MARGO ALEXANDER found she had to put her idealism on hold while she was on Wall Street, but now, retired, she focuses on getting Democratic Party female candidates elected.
ELISA ANCONA finally bought herself the BMW she had dreamed of owning one day, the same car that the rich girls at her high school had. She drove it back to her house in Brooklyn, but the rear-wheel-drive car couldn’t make it up the small hill to her driveway. Appalled, she shipped it out to her summer house in Catalonia, where it is still going strong after twenty-one years, preferring European terrain.
At BARBARA BYRNE’s retirement party at MoMA, everyone took turns sharing stories and laughing over “Barbarisms” (“the client is always right, especially when you’re wrong” … “stay on your horse”). Her husband then got up and revealed to her former colleagues at Lehman that she had never had a boyfriend at Goldman Sachs who bought her the mink coat. She had made it up to keep them on their toes—as they deserved.
In January 2007, JOLYNE CARUSO-FITZGERALD finally took three years off. Her son was ten and her daughter eight, and she realized she didn’t know the name of their pediatrician. Her husband, a lawyer turned stay-at-home dad after their first child was born in 1995, took away her BlackBerry and sent her away for a week to the Miraval spa. She has now worked in every aspect of finance, including leading a hedge fund and starting her own firm. Her most recent job was in wealth management, which she believes will be the last holdout for human, non-AI interaction “because rich people want to know what the other rich people are doing.”
PATRICIA CHADWICK had not told anyone but her husband about growing up in the Cambridge Catholic sect, but after her retirement, she published a memoir, Little Sister, in which she laid it all out.
In 2004, BETH DATER and her husband, Mitch Jennings, joined Wall Street’s Secret Society—Kappa Beta Phi, its motto “Dum vivamus edimus et biberimus,” Latin for “While we live, we eat and drink.” It was fun and games: cocktails, dress-ups, and comedy skits. But in 2008, Mitch had a massive stroke following the unexpected collapse of Bear Stearns. Beth has been his caretaker ever since.
MARY FARRELL now sits on so many boards that her children joke she still works full-time.
JANET HANSON eventually sold 85 Broads, by then 30,000 members strong, to Sallie Krawcheck.
NINA HAYES plays the stock market and still dreams of the vodka gimlets at Delmonico’s.
In 2003, LILLIAN HOBSON, now Lillian Lincoln Lambert, was shocked to receive a letter from the Harvard Business School that she was to be honored with one of that year’s Harvard Alumni Achievement Awards. They offered her a table for eight guests; she convinced HBS to turn it into three tables of eight for all her family and friends. Up onstage with a group of white male executives also receiving the award, Lillian felt nervous. But when the first question came—“Who motivated you the most?”—she was the first to answer. Memories of HBS came rushing back, and she knew to jump in, speak first, be strong. Her answer was: my mother and Professor Fitzhugh.
What bothers ALICE JARCHO is that “younger women do not think that what we went through has anything to do with their current life … You want to have seventeen parties before you get married, when we got married with little flowers in our [hair]? Okay.… All right! But not to acknowledge—even acknowledge what we went through?” But she is also the first to say, “I had a great career. I had a lot of fun. I made more money than I deserved.… How lucky was I to be there at that point in time?”
With DNA testing, LOUISE JONES finally found out about her biological mother: she’d been a student at Barnard College, fluent in five languages. The man who got her pregnant was much older, a highly decorated military officer. By the time Louise traced her DNA, both had passed away.
MARLENE JUPITER, always an incurable romantic, finally found not only “Justice” but her soul mate, her true love. Their first date was at a party for the Black National Republican Council at the Boathouse restaurant in Central Park.
MARIA MARSALA calls herself a recovering Wall Street executive.
WESTINA MATHEWS is now a public speaker and author of books about faith, healing, and Black sisterhood. She still has her St. John’s suits hanging in her closet.
In 2011, DOREEN MOGAVERO approached the NYSE governing board about reopening a ninety-year-old institution: the Member’s Smoke Shop. Originally opened in the 1920s at 20 Broad Street, Morris Raskin, a floor broker, later moved it to the 12 Broad Street entrance of the NYSE. Once meant for floor traders buying cigars and cigarettes, Doreen cleaned up the shuttered store and restocked it with candy bars, sodas, and aspirin, and hired family members to work there. She closed the store when her husband retired; its last day was December 22, 2017. The NYSE has since torn it down.
After leaving Wall Street, PRISCILLA RABB worked in various capacities for the executive branch of the U.S. government, and later for Motorola and IBM. She can attest to the fact that none of these workplaces were oases of equality.
MAUREEN SHERRY’s memoir about her life at Bear Stearns, called The Glass Ceiling Club, was about to hit the bookshelves when it was suddenly pulled; she turned it instead into a successful novel—Opening Belle—which she could claim was “fiction.”
MURIEL SIEBERT acquired a Chihuahua named Monster Girl. When Mickie set up her offices on the seventeenth floor of the Lipstick Building in New York, the same floor where Ponzi-scheme conman Bernie Madoff had his office, Monster Girl would bark inexplicably every time they walked past. Mickie, the college dropout with nineteen honorary degrees, died in 2013, leaving $100,000 for the care of Monster Girl. Most of her $48 million, however, went to her nonprofit foundation, which focuses on both financial literacy and the humane care of animals “especially those owned by the elderly who are financially challenged.”
MARIANNE SPRAGGINS turned her real estate hobby into a full-time profession. Now when she sees corporate skyscrapers, she says “they look like prisons to me.” When asked what she’d like to be remembered for, she said as “somebody who stood up to power.”
PHYLLIS STRONG became a television writer and screenwriter, exactly as she had wanted all along. She still has her “golden handcuff” somewhere in a drawer, although she’s not sure the Swiss watch works anymore.