ABSTRACT
The story of the diffusion and availability of the telephone in the US is not quite so simple. As Claude S.Fischer (1984) explains, the diffusion of telephones did not follow a steady, chronological, upward trend. Forty-two per cent of all households had telephones by 1929, but in 1940, only 32 per cent had telephones (4). The shrinkage of the number of telephones in service during the Depression led Bell Telephone to expand its marketing approaches to include encouraging the social use of the telephone, a use the exchanges had seemed to frown on until then. Indeed, women’s ‘gossip’ on local lines when a flat local area rate was charged added little to telephone company coffers, suggesting one reason women’s telephone talk was ridiculed or discouraged. Two non-Bell companies in Indiana and Oregon went so far as to take their cases to the public service commissions in their states to ask for extra service charges for each call. Women gossiping at length were detrimental to their business, they claimed. When the Indiana Public Service Commission held its hearing, according to one account, ‘the whole countryside turned out. Many telephone subscribers testified that they had no objection to the women talking at any length they wished, so the commission ruled it could do nothing.’ The Oregon commission ruled similarly, though it denounced gossiping (MacMeal 1934, 224). Bell Telephone, meanwhile, began placing greater emphasis on the social uses of the telephone after the Depression (Fischer 1984, 9), presumably in order to increase installations.
