How trailblazing women fought for a place on Wall Street

A new book, out next week, examines the history of Wall Street and women in finance. The text chronicles how the first generation of women worked around unfair and discriminatory labor laws to eventually carve out a seat for themselves at the famed financial hub.

Paulina Bren is an historian and professor of gender studies at Vassar College. And she’s the author of a new book, out next week, called “She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street.” Marketplace’s David Brancaccio spoke with Bren about her new book. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: I mean, it’s still very male-dominated, when you take a look at what we call Wall Street — banking, finance, markets. Although the percentage of women in the whole industry is a little bit more women than men, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Paulina Bren: Exactly. What was really surprising to me, when you write histories about women, social histories, it’s hard to find sources. But this was particularly interesting to me because I write about a lot of the women who are still alive, not particularly old, but you can barely find sort of their name on the internet. You can barely find their name in articles and studies and so forth. For example, there’s a wonderful book, sort of a history of Wall Street and finance, and it’s told through interviews with sort of the movers and shakers of Wall Street. It’s over 600 pages. There are only two pages where a woman is interviewed, and that is the famous Mickie Siebert. And I kept coming across this all the time. And so that really in itself, was incredibly eye-opening that the women who have been on Wall Street have made a name for themselves. They are still invisible and nameless.

Brancaccio: Of course, we have covered her over the years, particularly when I was on the air in the 1990s. She’s very much at the forefront of headlines. But just remind us: She was a path-blazer.

Bren: She was indeed. She arrived in 1954 in a beat up Studebaker. She didn’t finish college. She decided, after father died of cancer, that she was just going to come to New York. She did not want to follow a path of regret, like her mother and she didn’t get a job at the U.N. and so she went to Wall Street. Wall Street was such a fascinating place then, because there were the big name firms, of course, but there were hundreds of small brokerage houses, and this is how these women got their foot in the door. So Mickie Siebert was basically going from one brokerage house to another, but every time, all the men were outpacing her in terms of salary. And so finally, she’d had enough, and one of the sort of gunslingers of the 1960s — her friend, Gerald Tsai — said to her, “Well, why don’t you buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange?” And she checked the constitution. The founders of the New York Stock Exchange had not had the foresight to exclude women, and so after many difficulties, she was able to buy a seat. And Jan. 1, 1968 she became the first female member of New York Stock Exchange.

Brancaccio: Let’s just emphasize what you just said. This is 1967 it took until what many will consider the modern era.

Bren: Absolutely. And not just that, she said publicly she cannot make more enemies, so she never actually traded on the floor. When she showed up on the floor, it was in 1977 as the New York Superintendent of Banks. So the first woman to actually trade on the floor was in 1976 Alice Jarcho for Oppenheimer, and she knew it was going to be difficult, but she had no idea just how bad it was going to be.