2
Breaching a Wall
Wall Street was named after a wooden wall built by Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant to protect settlers from local Native American tribes. But it was the Buttonwood Agreement that gave shape to “Wall Street” as a recognizable space: all twenty-four signatories posted addresses in the area—Wall Street, Broad Street, Pearl Street, Hanover Square, Nassau Street, Broadway. Those streets would become New York’s trading center, and “Wall Street” would be shorthand for it all. The very first New York Stock Exchange was in a room on the second floor of the Tontine Coffee House on Wall and Water Streets. Across the street stood the market where, until 1762, enslaved Africans as well as Native Americans were auctioned off on the docks while coffee, tea, sugar, molasses, and cloth were unloaded.
Until 1817, the NYSE would operate out of the coffeehouse, which an early-nineteenth-century visitor from England described vividly:
The Tontine coffee-house was filled with underwriters, brokers, merchants, traders, and politicians; selling, purchasing, trafficking, or insuring; some reading, others eagerly inquiring the news. The steps and balcony of the coffee-house crowded with people bidding, or listening to several auctioneers, who had elevated themselves upon a hogshead of sugar, a puncheon of rum, or a bale of cotton; and with Stentorian voices were exclaiming: “Once, Twice.” “Once, Twice.” “Another cent.” “Thank ye gentlemen,” or were knocking down the goods which took up one side of the street, to the best purchaser. The coffee-house slip, and the corners of Wall and Pearl Streets … were jammed up with carts, drays, and wheel-barrows: horses and men huddled promiscuously together, leaving little or no room for passengers to pass.
The first women to make a significant appearance on Wall Street were the sisters Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull, who arrived in the second half of the 1800s. Working first as clairvoyants and fortune-tellers, they became public personalities, opening a spiritualist salon in New York City. When it was time to ratchet up their operation, they turned to railroad and shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had a soft spot for both women as well as for clairvoyance. Tennessee Claflin became his lover, and he became their silent investor. With a $7,000 check, he financed the opening of their Wall Street brokerage house at 44 Broad Street—Woodhull, Claflin & Co.
The press was all over it, as were eager customers, especially women for whom the firm had a back-door entrance so they could arrive clandestinely to deposit their funds. Poet Walt Whitman visited, calling the sisters’ brokerage “a prophecy of the future.” Susan B. Anthony, writing in the suffragist press, applauded them: “These two ladies (for they are ladies) are determined to use their brains, energy, and their knowledge of business to earn them a livelihood.… The advent of this woman firm in Wall Street marks a new era.” The sisters began wearing men’s business suits. At the famous Wall Street restaurant Delmonico’s, women were not allowed to dine without a male escort; the sisters cleared this hurdle by inviting a coachman in off the street to sit with them.
But Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull were less investors than women with enormous ambition who wanted to be seen, and ultimately the first women’s Wall Street firm was a way to garner attention for their evolving interests. Victoria had her sights on a political career and largely saw Wall Street as a way to elevate her profile. In 1870, she announced she was running for president, and the sisters’ focus shifted to publishing their own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, where they expressed their uninhibited views. Even Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, their secret (and not so secret) funder, found he was not exempt from Victoria’s progressive punch: in an 1872 speech, she singled him out, along with other industrialists, for the visibly inequitable distribution of wealth. As her views on marriage, free love, and economics became ever more radical, she slowly lost support. At the same time, the sisters’ brokerage firm began to falter, having been overly reliant on gold speculation. Eventually, both women moved to England and on to financially advantageous marriages. Yet the sisters had made a mark; often written off as amateurs, psychics playing at investment, they in fact understood well the power and allure of Wall Street, and how to use it to their advantage.
Henrietta “Hetty” Green, nicknamed “The Witch of Wall Street,” once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “greatest miser” that ever lived, was the best-known female financier on Wall Street during the Gilded Age. Inheriting a fortune, and familiar with finance (as a child, Hetty had had to read the financial pages to her father, whose eyesight was failing), she invested cleverly, buying low and playing the long game, eventually becoming the richest woman in America. Unlike the Claflin-Woodhull sisters, Henrietta shied away from publicity, although her litigious, penny-pinching, and fashion-challenged ways seemed to invite attention (she inhabited dingy apartments in poor neighborhoods to evade taxes and wore the same black dress each day stuffed with crumpled newspaper to keep her warm and save on heating). Her infamous appearances in court, and her dragged-out lawsuits, were all centered on protecting her wealth and remaining in control of it. As individuals and institutions came asking for loans, Hetty Green became a “private bank.” Each day she sat at a desk loaned out to her by the Chemical National Bank and oversaw her expansive portfolio. In a backhanded compliment, the press commended her for having “a masculine instinct for finance.”
