In the 1960s, one of the hottest items on male-dominated Wall Street was Ms. Francine Gottfried's torpedo-like breasts.
Worn proudly under a tight sweater, Ms. Gottfried’s size 43 shoes, 20 years old, were innocently visible every workday as she walked from her home in Brooklyn to her modest data-processing job across the street.
And daily, a macho crowd of clerks and traders would gather — some even climbing lampposts and trees — to get a better look at the 5-foot-4-inch young woman who became known as “Sweater Girl” as she exited the subway in an incident that became known in 1968 as “The Great Wall Street Titty Riot.”
It's just one of many instances of blatant sexism that dominated Wall Street at a time when “No Ladies” signs were posted on the doors of neighborhood lunch clubs and inside the hallowed halls of brokerage houses and investment banks, according to historian Paulina Brenn's fascinating, richly engaging exposé.She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street,” (W.W. Norton), which covers the period from the 1960s to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“Wall Street’s female pioneers, its original ‘she-wolves,’ entered uncharted territory not knowing what awaited them there other than men, lots of men, few of whom were prepared to welcome them,” writes Brain.
When Harvard Business School opened its classes to women in the autumn of 1963, women graduating from elite business schools joined the first women who hit the streets in search of big-money trading jobs that were a bad-boy culture.
According to the author, he soon realised that equal degrees do not mean equal opportunities.
Brain believes that some women were allowed to participate in behind-the-scenes research work but were excluded from lucrative sales and trading jobs reserved for men.
And when a woman is lucky enough to get one, she faces brutal treatment and horrific sexual harassment.
It was only in small brokerage houses, Bren writes, that “women who dared to enter this male bastion, this old men's club, could find their footing, no matter how risky it was.”
Bren writes that when Alice Jarcho began working as a clerk on Wall Street for Hirsch & Co. in 1965, a male colleague revealed his identity to her.
And when Jarcho became the first woman to trade on the floor, dildos were sent to her via pneumatic tubes instead of stock orders.
A sympathetic colleague tried to explain the culture to him, saying, “Our fathers were here. Our grandfathers were here. We never had sex with women.” The authors write that Jarcho was “disrupting a testosterone culture that had been ingrained for nearly two hundred years.”
Jarcho left Wall Street in 1993, knowing that “she had sold her soul. She had become a person who would tolerate the intolerable for a penny,” writes Brean.
When Muriel “Mickey” Siebert arrived in New York from Ohio in 1954, she had an extraordinary personality and was hired in the research department of Bache & Company.
She became the first female member of the New York Stock Exchange in 1967.
He described his membership badge as “the most expensive jewel” – worth $445,000 plus an initiation fee of $7,515.
For Black women, pursuing a career on Wall Street was even rarer, even with an MBA from Harvard.
But times were changing, with the civil rights movement and the women’s movement growing rapidly.
Betty Friedan, who founded the National Organization of Women (NOW) and was the author of “The Feminine Mystique,” declared to a crowd of ten thousand gathered near the Financial District in August 1970, “The women’s movement is going to be the greatest movement for social and political change in the nineteen seventies.”
Brené writes that newspapers ridiculed Wall Street as “the most visible symbol of actual gender discrimination.”
In silent protest, women on Wall Street began wearing pantsuits, abandoning standard workday dress fashion.
In 1970, the “First National Oggle-In” was held, when positions changed and men were teased, wolf whistled, body parts were evaluated, air kissed and some were even groped.
That same year, Wall Street Week with Louise Rukeyser was a hit on public television, introducing TV viewers to women in the financial sector such as Siebert.
The go-go '80s arrived with a glitz and glamour, as did the advent of the bull market. Greed and debt suddenly became fashionable, and finance became glamorous, Bren said.
When Clinton was in power in the 90s, the economy boomed, the federal budget was balanced, and everyone from schoolchildren to retirees could be seen doing business all day on their home computers.
Known as the “Money Honey,” the beautiful Maria Bartiromo became the most watched and respected female Wall Street reporter and business TV star working from the trading floor in 1993.
When planes struck the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people, electronic trading on the NYSE’s floor had already “shifted from trading desks to investment banking hedge funds and private equity firms,” writes Brean.
Yet, today, only one in 10 of those who sit on investment committees, where private equity investment decisions are made, is a woman. “Wall Street was built for men, and basically, it remains an old boys’ club,” Bren laments.
