"But, as Michèle Martin documents in her paper “The Rulers of the Wires”, middle-class women’s “‘delinquent’ telephone activities” took the Telegram Men by surprise. This delinquency included not just social telephone calls in the afternoon, but planned and impromptu meet-ups on party lines where isolated women could dial in and get an update from their community.
This was damned at the time by the Telegram Men as futile and frivolous, but that didn’t stop it from happening."
https://medium.com/careful-industries/delinquent-telephone-activity-f75f815d6e9a