Hetty Green was hard to ignore, but there were in fact other women trying their hand at stockbroking in the late 1800s, including Mary Gage, daughter of the famous suffragist Frances Dana Gage. Mary opened a ladies-only exchange at 71 Broadway after one too many unpleasant experiences using male brokers. Unlike most of these women, Maggie Walker, born to a former slave and a white abolitionist writer, was treated surprisingly well as America’s first Black female bank president, but that was in part because she was far from Wall Street. At the time, Black-owned businesses were being championed by African American leaders, yet white-owned banks were unwilling to lend them capital. Walker was a board member of St. Luke’s Mutual Benefit Society in Richmond, Virginia, and in 1901 she insisted on the formation of a bank, of which she became president, that would directly cater to the Black community.
While there were a handful of women who planted a flag in new financial territories, it was American women’s presence and potential power as investors that was thought more likely to shift the needle. The United States emerged from World War I as an economic powerhouse, and women, no less than men, were getting in on the bull market: the Pennsylvania Railroad was nicknamed “the Petticoat Line” because women now owned more than half of its shares. With such a substantial female clientele, the door creaked open for women to become brokers catering directly to other women. In the boom years of the 1920s, brokerage firms across the United States introduced “women’s departments”—women-friendly brokerage rooms.
Money, women’s money, was speaking. Journalist Eunice Fuller Barnard was enthralled. Writing in the North American Review, she described one of these women’s departments: “It might almost have been a club. The same discreet lighting, the cavernous davenports, an occasional bronze. In the deep Florentine armchairs a dozen women lounged and smoked. But at one end of the room their gaze was transfixed by a wide moving ribbon of light. ‘PAK—3/4 … BDLA—1/2’—the cabalistic symbols glided across the magnified ticker tape.” And while the pretty, young assistants, “turned out as so many mannequins,” would sneak into a trading booth to hurriedly gulp down a sandwich for lunch, the customers could barely remember to eat, so glued to the ticker were they. In the New York Times, too, Barnard waxed lyrical about the recent sea change in the investing landscape: “Behind the scenes the expert eye that analyzes customers’ lists of security holdings is as likely as not to be a feminine one. In the marble-halled solemnity of banks, where even five years ago women officials were undreamed of, they sit today as a matter of course as assistant secretaries, assistant cashiers and managers of women’s departments.” These female professionals also began to do what their male counterparts had done for decades—create professional organizations of their own, such as the National Association of Bank Women and the Women’s Bond Club. People spoke of “social change” being activated inside these women’s departments and argued that harnessing women’s investing power could do more “than all the noisy suffrage campaigns.”
But there was also a sobering reality: the women running these women’s departments had nowhere to go from there. This was their glass ceiling, even as the phrase had yet to be coined, because into “the men’s board rooms, woman, whether as customer or clerk, rarely penetrates. She may shop, vote, ride in the subway and work in business offices with men, but when it comes to stock trading she is rigidly segregated.” Selling stock, when women in the 1920s were clamoring to spend their money on securities, was one thing; women trading stock was quite another.
As for the New York Stock Exchange, which had relocated in 1903 to its current columned neoclassical building on the corner of Broad and Wall Streets, it was said—although no one was certain—that in 1927, shortly before the crash, a woman had planned to buy a seat on the exchange. The NYSE’s Board of Governors, looking through its constitution, had discovered that women were technically not barred. All that was required of a member was “responsibility, character and citizenship.”
In October 1929, the stock market crashed, and with it, women’s departments and all that they represented. With so many Americans having gone full in on the stock market, and with their life savings now wiped out, the country turned against Wall Street. Bankers were renamed “banksters” by an angry public. Wall Street was accused of having turned into a Wild West and the U.S. government was forced to step in, promising to ensure this never happened again.
