1
Jamming a Foot in the Door
The “go-go years” had finally come to Wall Street. In 1960, a good day on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange meant 4 million shares traded, but by 1967 it would be closer to 10 million. “Glamour stocks” with futuristic names (think Xerox!) were snapped up by investors. The “Nifty Fifty” stocks (much like today’s FAANG—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) included the technology innovators of the day: Polaroid, Texas Instruments, Telex, Kodak. “Gunslingers”—brash, young men helming aggressive new investment funds—were the new celebrities. In 1967, the brokerage firm Harris, Upham, Inc. claimed in its newsletter that markets were moving in the same direction as hemlines. They included an amateurish pencil graph of women’s skirt lengths over time alongside stock-market gains: “From the days of street-sweeping skirts in 1897 to the days of Twiggy in 1967 the market is up 2100% in value,” Harris, Upham declared. But the women wearing the Twiggy miniskirt, or any length of skirt for that matter, were not welcome on Wall Street. This half square mile of lower Manhattan was a world of men: some gathering for drinks at the private club India House, while others stopped to have their shoes shined, and still others rolled carts through the streets full of stock certificates—beautifully ornate artworks—to basement depositories for safekeeping.
When Alice Jarcho left home, dropping out of Queens College to start afresh in Manhattan, she did not intend to go to Wall Street. Neither she, nor anyone else for that matter, would have imagined she would become the first woman to fully trade on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Nineteen-year-old Alice just needed to pay her rent. She took a job as a receptionist at Hirsch & Company—one of the many small brokerage firms that proliferated on Wall Street in those days—coming home after work to an apartment on a sketchy, underpopulated block near the recently defunct Jacob Ruppert Brewery in Yorkville. The one-bedroom apartment she shared with a nursing student cost $157.60 per month and was so small that if you opened the Murphy bed, you had to climb over it to get to the bathroom. Even so, Alice’s salary at Hirsch & Company could not cover her bills, and as red-inked overdue notices stacked up, she found a better paying job elsewhere.
Her only goal was liberation. Growing up in a row house in Forest Hills, Queens, Alice had a mother who was a card-carrying Communist (until Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes in 1956). She did not play canasta or visit the beauty parlor like the other mothers. Instead, she worked at the American Labor Party offices day and night, and if there was free time, she’d either be on a picket line or in front of the Macy’s department store, with a seven-year-old Alice in tow, handing out copies of the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. The Forest Hills house, littered with books, the site of political meetings in the basement, was not a safe zone; the FBI “came often.”
Alice had already bid goodbye to Wall Street when she bumped into Jane Larkin while standing in line for movie tickets for an Ingmar Bergman film. The daughter of a Manhattan detective, Larkin was a rarity on Wall Street, an exception that proved the rule: a successful woman in finance, a research analyst and partner at Hirsch & Company, the brokerage firm Alice had left for a better paycheck. Later, when the women’s movement kicked into high gear, Larkin would insist, “A feminist I am not.” In that sense, she was very much a woman of her time. Larkin pulled Alice aside and asked her to return to Hirsch & Company: they were opening a new branch office, and would she consider coming to work there as a secretary? Alice agreed as long as this time she’d be paid enough to cover her bills.
The branch was, as Larkin had promised, brand-new, with glassed-in offices and a wide-open room in the center where the so-called moneymakers, the big producers, sat. The ticker board ran across one wall, but if you thought you’d missed something, you could still get up and walk over to the old ticker-tape machine to check the seemingly infinite strip of narrow white paper with printed stock symbols and prices that the machine spewed out all day. If a stock suddenly showed movement, up or down, someone in the room would shout it out.
Hirsch & Company was on the retail side of the business, meaning their clients were individual investors rather than institutions, and a large part of a broker’s job was to cold-call customers. For the brokers doing the cold-calling, however, these were easy times; the economy was booming, and trade commissions were fixed, nonnegotiable, so that investors paid brokers per trade, based on the volume of stock bought or sold. As a broker, you didn’t have to hustle; you didn’t even have to know the intricate ins and outs of the market, really, you just had to churn out trades, encouraging your clients to buy and sell. The hustle would come later, as would the serious money.
