From the article:

"The first telephones were hard enough to use without the added harassment of the teenage boys who worked as the earliest switchboard operators — and who were, per PBS, notoriously rude.

It was Alexander Graham Bell himself who came up with a solution: replacing the abrupt male operators with young women who were expected to be innately polite. He hired a woman named Emma Nutt away from her job at a telegraph office, and on this day, Sept. 1, in 1878, she became the world’s first female telephone operator."