Until then, Wall Street’s banks had played dual roles as both commercial and investment banks: a place for ordinary people to deposit their money and apply for loans, and also a place for the buying, selling, and underwriting of securities. These two roles were now seen as a conflict of interest that had put ordinary people’s savings in jeopardy by allowing banks to use that capital for their own investments. In 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act was passed, and banks faced a fork in the road: they could no longer be both commercial and investment banks. The famous JP Morgan firm, for example, remained in commercial banking, while six of its partners soon peeled off to create the investment bank that would be known as Morgan Stanley. The idea was to stabilize the system, to separate Wall Street from Main Street. The Glass-Steagall Act would not be overturned until 1999, although banks would start to chip away at it beginning in the 1960s.
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AFTER THE UNITED STATES ENTERED WORLD WAR II, AND MEN WERE called to military service, across all industries women took on jobs previously reserved for men—even on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Eighteen-year-old Helen Hanzelin from Queens was the “first woman to appear on the floor in trading hours”—if one didn’t count “a girl musician in the band that played for the New Year’s Eve celebration three years ago,” the New York Times wryly noted. Hanzelin stepped out onto the floor as a telephone clerk for Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane at 9:30 a.m. on April 28, 1943, to “a barrage of boos, catcalls, whistles and jeers.” Described as “a slim, self-possessed young woman with a good figure, tip-tilted nose, brown eyes and curly—but not too curly—hair that might be either brown or deep auburn,” the next day her photograph appeared in almost every newspaper. A month later, Helen Kowalski, or “Helen the Second” as she was quickly nicknamed, was sent onto the floor as a second female telephone clerk for Merrill Lynch.
On July 12, another five weeks later, the New York Stock Exchange itself hired thirty-six women to work on the floor as support staff. Floor support included pages (later they would be called runners, the bottom of the NYSE hierarchy, those who ran messages and trades—literally pieces of paper—between brokers and clerks); reporters (those who stood at the specialist posts, and when a trade was made reported it at the point of sale); and clerks (answering the phones in the floor brokers’ booths and taking stock orders). They wore NYSE uniforms designed specifically for them—worsted wool, the blouse “French blue, with ‘NYSE’ embroidered on the left pocket, and the skirt in royal blue.”
Women pages on the trading floor of the NYSE, 1943.
For a moment it looked as if a path had finally been forged, making way for women, sixty-six of whom were working on the floor as the war came to an end. But Lucy Greenbaum, one of a handful of women reporters at the New York Times, felt less optimistic. She herself had been hired in 1940, but largely sidelined to the society pages, and so when she wrote in May 1945 about the involuntary female exodus from the NYSE, it must have felt personal. She pointed out that Wall Street was not like other industries where women were able to use their wartime jobs to create “bridgeheads that they are planning to exploit in peacetime.” Wall Street’s Rosie the Riveters faced a dogged male resistance, the entrenched belief that “women can handle the money in the home, if their husbands are willing, but that they should remain at least a silver dollar’s throw away from the Street.” The frustration was perhaps best summed up by a young “page girl” who, as Greenbaum described, had had enough, and cracked, announcing to the men on the floor: “You’re all living in the days of the Buttonwood Tree. This is 1945.” Greenbaum commented: “The market failed to react violently to this news.”
The young page’s cry indeed fell on deaf ears even as some of the female floor workers dug their heels in and made a last stand, turning to their unions, who negotiated at length with the NYSE but to no avail. With the war over, women were marched right back to the secretarial pool, stripped of their blue NYSE uniforms. They went back to buying their office outfits from the Wall Street branch of the Anson-Jones chain, where all the dresses were priced $29.95. They were once again consumers rather than producers or, as a newspaper report observed, “Men make the big money on Wall Street, but it is the women who work for them who spend a fortune there.”
John Wanamaker, owner of the only department store in the area—Wanamaker’s at 150 Broadway—could set his watch by his female customers. Noon lunch hour, the “first group floods this store,” with the second wave of women rushing in a few minutes after 1 p.m., in search of “a sterling silver peanut dish for an office shower, a cocktail dress, a bathing cap, a spotted leopard toy or a pair of shoes in size 12AAA.” On weekends, with Wall Street closed, Wanamaker’s did not bother to open its doors either.
As Greenbaum concluded: “Wall Street has always been a man’s world and not even the manpower shortage could weaken its determination to remain just that.” Wall Street was transparent about this fact. If you found yourself in an elevator with a woman, you didn’t bother to take off your hat. Such niceties, the traditional gestures of respect in those days, were only practiced north of Canal Street. Below Canal Street, it was defiantly a man’s world.
