Hello Girls finally win recognition as America’s first women soldiers

The Senate unanimously passed legislation in 2024 to award the Hello Girls a Congressional Gold Medal, a long-delayed honor for the Army Signal Corps operators who kept American and French forces connected on the front lines in World War I.

In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France as telephone operators. About 200 ultimately served in operating units at First, Second and Third Army Headquarters, where the work demanded fluency in English and French and experience at the telephone switchboard. Their job was not ceremonial. The women connected important calls, translated information and helped command and control operations as the war moved across France.

The Army and later historical accounts have described the Hello Girls as America’s first women soldiers and the first women to actively support combat operations on a regular basis. One of them, Grace Banker, received the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal on May 22, 1919, a rare recognition for a service that the government still would not fully acknowledge for decades.

That gap lasted far longer than the war itself. For the next 60 years, the women and their supporters petitioned Congress more than 50 times for recognition. Merle Egan of Montana led much of that effort, pressing lawmakers to treat the operators as veterans rather than as civilian contractors who had simply worked overseas. The breakthrough finally came in 1977, when the Hello Girls won veteran recognition, but only 33 were still alive to see it.

Their delayed recognition remains a live issue because the women’s service has become a test case for how official history records women’s military labor. The Hello Girls were deployed into a combat zone, worked in operating units tied to the Army’s headquarters and handled communications central to battlefield coordination. Yet their place in the military record was contested for generations.

Interest in their story has kept returning to Washington. In 2018, Sens. Jon Tester and Dean Heller introduced the bipartisan Hello Girls Congressional Gold Medal Act. In 2024, the Senate again moved unanimously to honor them, pushing one of the war’s most essential but long-overlooked groups closer to the recognition their service had earned more than a century ago.