Every year on May 17 World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is observed. The day helps raise awareness about the possibilities that the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), including the Internet, can bring to societies and economies and how these can bridge the digital divide, a defining feature of the 21st century.
The body pioneering this celebration is the International Telecommunication. The aim is to foster the idea that government and private agencies can and should do more to help people take advantage of technologies to improve their lives.
Telecommunication began majorly from the telephone and spread its importance. It still remains a means of communication despite the advent of internet.
And so on this day, we are here with an ultimate award-winning Netflix series that will take you back to the early 20th century when telecommunication was just beginning to seep into our daily lives and how it changed the whole world.
We are referring to Cable Girls, a Spanish period drama streaming television series that ran from April 2017 and concluded in July 2020. It is the first Spanish original produced by Netflix, made in collaboration with Bambú Producciones.
About Netflix Cable Girls
The plot begins in the year 1928 when a modern telecommunications company begins to operate in Madrid. The series tells of how the lives of four young women change after they start working as cable girls or telephone operators for this company, which offers them decent pay and some independence.
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Each of these women has a different reason for joining the company. Alba Romero, who goes by the name Lidia Aguilar to conceal her identity, seeks a job at the telecommunications company to complete a secret mission. Ángeles Vidal is a young mother who works to help provide for her family and is the most experienced switchboard operator. On the other hand, Carlota Senillosa wants a job at the telecommunications company to escape her controlling father and her rigid high society life, and Marga Suarez joins the company to start a new chapter of her life. The four women begin to form a close friendship, and together they navigate their sentimental lives and work.
The show reveals the hardships that working women faced in 1920s Spain and especially the severe restrictions on the rights of Spanish women in a patriarchal society.
Cable Girls offers the aesthetic of a period piece while keeping its feet planted firmly in the daily challenges women face today. There is an all-too-familiar feeling of helplessness, of trying to move beyond traditional expectations of marriage, children, and home. The characters speak for the struggle for independence outside of those traditional and domestic expectations. However, it is clear the mounting pressures of expectations cross both cultural and liminal spaces, manifesting themselves into new pressures that face women of today. Despite its historical backdrop, Cable Girls asks the age-old question: can women have it all?
The Netflix series is filmed in Spain’s capital, Madrid, in various locations across the city with a makeover to transport viewers back to the 1920s.
Now all you got to do is open your Netflix and click on Cable Girls and travel to the bygone days where it will take you.