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BUT WOMEN STILL HAD MONEY TO INVEST. IN 1947, AT THE ANNUAL stockholders’ meeting of the United States Steel Corporation, Wilma Porter Soss, a stockholder and public relations consultant—who of all her epithets, including the Corporate Conscience, and the Most Talked About Woman on Wall Street, liked “economic suffragette” the most—announced that she was creating a “Federation of Woman Shareholders in American Business.” Its aim was to force businesses to acknowledge the breadth and impact of female investing: more than half of “Big Steel’s” stockholders were women.
Two years later, Soss was back at the same meeting, donning “a late Victorian costume—a two-piece gray suit, a lace blouse and a large purple hat.” She told reporters, “The costume represents management’s thinking on stockholder relations.” (In 1960, she arrived at a stockholders’ meeting at CBS with a bucket and mop to “clean out” the recent scandals surrounding their quiz shows.) Soss’s mission was to rally stockholders, especially women, and help them understand that they were part owners of the corporations in which they invested, and that they consequently had a voice—a powerful one.
Wilma Soss recognized that the numbers were in her favor, and conditions were ripe for a stockholders’ movement. New York Stock Exchange data from the early to mid-1950s showed “considerable and increasing public participation in the market.” A news article spotlighting these new postwar investors interviewed, among others, “an ash-blond interior decorator with a copy of The Wall Street Journal tucked firmly under her arm,” who had only just dipped into the stock market and admitted not knowing a thing, but with $5,000 invested, she didn’t mind the gamble. Another was a “plump, cheerful woman with a pearl choker,” who had owned a clothing store in Miami but now lived off her stock-market investments: $200,000 in holdings, from which she took home gains as high as $40,000 in one year and a loss of $10,000 in another. “A slim honey blond, looking like a model fresh from the pages of Vogue,” pointed out that a stock like General Motors—one of the Nifty Fifty—was tied to the country’s economy, and so her stock would tank only if the country did too.
By 1958, an astonishing 52 percent of stockholders were women (up from 35 percent six years earlier). Their investments represented more than a $100 billion worth of securities. As in the 1920s, these numbers again translated to the hiring of a small number of women working as “customer’s women” (a play on “customer’s men,” otherwise known as Registered Representatives, otherwise known as brokers), among them even a few Black women, “to explain to new female stockholders why it is impossible to buy shares of Dow-Jones or that there is nothing vulgar or unladylike about ‘common’ stocks.” Mrs. Lilla “Lilly” St. John, the first African American woman to take the New York Stock Exchange licensing exam, became a registered stockbroker in 1953. Little is known about her other than that she was the host of her own music television show on a local Milwaukee station before moving to New York and working for Oppenheimer (where Alice Jarcho would go to work for the arbitrageur in 1969). She had “crammed” for two months for the broker exam, switching careers because she found investing to be “utterly fascinating.”
In 1957, Special Markets, the first Black securities firm in the financial district, started a tradition of “Women’s Day on Wall Street.” Wilhelmina B. Drake, its director of Women Activities, included a tour of the New York Stock Exchange, lunch at the restaurant Antlers, and a lecture on how to invest in mutual funds. This event pulled in their most important client, the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority for Black women.
Poster for the NYSE film The Lady and the Stock Exchange, 1962.
The NYSE also started to actively search out female investors, placing advertisements in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Look, and elsewhere. In 1962, the NYSE commissioned its own film to explain Wall Street to women. The Lady and the Stock Exchange premiered on the NYSE floor, turning it into a movie theater for the night, before traveling the country: in St. Louis, brokerage firms held a three-day event with a reception and film premiere at a local department store; in Rochester, brokerage firms organized free showings at the local shopping mall; in numerous cities, local television stations ran the film.
Only thirty-minutes long, it starred actress Janet Blair—who had played a dancer and friend of Rita Hayworth in the 1945 film Tonight and Every Night—as Mrs. Marge Jones, a pretty, smart, and loving suburban housewife, and the well-known comedian Eddie Bracken as her hapless husband. With Mr. Jones lured by get-rich-quick schemes and unwilling to invest for their teenage son’s future, Marge secretly heads to New York City for an appointment at Brown, Smith & Co., a Wall Street brokerage firm.