Alice had just about settled in at her new job when the manager walked in one morning, opened his desk drawer, and pulled out a gun. Everyone could see right through into his glassed office as he stood there, waving the gun about. People shouted at him to stop, pleading with him to put it down. When the police arrived, and then the ambulance, he was taken away in a stretcher under police custody. That same day, Alice Jarcho, the secretary, became Alice Jarcho, the de facto office manager. The number-two guy, the next in line, was a successful money producer, sitting prominently in the very center of the room, and he was not about to compromise his profits to manage the office. Instead, Alice was put in charge of office operations: hiring teletype workers, opening client accounts, and fixing stock errors (when buys and sells were hurriedly written out on pieces of paper amidst the rush of the New York Stock Exchange floor, sometimes the two tickets did not match).
But some of what she was doing—namely, opening client accounts, talking to customers—was illegal. Only a Registered Representative, otherwise known as a broker, someone who had passed the necessary exams, could legally do these things. The firm was liable, but all that had to be done was for her to take the licensing exam (as of 1974, it would be known as the Series 7) and everything would be aboveboard. She approached the firm’s partners, asking for them to sponsor her, but they refused to pay the $300 exam fee: because she was a woman. The very firm that had made Jane Larkin a partner refused to invest $300 in Alice Jarcho to operate within the rules.
But the only reason slim, auburn-haired Jane Larkin was made a partner without ruffling feathers was because she was a research analyst, not a stockbroker. Typing and answering phones were reserved for women, as in all industries. Research, which took place behind the scenes and had the power to influence but not the power to execute trades, could tolerate a few women. Selling and trading, where profit was generated, was for men. That was the rule that was sacrosanct.
Alice had been brought up questioning capitalism, but that was not what drove her. What drove her was something else entirely: with a mother always “overthrowing the government,” Alice had inherited very little fear of authority. And she was not about to stick around at Hirsch & Company if this is what they thought of her, of women, in 1969. She left and took a job at Oppenheimer, in the institutional investing division, working for an arbitrageur. Oppenheimer was a successful firm that focused on institutional trading, trading not for individuals but for large funds—insurance companies, retirement plans, unions—and unlike at Hirsch & Company, they agreed to get Alice registered.
Hired as a clerk on the trading desk, she was now in the bull pen, alongside the men. There was no training. Every day she asked what arbitrage was, and every day her boss would “slam on the desk” when she said she didn’t understand (later she would explain it as “the simultaneous purchase and sale of equivalent securities which, due to market variations, are not selling at equivalent value”). One day it suddenly clicked.
Her job included doing her boss’s paperwork, putting in orders, checking for errors, finding research for an analysis, following through with the orders on the trading floor. As trading volumes increased, the job of clerk was becoming ever more vital. Before computers, every trade was ultimately an exercise in trust between buyers and sellers, and the person to ensure it went smoothly was the clerk. Data on prices and shares traded needed to be recorded accurately, then reconciled before a trade was settled to avoid incorrect transfers of shares and cash. It was painstaking work that called for diligence, while offering zero glory but inevitable blame when things went wrong. Unsurprisingly, it was a way for women to get a foot in the door.
Alice’s boss was extraordinarily smart but “a maniac,” “a screamer.” Once, when she missed something, he picked up the telephone, a clunky, corded, plastic-and-metal contraption that weighed close to five pounds, and lobbed it at her, narrowly missing her head. She stood there, blinking, trying to process it. Her first thought was that he was the one who looked like a complete idiot; her second was that as a top producer for Oppenheimer, he would face no consequences. She then turned on her heel and made a beeline for the bathroom, where another woman tried to comfort her, but once she was over the shock, Alice found it so absurd as to be funny.
Besides her boss, there was another clerk on the trading desk with Alice, although much higher up on the ladder, who “bragged about the size of his member all the time.” He would draw pictures of it for her to admire. Just as Alice appraised the head arbitrageur with a cold eye and thought how absurd it was for a grown man to have public temper tantrums, she would look at this other man, married with two small daughters—photographs of his wife and girls prominently displayed on his desk—and wonder what could possibly be going on inside his head.
Then one day it came to her: these men were having fun yanking her chain. She was catnip to them! Slim, pretty, five-foot-two, she was “a new toy, a shiny new object.” But what they did not know is that she had spent a childhood fending off two brothers who had turned torturing their little sister into a sport—choking her with a curtain rod, mugging her on Halloween. She knew how to disassociate herself from the perpetrator. Like so many women who would come to Wall Street in the early days via the circuitous route, Alice was someone whom life had already taught how to navigate dysfunction. One could even say that she thrived on dysfunction, was its connoisseur. She was now in the perfect place—Wall Street—to hone this particular skill set.
