A Story We Hadn't Heard

Hi friend,

In suburban Pennsylvania last weekend, we watched as a group of gray-haired women posed for a photo. “We’re not going back!” they proclaimed.

These were the OWLs (Older, Wiser Ladies), one of the many grassroots groups out canvassing for the Harris/Walz campaign. 

This demo is a “wild card,” according to pollsters working for the AARP. “We got very interested in older woman voters a few years ago – nobody else was really focusing on them,” said AARP executive VP Nancy LeaMond. “There are 63 million women voters over the age of 50 and about 97 percent of them say they are going to vote.” Per their data, these women “have moved more than any other group of voters, including younger women and men in the same age bracket. And they moved in Harris’ favor.”

Perhaps this is because they came of age during a different time. Until the early ‘60s and ‘70s, women’s lives were circumscribed by the wills of the men around them. Progress came in fits and starts, such as with the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which turns 50 this week. Before that, as Tory Burch explained for Time, “banks required women to have a male cosigner — typically a husband or father — on applications for credit cards, loans, and mortgages. It was an archaic policy in an archaic system that was designed to fail women.”

These sorts of ground-shaking changes are captured compellingly in the new nonfiction book She-Wolves, which we have an exclusive excerpt of below. It tells the stories of the audacious and tenacious first women of Wall Street and there are many jaw-dropping tidbits. Barred from entering men’s clubs, women giving financial presentations found their way in through fire escapes and windows. Blocked from the big leagues and unable to make partner, one bought her own seat on the exchange.

It’s an interesting history to consume on the eve of what feels like the most consequential election of modern times, one that could result in a woman breaking through the ultimate glass ceiling. Gender has dominated this election for months, and polls show the gap between female and male voters may be the largest in history. 

Kamala Harris is 60 years old, meaning she was born before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which banned racially discriminatory laws around voting, like literacy tests and poll taxes. She often says she feels the “weight of this moment” in her role. Whether she succeeds is ultimately up to all of us.

Eeek.
Your friends at Gloria

Excerpted from She Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street by Paulina Bren.

In September 1970, the New York City Commission on Human Rights held a series of hearings on sex discrimination in the workplace. In his opening remarks, Mayor Lindsay spoke of “a total environment of inequality in which half the population is systematically denied rights and opportunities taken for granted by the other half, and in which the community’s desperate need for the fullest use of all its human resources is foolishly sacrificed in the name of custom.”

Anthropologist Margaret Mead — who recalled how she’d marched alongside her suffragist mother and as a child believed anti-suffragists were “wicked, rich women with poodle dogs” — testified about these “customs” that kept women locked out of the workplace or else in low-paying positions. She argued that societies had always been geared toward women making babies and men providing for them, but there was no longer a need for an expanded population, quite the opposite, and yet society remained mired in the “customs” of a time that had outlived its purpose.

When a representative for Merrill Lynch testified, he was asked about the low female enrollment in the firm’s broker trainee program. His answer was that there were few female applicants and “even fewer of those who can qualify with the combination of finance education, and/or financial sales experience.” When challenged — there were countless women working in business, he was told, and so “Why wouldn’t more of these women . . . be inclined to come over and apply for your program?” — he replied: “I don’t really have an answer to it except that the net effect is that they do not.” He further defended his position by insisting that women were not allowed to work as brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange or the American Stock Exchange because there it “would become an occupational disability to be female.” (It was pointed out to him that if women were actually barred from trading on the NYSE or Amex floor, given equal rights legislation passed in the 1960s, that would be illegal. Moreover, he had clearly never heard of Muriel Siebert.)

At the hearings, women recounted their experiences of how they’d received training and promotions reluctantly, if at all. To be considered for the Registered Representative examination, they needed a sponsor, and while their firm might even offer their sponsorship — especially to “ambitious secretaries or sales assistants” — it then refused to give them the title or the income of a broker, even as they were now licensed and making trades for the company.

The Bankers Trust revealed at the hearings that while 54 percent of its employees were women, only 1.5 percent occupied what might be considered top jobs, meaning non-support staff jobs, and no women at all were executives. Merrill Lynch had 40 percent female employees, but only 2 out of 70 were officers; and while they had 499 brokers, only 15 were women: there were no female traders. Its Research Department had an impressive 7 women out of 26 industry specialists, but as Mary Wrenn, one of those seven, explained: “Financial analysis is probably the one area where women are equal to men because we don’t deal directly with them. For a long time, those who read my reports didn’t know whether I was Miss or Mr. Wrenn.”

In December 1970, three months after the New York City Human Rights Commission hearings, the NYSE finally let women back on the floor . . . as pages.

Back at the Harvard Business School, Robin Wigger, class of 1970, wrote to the women in the next incoming class with some tips on how to survive their HBS experience. First, have a well-rehearsed answer to the inevitable question: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in business school?” The men, especially the first-years, believed that women were only there to find themselves “rich husbands.”

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TO WATCH Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched Jewish cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland in A Real Pain, which Eisenberg wrote and directed (it’s based upon his research of his own family). It looks completely brilliant and the reviews so far have been glowing.

TO LISTEN What happens when one of the world’s richest men uses private investigators to try to turn up dirt on random people, like the 64-year-old cave explorer who helped rescue a Thai soccer team? You’ll find your answers in the illuminating and infuriating podcast Elon’s Spies.

TO MAKE If you have a surplus of tiny chocolate bars left over from Halloween, perhaps this simple baked treat appeals. We like that it’s the sort of “recipe” a kid can do.

TO STREAM Janet Planet, the wonderful indie coming-of-age film set in the ‘90s, has been picked up by Max — a blessing for those of us who rarely make it to the theater. We’re also curious about the Swedish road-trip drama Let Go, which is now on Netflix.

Why Michelle Obama’s speech is the best summation of the stakes of this election. • “From mommy blogger to MAGA’s most powerful weapon: the story of Jessica Reed Kraus.” • RIP work wives. • Dr. Mary Claire Haver, menopause influencer. • Fascinating.

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