Attired in a Victorian outfit, she sought to
visually convey that US Steel management
was mired in old ways of thinking and
doing things. She also reiterated the Federation’s demand for at least one woman
to be appointed to the board.
The immediate results at the 1949 meeting typified what would be Soss’s experience at most other annual meetings: her
proposal was defeated by a wide margin.
Not only did Hoboken remain the site of
f uture annual US Steel meetings, but also
no woman was elected to the board that
year. Nevertheless, she attracted considerable media attention, and she vowed to
return the next year with the same resolution if management did not voluntarily
change the location of the meeting. (Later,
in an effort to counter such a strategy, the
SEC ruled that “independent shareholders” could not bring forth the same failed
resolution immediately the following year
unless it originally had carried a certain
percentage of votes.)
Though she became a household name
for her attention-seeking antics at annual
meetings, Soss was not the first corporate gadfly, nor was she the wealthiest. For
example, more than a decade before Soss
began fighting for shareholder rights, Lewis
Gilbert and his brother John already had
been staunchly advocating for corporate
reforms. The Gilberts possessed substantial
shareholdings in several companies, which
they sought to protect by actively monitoring management.
While Soss would come to join forces
with the Gilbert brothers, she more closely
fit the mold of the average investor of the
time: she owned relatively few stocks, and
not a particularly large holding in any of
them, yet she took her responsibilities as a
shareowner seriously. She also seemed to
grasp the trend that was just beginning to
emerge — that more and more Americans
would become involved in the stock market, putting aside as best they could their
memories of the 1929 Crash and putting
their faith in common stocks as effective
vehicles for wealth creation. Individual
share ownership in the United States,
according to NYSE shareholder censuses,
would grow from less than 6.5 million
Americans in 1952 (approximately 4.5% of
the population) to almost 31 million (over
15% of the population) by 1970. During
most of that time, the stock market experienced an extended bull run.
Soss emerged as a champion of little
investors at a time that was arguably
the heyday of the individual investor. In
the mid-20th century, the vast majority of shareowners were still individuals,
not institutions, and the overwhelming
number of stock trades were executed by
them as well. Soss saw herself — and the
Federation she headed and founded — as
acting in the interests of ordinary investors, especially women.
Despite the fact that roughly half of
the nation’s shareowners were women
when the organization debuted, the Federation of Women Shareholders under
Soss’s leadership never grew to be a large
organization with much clout. In interviews, Soss repeatedly declined to state
how many members the Federation had,
as she was anxious not to detract from the
perception of the organization as strong
and vibrant. However, according to The
New Yorker, the Federation in 1951 only
had approximately 1,500 members. Given
its small size, it is not surprising that most
of the organization’s resolutions failed.
Soss, though, always extolled the strides
made by the Federation, not its weaknesses.
For example, she invariably claimed victory whenever a woman was named to a
corporate board, even if that corporation
had not been specifically targeted by the
22 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2016 | www.MoAF.org
Federation. To be fair, Soss and the Federation’s efforts indeed contributed to getting at least some women on boards across
the country and in other high places in
corporations. Soss bristled, though, that
more women who rose to positions of
prominence were not sufficiently grateful
to the Federation for their assistance. She
also recognized the extent to which more
progress needed to be made to improve
board gender diversity. As she remarked
to The New Yorker in 1954, “…one woman
on these big boards isn’t enough.”
In the late 1960s, the leadership of the
Federation fractured, as some of Soss’s
colleagues disagreed with her tactics. The
concern was that her sometimes dramatic
boardroom stunts might be diminishing
the organization’s efficacy by reducing its
perceived legitimacy. For example, Soss
goaded management at times to forcibly remove her from meetings. While
she believed that such mistreatment of a
shareholder by management could be bad
publicity for the company, some within
the Federation viewed Soss’s conduct as
unseemly.
In May 1966, Federation Vice President
Beatrice Kelekian resigned in the wake of
Soss being ejected from an IBM annual
meeting. Complaining to The New York
Times of Soss’s “latest wrinkle of being
tossed out of annual meetings,” Kelekian
said, “I just can’t take it any longer.” At
IBM’s annual meeting on April 25, 1966,
Soss had to be carried out of the assembly
room at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel, reportedly to the applause of many of the roughly
1,300 shareholders present who were irritated by her interruption of the meeting.
Soss had stubbornly continued to try to
nominate a woman director even though
Chairman Thomas Watson repeatedly told
her he was not yet taking any nominations.
A similar episode where Soss was ejected