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AND THEN THERE WAS THE MORE DIRECT ROUTE TO WALL STREET: business school, B-school. Harvard Business School was the most prestigious, and in the late summer of 1963, a few years before Alice found herself on Wall Street, reporters descended on Cambridge, Massachusetts, because America’s best B-school was about to let them in. The women.
Eight women had been officially admitted into the two-year MBA program. Elaine Luthy, a twenty-year-old English major at Stanford, opened up a telegram to find that she had been designated “the first woman” at HBS. The Boston Herald dubbed her the “Blond Bomb.” Official Harvard photographs of her first day show her hair in a sideswept bouffant, wearing a black turtleneck, a tweed pencil skirt, and a matching jacket. Altogether very Jackie Kennedy.
Elaine Luthy registering for classes on her first day at Harvard Business School, 1963.
Luthy was joining 7 other women and 624 men in the HBS class of 1965. Despite the fanfare over the incoming class, some women had in fact already had a taste of what was in store. Since 1959, four years earlier, HBS had been offering the women who graduated from Radcliffe’s one-year program in business administration (established in 1938 for women at Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister school) the opportunity to sign up for the second year of the men’s far more prestigious two-year MBA. In the first year of that experiment, three women—one married to a PhD student at the business school; another the daughter of a banker in the Midwest; and the third the only daughter of a single mother who worked as a janitor—had experienced firsthand the tiered classrooms and discussion-based pedagogy on which HBS prided itself. They had also weathered the male students’ disdain, as well as that of the professors. But all the Radcliffe Program women got a taste of it too. Ann Leven recalled a professor fulminating: “I taught the same material to the boys—men this morning, and they understood it. What’s wrong with you? Are you guys stupid?” Ann walked out in protest, the whole class followed, refusing to return until the professor was removed.
The Radcliffe women were also invited occasionally to join the men across the river, where their role seemed to be that of consumer “guinea pigs.” One recalled how a classmate was asked to model her Dior gown for a class discussing the advantages of couture over mass-market knockoffs. Another time, the Radcliffe women were brought in to join a class discussion about whether women’s hats would sell in a supermarket.
For a long time, Ann Leven believed that “we didn’t need Gloria Steinem,” that she and her classmates could take care of themselves without a women’s movement to back them up. But looking back, she realized just how naïve they all had been about discrimination, seeing it clearly only when they were literally being screamed at.
They were not the only women during the ’60s blind to the realities of what was around them. In 1961, 95 percent of American women said they saw themselves having careers once they’d finished school. Yet Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963, documented how after the war, in a backlash against Rosie the Riveter’s triumphs, educated women were expected to find fulfillment not in work but in a mythologized ideal of four children, two cars, one white picket fence, and weekly PTA meetings. The first female vice president of a Chicago department store, when asked about the odds for women like herself, sarcastically remarked, “A woman who is determined to play a game so fixed, had better be prepared to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.” In 1966, Newsweek referred to a recent survey of businessmen who’d been asked if they would work for a woman: almost all found the idea “flatly repellent.”
This attitude was largely shared at HBS. Even so, there were “good guys” among the male student body—“allies” in today’s vernacular—as there were professors who were more awkward than antagonistic. One exasperated female student finally took her professor aside and asked why he wouldn’t call on her. He replied that he wasn’t sure she wanted to be called on, to which she replied that if she had her hand up, and was waving it frantically, it meant she did. Another professor asked a married woman with several children to leave the classroom because he was about to show photographs (presumably of naked women) related to their discussion about the Playboy Club. One finance professor unfailingly referred to a female student as “Mr.”—and could never meet her eye.
Most of the women’s living arrangements made their distance from the professors and male classmates more than metaphoric, sequestered as they were with other female graduate students at the Radcliffe Graduate Center, situated far from the business school campus. The distance mattered, especially on cold winter nights when, having to cross the bridge, the wind off the Charles River felt like an angry slap to the face.
No one, not in the Dean’s Office or anywhere else, considered the HBS women’s safety or comfort as they commuted between the two campuses, often late at night. No shuttle bus was offered. Dressed for class in business attire, wool dresses, they carried their stockings and heels to the HBS campus, where there was only one ladies’ room in which to change.
