Vassar Today

Who Were the Pioneering
“She-Wolves” of Wall Street?

Professor Paulina Bren takes us into a world where “thick skin and chutzpah” helped women scale the mighty walls.
Paulina Bren seated at a wooden table wearing a grey shawl.
Adam Patane
Paulina Bren is a writer and award-winning historian who teaches at Vassar on the Pittsburgh Endowment Chair in the Humanities, where she also directs the Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies Program. VQ recently spoke to Bren about her latest book, She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street, which chronicles the experiences of the female pioneers who dared enter the formerly all-male bastion of finance. The book has been called “enthralling” by Publisher’s Weekly and was selected as a “most anticipated book” for fall 2024 by the Next Big Idea Club, the Washington Post, Town & Country, and LitHub. UntappedNewYork listed it among the 100 Best Books about New York of all time. She-Wolves is in development with Mark Gordon Pictures.

What originally piqued your interest in the female pioneers of Wall Street?

It was while writing my previous book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, about New York’s famous women-only residential hotel, that I was struck by something: Just as New York City was turning grimy and dangerous in the late 1960s and early 1970s, occupancy rates actually plummeted at the Barbizon. Yet one would think this would be exactly the moment when young women would be eager for the sanctuary of the Barbizon. That they didn’t want to be there told me that a very different kind of woman was about to embody New York. In a sense, I followed her from out the doors of the Barbizon and onto Wall Street—figuratively but also, in the case of one of my “characters” in She-Wolves, literally.

You go as far back as the New York Stock Exchange’s beginnings in 1792, but your book focuses on the period from the 1960s to September 11, 2001. Why did you choose that timespan?

Because this was really the start of women coming to Wall Street. They had always been [coming] cyclically, depending on whether women were investing in the market and firms were hiring women to help other women invest their money, but the 1960s is when it became less of a one-off. My story begins largely in the 1960s, but I do dip back into the 1950s when the first smattering of women on Wall Street working beyond the secretarial pool created the Financial Women’s Association; they did so, as they said, mostly because they had no one to have lunch with! Of course that was the least of their problems; much of what took place, as readers of She-Wolves have told me, is jaw-dropping.

But returning to the timeline, I think those 50 years were simply fascinating. The first women to arrive experienced a Wall Street vastly different from what it is today: It was men—all men. There were “No ladies” signs on the area’s dining clubs, two-martini lunches, much after-lunch groping, and all of this within what was a very secluded enclave on the tip of Manhattan. The area was peppered with small brokerage houses alongside the major firms, and it was at these small partner-owned brokerages where women got a foothold.

Almost all of them started as secretaries and looked and listened and began to climb that steep and treacherous ladder, a climb that usually began in the research departments as analysts, recommending stocks to their firm’s clients, in large part because they could sign their reports with initials, thereby passing as men.

Many of these early women were college dropouts from the outer boroughs of New York, who found themselves almost accidentally on Wall Street but, in the process, discovered a place where, with thick skin and chutzpah, you could actually go beyond the secretarial pool. When in the early 1980s Wall Street exploded onto America’s stage, and it suddenly became the place to be, a new generation of women came pouring in—a very different type of woman—and tensions ensued. And one can say the same for the early 2000s. It’s a very dynamic story.

Tell us about one thing you discovered during your research that truly surprised you.

One of the things that surprised me (although there were so many) was the fundamental difference between the women who worked in investment banks and brokerage firms and those on the trading and stock exchange floors. One woman who worked on the American Exchange Floor and then the New York Stock Exchange floor tried attending a meeting of the Financial Women’s Association but, as she told me, these women were so different. Like oil and water, she said, a case of brains versus brawn. I don’t think that’s quite right: You had to have brains, too, for the trading floors, but I came to understand what she meant. It took a very different kind of woman to hustle on the exchange floor or make huge trades on a trading floor.
Cover of Paulina Bren’s book, She-wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street.

You interviewed many “she-wolves.” Is there an anecdote that singularly encapsulates what the women of Wall Street faced at the beginning of this era?

So many crazy stories and anecdotes! But a short one was a case in the 1960s. A woman was scheduled to give a keynote speech at one of the clubs on Wall Street, except “no ladies” were allowed. So she had to climb up the fire escape and was helped in through the window by the men gathered there to listen to her talk, who then helped her out again as she made her way back down the fire escape. I think that says it all!

Whom did you enjoy speaking with the most in the course of your research?

I’m not supposed to have favorites, but I confess it would probably be Louise Jones, who was found abandoned as a newborn in a phone booth on New York’s Upper West Side. She was adopted by a foster family in the Staten Island projects, did not know she was adopted, but when, as a 17-year-old, she first stepped onto the floor of the NYSE as a teletypist, she felt like she could breathe for the first time in her life. The chaos, the insanity, the money—it all made her giddy with excitement. And, yes, that floor turned her into a multimillionaire.

Did you encounter any Vassar she-wolves?

I tried to get in touch with a few but never heard back! Wall Street is a very secretive place, and it’s hard to get women to talk for a variety of reasons. It’s easier to “spill the beans” if you had worked at Lehman or Bear Stearns because those companies collapsed during the Great Recession. So less liability!

But I received an interesting email from Mark Higgins and Bethany Bengtson, who are writing a piece on Hetty Green, a rare and iconic woman on Wall Street in the 19th century; a successful investor, she was both America’s wealthiest woman and a famous miser (she would stuff old newspapers under her dress to keep warm and save on heating), but also a charitable person. She left her fortune to her children, but with no heirs of their own, in the early 1950s, her daughter left her mother’s money to 63 organizations, including Vassar College!

What has changed for today’s women of Wall Street, and what hasn’t?

What has changed is that there are so many women on Wall Street now, but when you look at the very, very top of the ladder, you still see few women.

As the historian Judith Bennett argues (in a book chapter that we teach in Introduction to Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies), there is change and there is transformation. But change should not automatically be mistaken for transformation. In other words, don’t be fooled by change (lots of women on Wall Street now), and assume there’s a radical transformation taking place.

—Interview by Kimberly Schaye

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