shifted away from "boy" operators in order to win more customers, Green argues, the identity of the "white lady" operator was created. Green's early chapters detail the ways in which this identity brought together the interests both of the companies for a compliant work force and of a particular group of native-born white women for high-status employment. Her discussion of how these interests reinforced each other provides a model of how we can understand the implications of race for members of the white race. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, Green argues, African American women's exclusion from the ranks of telephone operators served to keep workers from identifying technological change as their enemy. . . .

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