The men’s proximity to the school’s amenities and to one another meant they could form study groups to lighten their workload. Presented with two to three case studies a night, students were expected to formulate strategies and solutions they’d be called on to discuss in class the following day. It was an impossible task unless divvied up. The women, absent from campus, were excluded and foolishly took the advice of the administration, which warned against students from different learning cohorts creating study groups.
The isolation could be as numbing as the blasts from the Charles River: Jane Lack walked into class on her first day and sat down, but as the men streamed in, she noticed that none of them were willing to sit next to her—nor beside her or even in front or behind her. She sat there like a pariah, never having felt such aloneness. Looking back on her section, Roberta Lasley, the daughter of the single mother who worked as a janitor, concluded that “some of them were nice, and some of them were jerks, and some of them were smarter than I was, and a lot of them were dumber than I was. And like really arrogant.”
One of the major features of the Harvard Business School experience was the WAC—the written analysis of cases. On Fridays, students received an extra case study for which they had to submit an extensive written analysis, alongside charts and graphs, to be deposited on Saturday into a special door slot by a fixed time, after which the bin below the slot was removed and late WACs would merely thump to the floor and be marked as zero. With no calculators in those days, the analysis was painstakingly computed with the help of slide rules and typed up on old-fashioned typewriters with finicky, spooled-ink ribbons. The women on the other side of the river not only had to get theirs to the chute on time but factor in the travel there, sometimes with traffic and crowds streaming across the bridge for a Saturday football game. It was literally as if they were pushing against the current.
If the isolation were not enough, the women were constantly being told they were taking a man’s place. Their classmates told them, unabashedly, that men, as breadwinners, as family providers, were more deserving of a spot at HBS. Even as some of the men got to know their female classmates, and liked them, they could not wrap their minds around why these women were there. The 1950s had come to an end, yet the decade’s cultural tentacles were still tightly curled around them. After World War II, the American business-man had become a new kind of symbol for America’s postwar success. Unlike before the war, he was now more likely to hold a college degree, and his “rough” work schedule (fifty-three to sixty-two hours per week—downright leisurely by today’s standards) was equated with a sort of virile endurance. A 1955 Fortune article described a typical day for the businessman: he got up at 7 a.m., ate a large breakfast, arrived at work at 9 a.m., left the office at 6 p.m., rushed home, and ate dinner before settling into bed with work he’d brought home.
As fundamental as the pressed suit, the starched shirt, and the briefcase, however, was the executive wife. Single men were viewed with suspicion. It was far better to have been married and divorced than never married at all. A successful corporate wife was usually also college-educated, like her husband, if only to keep the proper intellectual balance between them and avoid her becoming what was then known as “the wife he left behind.” It was also considered advantageous if the wife had briefly worked before marriage so she could relate to her husband’s life.
Corporations, seeing wives as the weathervanes of a man’s potential, had much to say about them. The ideal executive wife was “highly adaptable, highly gregarious, and realizes that her husband belongs to the corporation.” Guidelines for executive wives included never talking shop with “the Girls” (other wives); never turning up at the office unannounced; remaining attractive (because there was a high correlation between “executive success and the wife’s appearance”); becoming phone buddies with a husband’s secretary; and “never—repeat, never—get[ting] tight at a company party.” Corporate wives were also tasked with providing a calm, distracting environment for their pent-up, exhausted husbands working their fifty-three-hour workweeks. The wives themselves often bought into these ideals, as well as the surveillance necessary to keep the status quo: a 1957 survey of 4,000 executive wives found that 55 percent thought a company hiring a man should also interview his wife to check on how she behaved toward him (too much nagging, perhaps?) and how she handled her alcohol. But this happened anyway in less formal ways; it was not unusual for prospective hires and their wives to be invited to the local country club, for example. In one case, a man lost his job because his wife had dared to wear a strapless dress to a company picnic.
The perfect executive wife was also the shadow that trailed the female HBS students. She was the ideal dreamed of by the bachelors tucked away in their redbrick dormitory suites at night. The female students across the river at the Radcliffe Graduate Center were the un-ideal, the executive wife’s polar opposite, the ones daring to steal a man’s place instead of fluffing up his seat pillows.