Marge and her husband have $4,500 to invest, a recent windfall inheritance, and Mr. Huntley, the patient and attentive broker at Brown, Smith, offers her “a sound program” of investment. Marge takes home brochures and research reports, reads through them carefully, and eventually settles on two recommended stocks, returning to New York to put in the order. Mr. Huntley happens to be heading to a meeting at the NYSE and offers to show her around. Together they enter the visitors’ gallery, and Marge leans over the railing to look down at the vast crowd of suited men moving around the floor. (While the floor scenes were shot during trading hours, the balcony scenes were filmed on a replicate balcony on a Hollywood set.)
Mr. Huntley explains the structure and mechanics of trading: While they were still at the brokerage house, he had called in Marge’s order for the two stocks down to the firm’s order room, which passed it via a direct line to their firm’s booth on the exchange floor. While they watch, the telephone clerk picks up the line, writes Marge’s order on a slip of paper, and then signals to the floor broker by pushing a button, which sets the broker’s number flapping on a large metal board hoisted onto the wall of the NYSE. The flapping badge number tells the broker to return to his booth—or else to call for a runner—to pick up Marge’s order.
Once the floor broker has the order in hand, he goes to the appropriate double-horseshoe-shaped counter, what’s called a specialist post, where the specific stocks Marge picked are traded. She wants to buy, but the floor broker now needs to find someone who wants to sell, and at the best price at that moment. He first gauges the current bids and offers, and then determines which price he’ll bid for Marge’s stock. This is where “his skill” as a broker comes in: if there is more demand for the stock than supply, the price will go up, and vice versa.
The specialist at his post is responsible for creating “an open and fair” market for his specific stocks. This means that if someone wants to sell a stock at his post at $600 and someone wants to buy at $400, it is impossible to make a trade, and the market would come to a standstill. Specialists use their own capital to tighten up the difference; constantly monitoring demand and supply, they are the toll booth operators of the New York Stock Exchange. Marge’s floor broker, who represents her brokerage house, and the seller’s broker, will bargain, and their agreement is sealed not by a handshake, let alone a contract, but “their word is enough,” Mr. Huntley notes. The NYSE only insists that it is done with “a loud, clear voice.”
The deal closed, the information is jotted down—the stock symbol, the number of shares traded, the price per share, and the badge numbers of the buyer and seller—and sent in a small pneumatic tube to the ticker-tape room. In a couple of minutes, Mr. Huntley explains, her transaction will appear on tickers in thousands of brokerage houses across the country; in other words, not only is the transaction transparent but it brings Mrs. Jones into a much larger and exciting world of finance. She is now, officially, a part owner in the companies whose stock she has just bought; she will receive their company reports, as well as proxies with which to vote on company matters. “The exchange insists you get the right to vote and the important information that is needed to vote,” he says. The film’s message appeared to be: Capitalism and democracy are at work together on Wall Street! Or, as Wilma Soss would insist, there is potential power (waiting to be unlocked) in owning a stock.
Yet women’s investment muscle did not include the power to work as floor brokers. When two New York Times reporters inquired in 1958 why there were no women with a seat on the exchange even as women were not explicitly barred, the NYSE’s “official explanation” was that “No woman has ever seriously applied.” Less officially “one Wall Streeter” told them, “It’s not that women are prohibited. It’s just that they’re not allowed.” Economist Sylvia Porter, syndicated New York Post columnist and Soss’s liberal counterpart, said she was “confident” there would soon be a woman with a seat. But until that time, the excuses the reporters heard from Wall Street men ran the gamut:
“This isn’t a business for amateurs. You don’t learn to be a brain surgeon [or an exchange member] overnight.”
“Charm and sex appeal don’t mix with money.”
“The exchange floor is too rough and physical an area for a lady.”
“Women can’t think or act decisively enough to keep up with the trading pace.”
Women’s presence might destroy the “genial, fraternal, man-to-man” floor vibe.
The only woman’s voice to ring out from the New York Stock Exchange from the late 1950s into the 1960s was that of Jean Geiger, chief receptionist in the Exhibit Hall and Visitors’ Gallery. When the brass gong signaled the end of the trading day, the reporters on the floor scrambled to get the closing prices on 350 NYSE-listed stocks into the pneumatic tubes up to the broadcasting booth. There, speaking quickly but enunciating carefully, Miss Geiger read out all the closing prices on the New York radio station WNYC. She received both fan letters and constructive criticism, including a letter from a ship’s captain who offered this unsolicited advice: “for long reading, maybe … better stand, loosen the girdle, and breathe easier.”
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DID THE FIRST FEMALE GRADUATES OF THE HARVARD BUSINESS School know all this? Probably not, probably they had never heard of Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, Hetty Green, Mary Gage, or Maggie Walker. But there was one woman who must have been on their radar. Muriel Siebert, known to everyone as “Mickie,” had arrived in New York in 1954 in a seen-better-days Studebaker with $500 to her name. She had dropped out of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, instead playing bridge all day, when she learned her father was sick with cancer. After he died, she had no desire to stay on in Cleveland and follow in the footsteps of her mother, whose tread marks were filled with regret. Her mother “had a God-given voice, and she was offered a place on the stage, but nice Jewish girls didn’t go on the stage in those days,” which meant that Mickie “grew up with a woman who was frustrated her entire life.” Mickie was determined not to feel the same when it was time to look back on her own life, and she left for New York, a city she had visited only recently as a tourist.
The previous summer of 1953, she’d taken a bus tour of New York City. At the New York Stock Exchange, she had stood on the balcony overlooking the trading floor—the very same where “Marge” and her broker would stand—and looked down onto a “sea of men in dark suits, punctuated by the occasional pastel jacket of a runner or clerk.” Feeling electrified by “the clamorous human buzz of those thousands of deals,” she saved the souvenir handed out at the end of the tour; a piece of personalized ticker tape that read “Welcome to the NYSE, Muriel Siebert.”
In the 1950s, at around the same time, writer Martin Mayer was also on Wall Street, walking its streets, meeting its denizens, so he could reveal this world to his readers. He observed as the limousines rolled in at four o’clock in the afternoon, their uniformed chauffeurs congregating for a smoke while they waited for their bosses to exit the banks and brokerages. The smell of fish wafted in from the Fulton Fish Market a few blocks north, sometimes mixed in with the more pleasant smell of coffee beans from the roasters, “the coffee men,” who had not yet moved from their nineteenth-century hub on nearby Front Street over to the Eastern Shoreline—today known as DUMBO in Brooklyn. With setbacks on tall buildings not mandated until 1916, Wall Street’s narrow streets were dark, some parts seeing sunlight for only twenty hours in total during a whole year. Looking up, one found “brick bas-reliefs, brass sculptures, stone statues, gargoyles,” with the architecture of Trinity Church, built by slaves, replicated in nearby buildings that showed off ecclesiastic “vaulted arches.”
Floor of the New York Stock Exchange, 1969.
Housed on the ground floors were the commercial banks, from the largest to the smallest, both domestic and foreign, even private ones with hidden entrances and backdoors. Intentionally located at street level for easy access, they offered the basic services but also functioned as stock transfer agents. The buying and selling of stocks was still entirely based on the exchange of paper, and part of the bank’s job was to cancel sold stock certificates, issue certificates for the new stocks bought, and write the checks to pay out the dividends. The elaborate, oversized certificates moved between brokerage houses via handcarts rolled through the streets “or in smaller amounts by gray-haired men carrying big wallets.”
Many floors above the street-level banks sat the investment bankers, those in the business of underwriting companies, helping them expand by selling shares through IPOs, “secondary sales,” or corporate bonds. These underwriting institutions were among Wall Street’s most famous names: Morgan Stanley & Co., Lehman Brothers, Smith Barney & Co., Goldman Sachs & Co., and Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
In the 1950s, the telephone was Wall Street’s most advanced piece of critical technology. Each stock trade meant at the very least six phone calls, so that the monthly telephone bill for Wall Street ran into several million dollars. The teletype was a useful and cheaper adjunct to the telephone, and even less work than a telegram: punch in a company’s TWX code, and their teletype machine would start tapping out your message.
Wall Street, Mayer explained, was loud. Only the executives, the C-suite, could find a modicum of peace and quiet in their closed-off offices; everyone else was unprotected from the unrelenting click and clatter of the ticker tape, the teletype, and the ringing phones. Without office printers, let alone computers, everything was printed by small, independent print shops nearby: from letterhead for the secretaries to type on to brochures and customer newsletters distributed by research departments. One print shop, the Ad Press, had a bowling alley for its customers waiting for their orders to be ready. Others offered luxury waiting rooms with free liquor, coffee, and “hideaway beds” for a quick nap.
