for operational calls between command outposts and the front lines. (4) During this time, in the United States, telephone operating was largely sex-segregated. Hired for their speed in connecting calls, women filled 85 percent of the telephone operating positions in the United States. It took the average female operator 10 seconds to make a connection. (5) On November 8, 1917, General Pershing cabled the War Department and wrote, On account of the great difficulty of obtaining properly qualified men, request organization and dispatch to France a force of Woman telephone operators all speaking French and English equally well. . To begin, General Pershing requested 100 women under the command of a commissioned captain, writing that All should have allowances of Army nurses and should be uniformed. . (6) The War Department sent press releases to newspapers across the United States to recruit women willing to serve for the duration of the war and face the hazards of submarine warfare and aerial bombardment. These articles emphasized that patriotic women would be full-fledged soldier[s] under the articles of war and would do as much to help win the war as the men in khaki who go over the top. . All women would take the Army oath. (7) More than 7,600 women volunteered for the 100 positions described in paragraph (5) and the first recruits took the Army oath on January 15, 1918. (8) Like nurses and doctors at the time, female Signal Corps members had relative rather than traditional ranks and were ranked as Operator, Supervisor, or Chief Operator. When promoted, the women were required to swear the Army oath again. (9) Telephone operators were the first women to serve as soldiers in non-medical classifications and the job of the operators was to help win the war, not to mitigate the harms of the war. In popular parlance, they were known as the Hello Girls . (10) Signal Corps Operators wore Army uniforms and Army insignia always, as well as standard-issue identity disks in case of death, and were subject to court