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THE EIGHT “FIRST WOMEN” POSING IN 1963 FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHER in harvard’s Baker Library were all white.
Four years later, in 1967, Lillian Novella Hobson arrived after a ten-hour train ride from Washington, DC. In one hand she carried a suitcase, and with the other she dragged a large trunk. When the cab dropped her off at her dorm at 6 Ash Street, she was disappointed to find that the Radcliffe Graduate Center, this “nondescript brick building” built less than a decade earlier, was not on the Harvard Business School campus, or anywhere near it. The housemother answered the door, and if she was surprised to see a young Black woman standing there, she didn’t show it, but neither did she go out of her way to welcome Lillian. She crossed off her name on a list and said that her room wouldn’t be ready until 3 p.m., but there was a park nearby where Lillian could wait.
Group photo at the Baker Library of the official first women at HBS, 1963: Elaine F. Luthy (MBA 1965); Elizabeth F. Trotman (MBA 1965); Cecilia B. Rauch MBA (1965); Caryl Maclaughlin Brackenridge (MBA 1965); Susan Lauer Holt (MBA 1965); Lynne Sherwood (MBA 1965), Michelle Roos Turnovsky (MBA 1965); Dixie Marchant (MBA 1965).
Sitting down on a park bench, she looked around, and said to no one but herself: “Why am I here?” W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard’s first Black PhD student, graduating in 1895, wrote, “I was in Harvard, but not of it.” Seventy-two years later, Lillian felt much the same as she sat on that bench, missing her family down south, where her father was a subsistence tobacco farmer and her mother a former teacher.
In Ballsville, Virginia, with barely more than two hundred residents, if you didn’t have land to farm, and you were Black, you worked as a farmhand or domestic. Growing up, Lillian wore hand-me-down dresses or, worse, dresses made by her mother from fifty-pound burlap feed bags. At the school cafeteria, she was the one with a sandwich made from home-baked bread instead of the superior store-bought Wonder Bread. The schools were segregated, but when that ended in 1954, Lillian in fact felt a loss. She had found the all-Black environment empowering, and now many of her favorite teachers were forced to leave the profession. The only upside to high school was that Lillian’s cousin was working as a maid for a Richmond family who owned a chain of jewelry stores. They gave her their daughters’ hand-me-downs, and suddenly Lillian was a lot better dressed.
Graduating third in her high school class, she assumed that the scholarships traditionally allotted to the top two students were the only path to college. She had missed that opportunity by a hair. She took the next best route—leaving for New York—convinced there was something better “outside of the segregation system,” if only because New York relatives who came to visit arrived “driving nice cars.” Through one of them, she secured a job as a maid—the only kind of job going for a young Black woman—in an exclusive Hamptons resort. But one summer stuck out on Long Island without a car or public transport was more than she could bear, and after it was over, she moved into a tiny apartment in Harlem with two cousins, sharing a bed with one while the other slept on the living-room sofa. Cockroaches ruled the tiny kitchen. Looking for a job as a young Black woman, her options were limited, and swallowing her pride, she took work as a domestic for a family on Fifth Avenue.
It was here that she saw real wealth for the first time. The apartment closets were full, the kitchen appliances sparkled, and the family’s whims were catered to by the servants—herself included. She wanted it, too, but if she was ever going to live like this, she would have to get away from domestic work. She tried to apply to Macy’s, but when she admitted she had no office-work experience, the woman sent her away. When Lillian returned asking about seasonal work, she was again turned away. Third time around it was not so much luck as a lesson learned: Lillian replied yes to the question about previous work experience, listed three fake companies she had prepared in advance, and presented herself calmly as she had practiced in front of the mirror. When her typing test was over, the employment officer looked concerned, and Lillian’s heart stopped. But she had done so well that the woman’s only concern was whether they could afford her. Lillian tried not to laugh and accepted the position of clerk in the comparison-shopping department for $45 a week.
But New York City was expensive, even if you lived without extravagance, and Lillian was existing paycheck to paycheck. Understanding that this, too, was a dead end, no less so than domestic work, she left for Washington, DC, and eventually enrolled as a student at Howard University, where she met Professor H. Naylor Fitzhugh, one of the first Black men to graduate with a Harvard MBA. In 1933, he had found that even a Harvard degree offered no job security for a Black man: “Indeed, even if I’d wanted it, I couldn’t have obtained a job as a grocery clerk in a chain store unit in an all-black neighborhood in Washington.” As a teacher, Fitzhugh made it his mission to change the experience of Black people in business. It was he who turned to Lillian during her junior year and suggested she apply to business graduate school. One eyebrow raised, he added, hardly missing a beat: “Why not Harvard?”
