The 'Hello Girls' helped win WWI—why was their service overlooked?

Ethel Elkins was one roughly 25,000 American women who volunteered in Europe during the First World War. But unlike most who served with the International Red Cross and other aid organizations, Elkins was one of the first female soldiers officially deployed to a combat zone—as a uniformed member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

An eager nation took note: “How many girls do you know with ‘the disposition of angels’ who can add thereto a strong constitution, soldierly fortitude, a low, musical voice, and ability to speak French just as fluently as English?” trilled a reporter in a 1918 Philadelphia newspaper article about Elkins. She was no girl, but her voice did matter: Her unit would serve as front-line telephone operators on the battlefields of France, translating, encoding, and deciphering critical messages between French and U.S. forces.

Known informally as the “Hello Girls,” the 223 women of the Woman’s Telephone Unit of the American Signal Corps were known for their efficacy, patience, and fearlessness on the battlefront. But despite their historic service and the significant publicity they elicited at the beginning of their military service, Elkins and her counterparts would later be denied veteran status and military benefits, and their efforts almost completely forgotten.

No longer: More than a century later, a bipartisan group of legislators is pushing for Congress to memorialize the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit’s service with the nation’s highest civilian honor: the Congressional Gold Medal.

A nation calls its women

When the U.S. first entered the war in 1917, it had tried relying on French telephone operators to place calls to and from the front, but issues with English proficiency and cultural differences prompted American officials to turn to their own servicemen to do the job. That failed, too: The male soldiers’ lack of language proficiency and experience with switchboards immediately became clear. The Army needed experienced operators, and most American telephone operators at the time were women. So that same year, General John Pershing put out a call for women interested in serving their country at the front.

Soon, the Army gathered a group of mostly bilingual operators, culled from single applicants who could passed psychological tests and Secret Service background checks. Subject to regular Army discipline, the women, who were an average age of 26, underwent military training including drills and lessons on military history and terminology. The first group of 33 telephone operators, wearing U.S. Army uniforms of navy blue wool, reported to the front in France in March 1918.

On the front lines

The presence of American women on European battlefields made a splash from the start, and they immediately became known as the “Hello Girls,” a term with unknown origins that emerged with the growing popularity of the telephone in the early 20th century. They operated at five times the speed of their male counterparts, says Lora Vogt, Vice President of Education and Interpretation at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, and maintained and provided the communications essential to Allied victory.

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The job was dangerous, historian Jill Frahm writes: The women often worked within range of German artillery, performing everything from transmitting coded messages to directing supplies to connecting commanding officers with men in the trenches, even working to get communications working when the fighting damaged wires. “The [Army Expeditionary Forces] telephone operators were a trusted part of the military machine,” writes Frahm, “something no group of women had ever been before.”

That doesn’t mean their service was easy—or that they were sheltered from casual misogyny on the front. As historian Elizabeth Cobbs documents in her book The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, many women felt their efforts were hampered because they were stationed too far from the front, while others dealt with obvious opposition to their presence in the field from many commanding officers. In 1918, the female soldiers formally protested the nickname “Hello Girls,” resulting in a War Department directive to respectfully call them the Woman’s Telephone Unit of the American Signal Corps instead.

Forgotten firsts

Though the hundreds of American female telephone operators served in France through 1920, just one of them was decorated by the Signal Corps. As Cobbs notes, most even didn’t realize the U.S. government didn’t see them as soldiers until they attempted to apply for the same types of benefits offered to male military members and veterans, including combat bonuses, pensions, and military funerals. They weren’t even reimbursed for their uniforms, which the Army had made them purchase with their own money.  

Only in 1977, after a lawsuit and legislation, the women granted veteran status—over the objections of the Army, the Veterans’ Administration, and even the American Legion.

Today, supporters of the Hello Girls say that the efforts of 1977 didn’t go far enough. In their proposed legislation, re-introduced in May 2024, the bipartisan group from the House and Senate call for the women to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Endorsed by the American Historical Society, the American Legion, and others, the law, if passed, would officially recognize the women’s service during what co-sponsor Representative Emanuel Cleaver, II calls “a time of grave uncertainty.”

The move may be seen as too little, too late by some, but Vogt says it would highlight the importance of the story not just within classrooms or in history books, but in the national conversation. These American women “were crucial in the Allied victory of World War I,” she says. “To receive this posthumous honor will help recognize the not equal—but superior—work the women within the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit contributed to the war effort.”