Corsets with Copper Wire

The male telegraphers whose voices originally predominated in disembodied speech forums sometimes suggested that women should be excluded from virtual speech forums, and often worried that women should interact in the virtual world in traditionally gendered ways. Such nineteenth-century women telegraphers as Ella Thayer and Lida Churchill nevertheless voluminously produced literature that provided a format for their own technologically enabled literary utopias of new gender forms in the telegraphic virtual realm. Telegraphy seems to have appealed to women writers exactly because it provided a freedom that authors otherwise achieved primarily through the creation of literature. The freedom women experienced virtually emboldened the inscription of newly gendered models for both virtual and physical-world selfhood through the creation of women telegraphers’ literature.