Mickie Siebert thought she might be able to get a job at the United Nations through her cousin, but when that fell through, she tried Wall Street. At an interview with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., she admitted she had dropped out of college—a mistake she was sure not to repeat the second time around. She was hired at Bache & Co. as a “college graduate,” passing up a $75-a-week position in the accounting department for a $65-a-week job in the research department because the latter sounded more interesting. In the research department, they put her on the wire desk, where the telex machine spat out a litany of questions from brokers and clients around the country, as well as from “pension funds, mutual funds, bank trust funds, college endowments and foundations—wanting to know: What do you think of General Electric? Should we buy or sell General Motors?” Mickie’s job was to collect the telex messages and bring them over to the senior research analysts.
Research, she began to see, was both a science and an art, with the financial data a science and “seeing a pattern in those numbers” the art. She discovered she “could look at a page of numbers, and they would light up like a Broadway marquee.”
Only six weeks after she’d started, she got a $5 a week raise, from which she put aside an extra 20¢ for lunch, and the rest went toward renting a nicer apartment with her sister in what used to be the maids’ quarters in a building on Park Avenue. (Mickie slept on the Foamland sofa in the living room.) But her real lucky break came when the senior analysts, rewarded for their work, were allowed to shift some of that workload onto the underlings, discarding the industries they considered the least lucrative. Mickie, now their trainee, got some of their castoffs. One senior analyst gave her coverage of the radio, TV, and film industries; another, a brilliant railroad analyst, gave her the airline industry in which he had little faith.
Yet commercial jets were just around the corner, and TV and film were about to explode, and it was sheer luck that Mickie was “saddled” with these industries. The railroad analyst also gave her some important advice: learn everything there is to know about an industry, and a company, and “let the numbers tell the story.”
Companies, industries, and businesses had long produced “reports” for their investors and clients, but they were often mere fairy tales, musings, because there was little incentive to tell the full truth or impress with well-substantiated research. But a man by the name of Benjamin Graham changed that. Successful on Wall Street, when the 1929 market crash came, he lost a substantial amount, after which he turned his attention to research, studying companies and searching for those he considered undervalued (he would go on to teach Warren Buffett at Columbia University). When Mickie Siebert joined the New York Society of Security Analysts, an organization founded in the 1930s with only twenty members, it had close to three thousand members, and research analysis was a robust field using the modern concepts of securities analysis started by Graham.
Mickie was among the very first women to become a research analyst, but her start was typical because it was in these new research departments where women found a place for themselves beyond the secretarial pool or the occasional token hire as a salesperson or broker. Research, even when done by men, was considered the most feminized area of work on Wall Street. As one of the first female analysts herself noted: “I was with the geeks—they were a different breed who worked in wrinkled shirts.”
By 1966, there were around sixty women on Wall Street who were neither receptionists nor secretaries nor data-entry clerks nor statisticians but research analysts. Alongside Mickie Siebert, there was Mary Wrenn, profiled in the New York Times in 1964, “a pert, attractive brunette to whom people are always coming up at parties and saying, ‘What do you think of my XYZ stock?’ ” Mary Wrenn, like most female research analysts, focused on drugs, cosmetics, and merchandising—the areas seen as within a woman’s natural expertise. That she was working for Merrill Lynch was no accident. Merrill Lynch (founded by Charles Merrill in 1914, joined later that year by Edmund Lynch) took a pragmatist view, insisting that the “mystery” be taken out of finance. In Charles Merrill’s opinion there was no need for luxurious décor: you just needed telephones. He was an early adherent of Benjamin Graham and demanded that his brokers be informed by research and not speculation or wishful thinking. He not only built up a significant modern securities research department but trained the investing public, too, placing page-length newspaper advertisements that read like crash courses in stock-market investing. By 1960, Merrill Lynch’s firm was practically four times the size of the second largest brokerage, Bache & Co., and almost equal to the next four combined. With 540,000 brokerage accounts, Merrill Lynch was referred to as “the thundering herd.”
Mary Wrenn’s reports on her particular industries were distributed to “153 offices and more than 500,000 customers,” filled with the information she gathered by reading everything she could, traveling to visit with CEOs, as well as lunching with the representatives of large asset funds, pensions funds, insurance companies, and banks, who were all “scouting for investment ideas.” She smoked a pack of filtered cigarettes a day, liked her coffee black, favored Welsh rarebit with a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and always removed a clip-on earring as she reached for the phone, which she did often. In the office, she was expected to pick up the phone for anyone—brokers and customers alike—calling her with questions. The day the New York Times interviewed Mary Wrenn, questions were pouring in about a trending product, Magic Secret, the Helene Curtis wrinkle cream.
