Today is National Landline Telephone Day.
Landline phones aren’t as common as they used to be, but that’s just one of the many changes we’ve seen around phones since they started to become common in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Here’s another one of those changes: early on, being a little too well understood on the phone was considered kind of girly.
Now, of course, any big new technology ends up having an effect on the broader culture.
Think of how as television became more and more popular, politicians changed the way they spoke, dressed and acted so they would look better on camera.
The telephone had a similar effect, because our first impression of a person was increasingly based on the sound of their voice.
And the voices that were easiest to understand on those early phones were often women’s voices.
There are a couple of reasons why.
Women were often given voice instruction in school back then, and those practiced voices were more likely to break through the limited sound quality of early phones.
This was also a time when regional accents were very strong, and if you weren’t used to hearing how people in another part of the country talked, those voices would be harder to follow on the phone than those of ladies with the more deliberate speaking style from voice lessons.
But this didn’t sit well with a lot of people of the time.
Their attitude was, this is a man’s world, and here we have an exciting new technology that works better with women?!?
Which means that to use this technology successfully, men have to talk more like women, and how can we have that?!?
There are romance novels in this period where you have male characters who are just bewildered by phones.
They either mumble incoherently into their devices, or they resort to talking in high-pitched feminine voices or, in one story, a guy just goes all-out bonkers and starts climbing telephone poles because he can’t figure out how to do calls.
A research paper found that one solution to this problem back then was… spending more time and effort on policing women’s voices and criticizing the ones that didn’t sound right on the telephone.
Which I’m sure fixed everything for everybody.
If you were looking forward to running in this year’s Pyongyang Marathon, I’m sorry to tell you that this year’s race has been called off.
Travel company and race-cosponsor Koryo Tours says it received a statement from the North Korean athletics association that it had canceled the marathon “due to some reasons.”
Hopefully “some reasons” doesn’t mean, like, ominous reasons.
When the Telephone Was Considered Feminine (JSTOR Daily)
N Korea cancels Pyongyang Marathon for ‘some reasons’ (BBC)
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Image by Judge Magazine via Wikicommons
