Señorita Telefonista

Susie S. Porter is a presidential societal impact scholar and distinguished professor in the humanities at the University of Utah. She has been named as a corresponding international member of the Mexican Academy of History. Porter is the author of Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879–1931 and From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950 (Nebraska, 2018).

"Susie Porter deftly takes us from the initial days of the telephone operators in Mexico, who were described as señoritas, through their early organizing to become compañeras. Señorita Telefonista is the story of the awakening of labor consciousness among an important subsection of women workers who were incredibly savvy in getting their message out. The book reveals that the telefonistas are unsung heroines in the founding of Mexico's most important unions. Illuminating, well written, and a good read."—Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, author of Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856"By unveiling the history of telephone operators, this compelling book illuminates how two major changes of the twentieth century—the surge of the middle class and the expansion of women's role in society—intertwined, shaping Mexico's labor struggles and gender inequality. Telephone operators' shifting identities between middle-class señoritas and working-class compañeras unveil the many forms of resistance women have faced and continue to endure to obtain equitable working and living conditions in Mexico and elsewhere."—Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato Freer, professor of history at the El Colegio de México "Señorita Telefonista documents working women's struggles for respectability and rights in early twentieth-century Mexico. Focusing on telefonistas' recurring complaints of sexual harassment and company firings of pregnant workers, Susie Porter centers the long history of sexual harassment in Mexican labor history. Porter has done yeoman's work to bring this history to light, and Señorita Telefonista will help us move the needle on the gendered history of labor toward women's lived experience of both sexual abuse and their struggle against it."—Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, author of Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroductionChapter 1. Señorita telefonista, 1907-1911Chapter 2. Of señoritas and compañeras, 1912-1916Chapter 3. Centering working mothers: federal policy reform and anarchist visions in the working-class press, 1915-1921Chapter 4. Worker and Employee Union, Ericsson Telephone Company, S.A, 1920-1921Chapter 5. Gender politics at work and in the press, 1921-1925Chapter 6. Fired, 1927-1928Chapter 7. Gains, 1928-1932ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex