Books: "She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street," By Paulina Bren

 

She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street

By Paulina Bren

W.W. Norton & Company; hardcover, 384 pages; $29.99

Paulina Bren is a writer and award-winning historian who teaches at Vassar College on the Pittsburgh Endowment Chair in the Humanities. Her first book was The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, and it was a bestseller and a New York Times Editor's Choice.

She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street is her new book, and it tells the story of the pioneering women who gained entry into what was the men's club of all men's clubs.

Though there is a lot of history before it, the main focus of the book is the 1960s, also referred to as the swinging sixties, a time when "No Ladies" signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and brokerage houses and investment banks. It was a time when most of the women on The Street were secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens, known as the "smart cookies" who saw the potential, and the money that could be made, that was within their grasp. At this time, women were starting to graduate from Harvard Business School at a rapid clip, only to run into the hard reality that an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity.

"Before one even asks what Wall Street has become, one has to know what Wall Street was." Bren writes. "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 a 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."

Though there is no chronological order to the way Bren presents this deeply researched work, it is instructive that women started to assert themselves in the investing world well before the '60s.

In 1947, at the United Steel Corporation stockholders' meeting, Wilma Porter Soss, who was a stockholder and public relations consultant, announced the creation of a "Federation of Women Shareholders in American Business." The goal of it was to earn a recognition of the impact of female investing, as over half of the company's stockholders were women. "Two years later," Bren writes, "Soss was back at the same meeting, donning 'a late Victorian costume - a two-piece gray suit, a lace blouse an a large purple hat.' She told reporters, 'The costume represents management's thinking on shareholder relations.'"

Soon after, in 1953, Mrs. Lilla "Lilly" St. John became the first African American woman to take the New York Stock Exchange licensing exam and she became a registered stockbroker. At this time, 35 percent of stockholders were women, and by 1958, that number jumped to 52 percent. Their investments were worth over $100 billion in securities.

Muriel "Mickie" Seibert's story is a throughline throughout the book. She arrived on Wall Street in 1954, and she became one of the first women to be a research analyst. By the mid-1960s, she was at Stearns & Co. By this point, she set her sights on obtaining a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She pored over the Rxchange's constitution, and there was nowhere stating a woman could not apply for one. 

A seat on the NYSE cost $445,000, and on December 7, 1967, Siebert signed a conditional sale contract and paid 20 percent of its cost. She needed two NYSE members to sponsor her, which she did after nine turned her down, and a bank to loan her the remaining 80 percent, which would come from Chase Manhattan after she was turned down by Morgan Guarantee, who she banked and did business with. 

While Siebert was the first woman to have a seat on the NYSE, she did not work on the floor itself. That would be Alice Jarcho, who had perhaps the most interesting story in the book.

Jarcho hailed from Forest Hills, Queens, and went to Wall Street after dropping out of Queens College. Her career began at Hirsch & Company, which she left for a bigger paycheck, but a chance meeting with another pioneer who features throughout the story, Jane Larkin, who was a research analyst and partner at Hirsch, lured her back.

When the manager who Jarcho was working for met his untimely demise, Hirsch became the de facto office manager. She was put in charge of office operations, from hiring teletype workers to opening client accounts and fixing stock errors. The problem was that what she was doing was technically illegal, as she was not a Registered Representative, also known as a broker. The firm was liable, but it would all be cleared up if she took the licensing exam, but they refused to pay her $300 exam fee.

Jarcho came to the realization that if this is what they thought of her, and women in general, in 1969, it was time to move on. Eventually, she moved on to Oppenheimer, where she worked in the international investing division for an arbitrageur. Eventually, she went to work for Larry Tisch, of the family that currently owns part of the New York Giants.

After four years at CWBL, a friend of hers at Oppenheimer lured her back with the promise that she would be their floor broker. She didn't have any other allies at the firm, and her friend was fired just before she took her spot at the NYSE. There were initiation rites for first-timers on the floor, but they were worse in scope for Alice, as Bren writes in lurid detail.

The one thing Bren does well in this book is capture that Wall Street was as much an institution bound by hierarchy as much as gender. "Alice knew there were very clearly-demarcated class differences on the trading floor of the NYSE. There were the outer-borough people, like herself, from Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Then there were the Ivy Leaguers, the Harvard MBAs, the specialists whose seats had been passed down for generations within a family. She thought it was going to be the outer-borough set who ate her alive, but at first it was the well-heeled, well-dressed specialists - like the one who told her she had no right to be there - as well as other floor brokers...

"The brokers had their own hierarchy: the top dogs were the institutional brokers because their older sizes were significant whereas the retail brokers executed smaller trades for individual clients. The so-called two-dollar brokers took up the slack when a firm's floor broker was too busy to attend to a trade right away.  Then there were the independent traders, the small floor outfits, who bought or leased a seat to trade their own accounts. But despite a certain kind of floor meritocracy that was present, none of it took women into account."