The Hello Girls of France
A Novel of the First Female Soldiers

About this book:

In April 1917, eighteen-year-old Margery Vance reads a single line in a trade journal that changes everything: *Women wanted for overseas duty.* Not as nurses or volunteers, but as bilingual switchboard operators for the U.S. Army Signal Corps—wearing uniforms, subject to military discipline, and headed straight for the front lines in France. With her mother’s Bordeaux French and two years handling Manhattan’s busiest exchange, Margery knows she’s exactly who General Pershing needs. Her father sees a death sentence; her mother sees the echo of Prussian shells she survived as a girl. Margery sees the only chance to matter.

What follows is a journey from the marble halls of Broad Street recruiting offices to the mud-slicked switchboards of the Argonne, where a single crossed wire can doom a regiment. Margery and her fellow "Hello Girls" battle not just static and shellfire, but the Army’s own refusal to recognize them as soldiers—denying them veterans’ benefits, medals, even the right to call themselves veterans. Through meticulous historical detail and pulse-pounding prose, *The Hello Girls of France* brings to vivid life the forgotten women who connected the calls that won the war, then spent sixty years fighting their own country for the recognition they’d already earned under fire.

For readers of *The Alice Network* and *The Women of the Copper Country*, this is the novel that finally gives voice to the women who held the lines when the world went silent—and refused to hang up until history listened.