It was better that she didn’t know what she was getting into, that she walked in blind. That year, among 800 incoming students, still only 18 were women. Moreover, the Charles River, as Lillian would soon learn, “symbolized the Great Divide, separating Harvard’s liberals from its conservative counterparts.” Harvard students called the Business School “the West Point of American capitalism” and saw its students as “capitalist pigs.”
Cambridge itself was a counterculture hub during the 1960s. The same year that Lillian arrived at HBS, Patricia Chadwick, who had recently freed herself from a heretical Catholic community, and who would eventually end up on Wall Street, was studying for a secretarial certificate. Never having so much as heard of the Beatles until she left the Feeneyites, she was now reveling in her liberation, wearing a “black leather miniskirt, a form-fitting red turtleneck sweater, and platform shoes that made me a full four inches taller than my true five-foot-five height.” Even as she’d voted for Richard Nixon, she embraced Cambridge: “Hippies, unkempt and unwashed, roamed the square in sandals, tie-dyed T-shirts, and long hair, in arm with intellectuals and students and bands of saffron-robed Hare Krishna monks.”
Lillian was less enthralled, but as she dashed across the river to get to class, feeling like a freak dressed in her business suit, nylons, and heels, she saw the irony: the female MBA students, dressed as conservatively as the men in “their gray flannel suits,” were in fact “trailblazers,” preparing themselves like warriors for battle.
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IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE INCOMING STUDENTS, THE HBS CLASS OF 1969, had filed into the arena for their orientation, the only space that could hold them all, their ranks swelled by an influx of returning veterans, that Lillian grasped the enormity of her situation. She searched the crowd for another Black face. Eventually she counted five, all men.
Her section-D cohort included 97 white men, 2 white women, and Lillian. There was not even a Black female administrator on campus. The professors and HBS staff preferred to ignore her. If she were about to pass a professor in the hall, she would often hear him speed up “as if he were running down a ramp to catch the next flight out of town.” With eyes down, a grunt, a smile directed at the floor if she were lucky, he’d scuttle by without so much as a hello or a how-are-you.
But Lillian’s white female classmates were not having an easy time of it either. “Never before,” had they “been in such a testosterone-fueled classroom, with some of the most aggressive men on earth.” The moment a professor asked a question, before he had even finished, “hands shot up in the air like rockets … and they started shouting out the answer like falling bombs.”
Most of the women chose to keep quiet, to just survive the bombardment, even though class participation counted significantly toward their final grade. One of Lillian’s female classmates, Robin Foote, who would also make it to the list of firsts, becoming the first female Baker Scholar—the highest academic achievement—was also the only one who competed with the men on their own terms. She shot her hand up in the air and made sure her voice was heard, which “pissed off” lots of the men; some, she knew, “hated my guts.”
While Robin and one other woman had managed to join an informal study group, Lillian and the remaining women studied alone, Lillian in her small room with its single bed, narrow closet, and simple desk, listening to “the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Four Tops, and the Platters,” for company. Sometimes Nancy Pelz would stop by her room to chat. Nancy had decided the only way to cope was to never speak up in class, ever.
There was some equality at least in the Saturday “brain-hazing” WAC assignments that everyone had to do. As the campus bells rang out the hour, students stuffed their WACs down the chute while a crowd gathered, applauding and hollering. The so-called WAC readers who graded these assignments were typically young graduates of women’s colleges, especially Smith College. Lillian and her classmates were indignant: “To think that these women of privilege, with their fancy liberal arts degrees, were qualified to grade our knowledge of business was absurd. They may have known a thing or two about grammar and punctuation, which was evident from all the red marks strewn throughout the blue booklets, but they were hardly able to grade us on our analytical and problem-solving abilities.” There, Lillian was wrong.
