Financial History Issue 122 (Summer 2017) | Page 25
extensively advertised its women’s depart-
ments and published a series of pamphlets
on investments for women. Other pio-
neering directors of women’s departments
include Catherine Taylor at John Muir
and Company in New Y ork and Eleanor
Hall at S.W. Stearns and Company in Chi-
cago. Mary Riis, widow of social investiga-
tor Jacob Riis, later headed Bonbright’s
women’s department in New York.
The 1910 Census lists 207 women as
“stockbrokers,” four of whom were Afri-
can American. By 1920, the number of
women stockbrokers had grown to 376,
all of whom were white. As a cohort, they
were mostly young and single; 79% were
unmarried and 61% were between the
ages of 25 and 44. 98.7% of the nation’s
stockbrokers were still male. Most of the
pioneering women brokers and financial
advisors avoided the spotlight, fearful of
the ridicule so often heaped on Wall Street
women in the past. They kept a low profile
in the office, trading by mail or phone and
never “in the street.”
Rosalind W. Alcott, who worked as a
broker in the 1920s, even disguised her
voice on the telephone, “so that others
thought she was a man.” Elizabeth Cook
sold bonds for Harris and Forbes by mail,
an approach she endorsed for women
since outside sales required “continual
travel and staying in country hotels, which
for the most part, are very bad.” Cook
doubted whether many women were
suited to such rigors, but she believed
that they possessed both the patience and
the social skills necessary for carrying on
extensive and protracted correspondence.
In 1921, Cook founded the Women’s Bond
Club as a professional organization for
women employed in financial services.
By the late 1920s, at the height of the
speculative mania, many more stock
exchange firms hired women, some of
whom were “rated as among the best
brokers in Wall Street,” according to The
New York Times. By 1929, at least 22 New
York Stock Exchange firms had women
partners. That same year, financial writer
Eunice Fuller Barnard profiled the women
of Wall Street for the Times. She noted
that “saleswomen’s desks are ranged indis-
criminately, if still sparsely, among the
desks of ‘the boys’ in many a big invest-
ment house.” Experienced women brokers
were said to earn as much as $20,000 a
year, while beginners might make $6,000.
Barnard praised these brokers as “women
of intelligence, ambition and tact,” many
of whom were also “college graduates.”
One such woman, Irma Eggleston, had
been hired by the brokerage house C.F.
Childs and Company as an “experiment”
in 1917 to sell Liberty Bonds. A decade
later, she had set a national sales record
by selling $30 billion worth of bonds. The
New York Times celebrated her achieve-
ment in April 1927, although its story
concluded with the sentence: “She has no
children.” In spite of her business suc-
cess, or because of it, she had failed in her
most vital duty. The number of women
stockbrokers more than quadrupled dur-
ing the 1920s, from 376 to 1,793, but still
only represented 2.5% of the nation’s bro-
kers. In 1930, more than 160,000 Ameri-
can women were employed in banking
and brokerage services, although 92.5% of
them were still engaged in clerical work.
Women brokers usually oversaw the
accounts of women customers, whom bro-
kerage houses were assiduously cultivating
at the time. The North American Review
mentioned one woman broker in 1929
who “personally handles 300 accounts”
of business and professional women. The
Times profiled another woman broker,
Marjorie Sweet, who had been hired by
the Wall Street firm of Throckmorton and
Company in 1928 to recruit women cus-
tomers in New Jersey. In her first year she
acquired 150 new accounts from “working
girls” in the Garden State. As Sweet mat-
ter-of-factly explained, “I have a little car
and I drive around nights after the girls
get home from work and talk securities
to them.” This “petite, blue-eyed” broker
with “bobbed hair” was depicted as a kind
of Wall Street flapper. The press account
of Miss Sweet was rather patronizing,
and, as such, typified the amused, flippant
attitude often employed when discussing
women’s “invasion” of Wall Street.
Whatever modest, and contested,
inroads some women had made as bro-
kers on Wall Street, the New York Stock
Exchange remained an exclusively male
club, its floor “better protected against
women members than that of Congress.”
No official rule barred women from
membership, but the sexist traditions of
the Exchange were not easily overcome.
In January 1927, the press reported that
negotiations were underway by a bro-
kerage firm to purchase a seat on the
Exchange for a woman. Neither the firm
nor the woman was named, and no formal
application was ever made to the Stock
Exchange’s Admissions Committee. The
story may have been circulated to test
the waters as to whether the Admissions
Committee was receptive to a woman’s
application. If so, the answer must have
been negative, as no woman was to join
the Exchange until 1967, when Muriel
Siebert purchased a seat.
The first generation of women stock-
brokers faced great resistance, but they
chipped away at the old boys’ network
on Wall Street that sought to exclude
and marginalize them. They carved out
a niche for themselves as advisers and
liaisons to women investors. They helped
break barriers to women’s employment in
brokerage firms, and they made it possible
for women today to have greater financial
opportunities.
George Robb is a professor of history
at William Paterson University of New
Jersey. He is the author of British Cul-
ture and the First World War (Pal-
grave-Macmillan, 2015) and Ladies of the
Ticker: Women and Wall Street from
the Gilded Age to the Great Depression
(University of Illinois Press, 2017), from
which this article has been adapted.
Sources
Barnard, Eunice Fuller. “Women in Wall Street
Wielding a New Power.” The New York
Times. June 23, 1929.
Hill, Joseph A. Women in Gainful Occupations,
1870–1920. Washington, DC: US Govern-
ment Publishing Office. 1929. Pgs. 178–79.
“Ladies as Stock Speculators.” The New York
Times. February 3, 1880.
“Mrs. Pollard’s Business.” Chicago Herald.
October 15, 1890.
“Mrs. Sophronia Twitchell Dead: She Was
a Well Known Figure on Wall Street and
a Female Suffragist.” New York Herald.
August 4, 1893.
“Radcliffe Girl is Bond Salesman.” Boston Her-
ald. July 11, 1915.
“Wall Street Offers Good Chances to College
Women.” The New York Times. March 1, 1914.
“Woman Seeks a Seat on the Stock Exchange.”
The New York Times. January 14, 1927.
“Working Girls Buying Wall Street Securities.”
The New York Times. January 5, 1928.
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