So many women had this very high-pitched and constricted, and almost childlike "shrill" voice.
While men had vowels that were so wide-open laterally, but lacking in upper overtones (the opposite of nasality).
And I don't think you can ascribe any of it to the recording technology -- even if you record someone today and cut off higher/lower frequencies, they don't sound anything like that.
Hearing Australian from then is similar, though sounds much like UK RP, with a more gentle hint of "Strine" than you'd expect today.
Yet anyone who's been around long enough will have probably dropped pitch over the years. Listen to any wartime or pre war famous women speaking and hear them twenty or thirty years later, e.g. the Queen, Vera Lynn, not only has the stuck up constricted accent gone, but the pitch has dropped markedly too.
The accents and vocal qualities didn't really start to homogenize across the country until the 1920s when radio became widely commercialized, and likely didn't become common until the kids from that generation were adults.