"The Gilt-Edged Class": American and Canadian Telegraphers' Bodies and Work

This dissertation examines the lives and work of American and Canadian telegraph operators from 1870 to 1929. While historians have studied the telegraph as a technology and a business, few have integrated telegraphy with histories of class, gender, or the human body. Integrating the bodily turn means recognizing the physicality of telegraph work. This dissertation centres the bodies of telegraph operators and seeks to contextualize those bodies within the larger technological and corporate systems in which they were embedded. Operators’ class identities have often been ambiguous or misunderstood. I argue that telegraph work was real, physical work, in a way that has too often been elided, and that it is important to see operators as part of the working class. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which human bodies and human labour can be erased within large technological networks. I explore the historical significance of that erasure and its relevance for understanding the precarity of labour in high-tech industries today.