Ever since the 1920s, HBS male students had been miffed that women were grading their work, believing that “their painful literary efforts deserved male consideration.” But the truth was that while some men had initially tried to work as WAC readers, HBS had found that “competent young ladies could be employed and trained to do a more careful, dependable job than most of the men willing to accept such employment.” Any new hire was not allowed anywhere near the students’ case analyses with her red pen until she had first completed a series of classes focusing on accounting, case management, and other business subjects. The pay was “paltry—$57 a week after taxes,” but the spots were competitive because, as one professor observed, “We were the only employer in Boston at the time that was hiring young women to use their minds.”
The WAC readers were denigrated from all sides. John Loeb Jr., a true scion of Wall Street, whose mother came from the Lehmans of Lehman Brothers and his father from the Loebs of Loeb, Rhoades & Co., was a 1954 HBS graduate. He believed, with a wink and a chuckle, that the men looking to do well intentionally dated the WAC readers. But as to the question of who these young women might be? “I have no idea,” he said.
Almost twenty years later, the class of 1972 women agreed with him. They insisted the WAC readers buttered up the male students by giving them better grades. For proof, they pointed to the woman among them who was “significantly older” and “therefore not a social threat to the WAC readers’ hopes and marriage intentions.” She received the best grades of all the women.
Yet the truth was that for many years the competition to become a WAC reader had been stiffer than admission into the Harvard Business School. In fact, WAC reader applications at one point had a 1 percent acceptance rate—so desperate were educated young women for a job where they could use their brains. If anything, the HBS female students and the WAC female readers shared a similar conundrum in seeking a meaningful professional life despite the odds.
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LIKE LILLIAN, PRISCILLA RABB WAS IN THE HBS CLASS OF 1969 BUT she came from a starkly different background. Her father, Maxwell Rabb, had been a senior advisor to President Eisenhower. While Priscilla’s family was Jewish, her father was close with Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., scion of the prominent WASP Republican family. When the Rabb family moved to Manhattan, Priscilla was enrolled in Miss Hewitt’s Classes, a finishing school of sorts, and arrived as the new girl looking “cool,” with a Shetland crewneck sweater “turned backwards,” a straight skirt, knee socks, and sneakers, all finished off with a chained medallion hanging from her neck. After a more rigorous high school, in 1963 she was accepted into Smith College.
Through her father, who knew John Loeb Sr., she got a summer job at Loeb, Rhoades & Co., working in utilities research. It was not what most young women would have considered exciting, but Priscilla could not get enough of it, coming in on Saturdays and Sundays even when she didn’t need to. She was soon envisioning a future in investment banking. When Harvard Business School recruiters came to the Smith College campus, Priscilla was among the first to sign up. She walked into the meeting thinking she was there to apply to the MBA program, but the recruiters were in fact trawling for WAC readers. Priscilla told them she wasn’t interested; it was the B-school experience she was after.
Yet even Priscilla’s upper-class background and worldly outlook did not make her feel any less unmoored once she was there. Trying to make herself invisible on her first day in the Human Behavior class, she climbed up to the highest row in the tiered classroom, finding herself squeezed in between two large men: the professor’s eye fell on her immediately.
“If you’re walking in the halls, and a stranger comes up to you, what are you going to tell him about yourself?” he asked.
At a complete loss, paralyzed, she blurted out: “I wouldn’t tell him anything, because my parents told me not to talk to strangers.”
The class must have laughed—Priscilla was too distraught to hear anything in that moment—but the professor most definitely did not. He turned away, as if she had been making fun of him, and ignored her for the rest of the semester.
Then there was the daily onslaught of remarks from the men about how she did not belong at HBS. One student declared he would eat his hat if ten years down the road Priscilla didn’t have kids and had ever worked a day in her life (Priscilla to this day attends reunions in the hopes of seeing him there, to eat his hat.)
Priscilla was fortunate to have various forms of protection that Lillian did not; not only was she white, and of a privileged background, but she had a large diamond engagement ring on her finger. It worked, back in those days, as a protective armor, a way to avoid certain social expectations. But since her fiancé never visited campus, rumors soon began to swirl: was she a closeted lesbian? Did she belong to the Rabbs of the Stop & Shop empire? Did she already have a thriving business in New York that she tended to on weekends? The truth—that she was a well-off girl from Smith College who had refused to be a WAC reader because she wanted to be an investment banker—seemed too improbable to believe.
And yet these ambitious women, who felt like they’d been set adrift alone on the open seas, had predecessors who might have served as role models, or at least as guiding beacons. Except that Priscilla and Lillian, like most people, had most likely never heard of them.