Emma Mills Nutt (above) became the world’s first female telephone operator in 
operator in history when she began working for the Edwin Holmes Telephone
Dispatch Company in Boston, Mass. She was paid a salary of $10 a month 
for a 54 hour work week. The first operators for the company were teenage 
teenage boys who did not work well with the customers. Emma reportedly 
could remember every number in the directory of New England Telephone
Company. Within seven years, all telephone operators in Boston were  
women. The trend soon went nationwide. 
   

Operators at AT&T in Connecticut around the 1890s