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SPRING WAS HIRING SEASON AT THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL, when corporate recruiters descended on campus and second-year students might field five to ten serious job offers by the end.
But for the women of HBS, despite the presence of Mickie Siebert and Mary Wrenn on Wall Street, there were not even five to ten bona-fide job interviews. Some of the women tried to sign up with recruiters using only their initials, but then there was still the “big reveal” awaiting them: that moment when they walked into the interview room, heels and skirt, not knowing if they’d be welcome.
Usually, they were told the firm was not hiring women. Not yet. Maybe later down the road. The process itself was humiliating. A 1962 graduate of the Radcliffe Program walked into an interview and was told point blank by the General Foods representative: “Why are you here? We’d never hire a woman.”
Some recruiters encouraged the women to sign up for interviews, but only for kicks, so they could see what a female Harvard MBA looked like. One 1965 female graduate, disgusted, joked with her female classmates that with her degree, “at least when I go shopping I’ll be able to figure out if I’m benefiting from the 10-cent sale.”
Some companies were willing to hire women, or contemplate the possibility of doing so, but mostly for positions that were either in the so-called back office or in the research department, hidden from sight. Client-facing jobs were off-limits. In 1964, a major consulting firm did hire three female graduates as associates, meaning they were on the consultant track. But before the women even arrived, the three teams to which they’d been assigned received instructions that the new female hires, referred to as “the experiment,” were not to be sent out to client sites.
And then there was the question of pay. Roberta Lasley, daughter of the single-mother janitor, was offered a job at the investment bank, Smith, Barney & Co. for $4,500 a year. When she asked why a male classmate with a lower GPA had been offered $5,500 just the day before, the recruiter seemed surprised: “You don’t understand … You are a woman. You are going to be in research.”
Elaine Luthy, the blond bomb, the “official” first woman at HBS, interviewed for what she hoped would be a job at the advertising agency Young & Rubicam. But they had only just hired a woman, and they wanted to give it a few years to see how it went. She was finally hired by another advertising agency, but while she was searching for the information she needed for a client’s campaign, she was told she wouldn’t be able to get her hands on it without having sex with the man who held the research. She informed her boss, and after some time had lapsed, word came back from upstairs that she should go ahead and have sex in exchange for the research. Luthy stopped coming to work and had a breakdown. (In 1991, a Wall Street investment banker would similarly tell The Wall Street Journal how she discovered she’d “been promised romantically to the principal in a deal her boss was hoping to snag.”)
The limited or else degrading job prospects were hard to square with the eager and optimistic photo-op of the first eight official HBS women posing in Baker Library. It was fair to say that for many of the 1960s female graduates of the MBA program, the promises of Harvard Business School had fallen short. But different routes to Wall Street were just as pitted with landmines.
Patricia Chadwick had won her freedom from the Feeneyite sect by getting into Vassar College and thus helping them gain state accreditation. But once done, they made her turn down Vassar’s offer, and with no college degree, her only option, now out on her own, was to pursue a secretarial certificate, which landed her a job at the brokerage firm Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co. Determined to get the college education she’d been denied, Patricia also enrolled in evening classes at Harvard, writing papers until the morning hours.
Ladenburg, Thalmann was thriving, and the following year the partners hired new brokers and more secretarial support staff. One of the new brokers was known as a hardcore producer; he arrived with a “long client list,” a “rollicking sense of Irish humor,” and photographs of “his third wife and their three children,” which he displayed prominently in his office. An unattractive man, with thick glasses and a thick middle, he frequently invited Patricia and his British secretary for drinks at the 99 Club, a place popular with Boston’s traders. Patricia would sometimes go along before heading off to her classes at Boston University, where she was now getting her undergraduate degree.
One afternoon he asked her if she wanted to grab a drink before classes. “Sure,” she replied. When she arrived, her drink was already perched on the bar in front of the bartender. The next thing she remembered was waking up, “in the pitch black, naked, in pain and aware that a man was getting out of my bed.” As he “slipped into his trousers,” she caught sight of those familiar thick glasses.