Before one even asks what Wall Street has become, one has to know what Wall Street was. The Wall Street that the women here experienced is long gone. It was a time when the New York Stock Exchange was still teeming with brokers, clerks, and runners, the clamor punctuated by the metallic flap of a badge number on the call board, paper flying in all directions, swept up into enormous piles, sometimes weighing up to three tons and carted off at night long after the closing bell. It was a time when a veritable army of secretaries and teletypists and data-entry clerks poured out of the subways in the mornings, the ambitious ones staying on after hours to attend night classes at New York University’s business school or the Institute of Finance, both near Wall Street’s Trinity Church. It was a time when the big-name firms were certainly there—JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns—but smaller firms had a presence, too, giving Wall Street a distinct character and feel. It was at these small brokerage houses that the women who dared enter this male bastion, this old-boys’ club, could find a foothold, however precarious.
The female pioneers of Wall Street, its original She-Wolves, pushed into uncharted territory not knowing what awaited them there other than men, lots of men, few of whom were going to roll out a welcome mat. As one of the specialists, those at the very top of the New York Stock Exchange hierarchy, whispered to Alice Jarcho, the first woman to trade full-time on the floor: “… you do not belong here.”
The She-Wolves arrived on Wall Street at the same moment as the women’s movement was starting. In 1968, the tobacco company Philip Morris came out with a cigarette, Virginia Slims, specifically targeted at women. Its tagline was: “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!” The phrase, used up until the 1990s, caught on quickly, entering pop culture, where it was repackaged and coopted in all sorts of ways. The timeline for this book runs parallel with the life-span of their tagline, while also asking: Have you come a long way, baby?
Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, of the hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, was called out on his response during a panel at the University of Virginia in 2013 when he was asked by an audience member why the panel only featured “rich, white, middle-aged men.” He replied: “You will never see as many great women investors or traders as men. Period. End of story.… Take a girl that was my age … back in the ’70s. I can think of two that actually started at E. F. Hutton with me. Within four years, by 1980, right when I was getting ready to launch my company, they both got married. And then they both had … children. As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it.… And I’ve just seen it happen over and over …”
The story told in the following pages challenges everything he said.