Financial History Issue 122 (Summer 2017) | Page 22
By George Robb
Ladies
of the
Ticker
Pioneering Women Stockbrokers
from the 1880s to the 1920s
During the late 19th century, a growing
number of women were finding employ-
ment in banking and insurance, but not
on Wall Street. Probably no area of Amer-
ican finance offered fewer job opportuni-
ties to women than stock broking. In her
1863 survey, The Employments of Women,
Virginia Penny, who was usually eager
to promote new fields of employment
for women, noted with approval that
there were no women stockbrokers in the
United States. Penny argued that “women
could not very well conduct the busi-
ness without having to mix promiscuously
with men on the street, and stop and talk
to them in the most public places; and the
delicacy of woman would forbid that.”
The radical feminist Victoria Woodhull
did not let delicacy stand in her way when
she and her sister opened a brokerage
house near Wall Street in 1870, but she
paid a heavy price for her audacity. The
scandals which eventually drove Wood-
hull out of business and out of the country
cast a long shadow over other women’s
careers as brokers.
Histories of Wall Street rarely mention
women brokers at all. They might note
Victoria Woodhull’s distinction as the
nation’s first female stockbroker, but they
don’t discuss the subject again until they
reach the 1960s. This neglect is unfortu-
nate, as it has left generations of pioneering
Wall Street women hidden from history.
These extraordinary women struggled to
establish themselves professionally and to
overcome chauvinistic prejudice that a
career in finance was unfeminine.
When Mrs. M.E. Favor opened the
Uptown Stock Exchange on West 24th
Street in 1880, established brokers and
financial commentators treated her with
great suspicion. Favor’s newspaper adver-
tisements and circulars, sent to “prominent
ladies” inviting them to entrust their money
to “a lady of standing who had a long and
successful experience in stock speculation,”
were condemned as lures to trap unsophis-
ticated women. One businessman feared
that the ads would entice “many a woman
to pledge her diamonds, or to compromise
Portrait of an unidentified woman, a smile on her
face, as she reads a stock ticker, early 20th century.
20 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2017 | www.MoAF.org