Still a rich boys’ club

She-Wolves is a continuation of sorts of Paulina Bren’s previous book, The Barbizon: The hotel that set women free (TLS, April 2, 2021). That was about the once famous hotel in New York, which opened in 1927 and catered to the city’s working women. Up until the mid-1960s the Barbizon was considered a stopping place on the way to women’s ultimate destiny in marriage. But with the Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, the single-sex hotel became a relic of a bygone era; it closed in 1981. By then elite all-male schools were admitting women, all-male clubs were letting women through the front door, and Wall Street, that consummate male bastion of power, was seeing more women in non-secretarial roles, some of them with MBAs from Harvard Business School.

Bren’s new book never questions the idea that female liberation and empowerment, as defined by Wall Street, might be problematic – that is, predicated on women becoming like the acquisitive, often ruthless men who populate that world. This is a breezy, anecdotal account, not a philosophical or moral treatise. Still, the question looms: is success on Wall Street a laudable goal? Some of the women Bren profiles question the values associated with their work, but overall the idea of success embodied by Wall Street is taken for granted, both in the book and, I would argue, in American society, where money has increasingly ruled the day.

Although Wall Street was founded as an elite men’s club, a few women acted as brokers as early as the 1860s. They billed themselves as clairvoyants, an ingenious workaround. (Cornelius Vanderbilt was presumably one of their silent investors.) In the 1920s some brokerages opened “women’s departments” to cater to a surge of female investment, though these dissolved with the 1929 stock market crash. In 1947 Wilma Porter Soss dubbed herself an “economic suffragette” and created the Federation of Women Shareholders in American Business. Female investment was further encouraged with the creation of the Financial Women’s Association in the mid-1950s.

Yet if women could invest in the stock market, they were largely barred from employment beyond the secretarial pool. For women – and African Americans – getting jobs as analysts and, even more challenging, as brokers, was a struggle. (Jewish men were another case; they were directed to apply to “Jewish firms” such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs.)

During the 1960s the few women who succeeded on Wall Street were, like Alice Jarcho (a figure to whom Bren returns throughout the book), scrappy personalities who had not gone to college and often hailed from the unglamorous outer boroughs of New York. Through grit and the support of a male mentor, Jarcho became the first woman to trade full-time on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Another pioneer was Muriel “Mickie” Siebert, a college drop-out from Cleveland, who became the first woman to have a seat on the exchange. Both worked their way up from backroom roles to positions of visibility and power.

A new era began in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the rise of the MBA as a desirable credential. Bren takes as her focus Harvard Business School, the ultimate feeder for success on Wall Street. It admitted its first woman in 1963, though it seems that the school had employed female graders of student papers since the 1920s. Graduates of elite women’s colleges, they earned a pittance; though Bren notes that it was harder for a woman to be hired as a grader than for a man to be admitted to the school.

It is worth noting that, from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, the MBA was not a particularly desirable credential. Both men and women were influenced by the countercultural idealism of this period and harboured a desire to do something socially meaningful with their lives. By the end of the 1970s, however, such idealism had begun to evaporate. American society became more focused on making money, a shift reinforced by the election of Ronald Reagan as president. He removed many of the regulations that had kept extravagant wealth in check and implicitly celebrated the philosophy encapsulated by Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street: “Greed is good.” The 1980s was a time of lavish spending and fashionable debt, and “Masters of the Universe” (the epithet coined by Tom Wolfe) became role models for the nation. They worked long hours making money, then spent it on parties, real estate, recreational drugs and nannies for their kids.

Among Bren’s profiled subjects here is Marianne Spraggins, the Black daughter of a social activist. She began her career as a law professor, then pivoted to Wall Street as the route to power, prestige and material success. In 1980, 20 per cent of the Yale graduating class planned to go to business school, and by 1986, 30 per cent of that college’s graduates were seeking employment on Wall Street. Economics became the favoured undergraduate major, far eclipsing English and history. Students dreamt not of curing cancer, but of working for Goldman Sachs. (As a 1975 Yale graduate who majored in English, I can vouch for this shift – no one I knew was interested in business school. By the early 1980s some of my peers and many of my younger acquaintances were putting in applications to business school and revising their résumés in the hope of being hired on Wall Street.)

There was a heady conformity to this period, with droves of young women on New York streets in the attire prescribed by the “dress for success” guru John Molloy: suits with pencil skirts, blouses with floppy bows and pumps carried in tote bags so they could wear sneakers as they made their way downtown to the financial district.

The popularity of the MBA meant that men who had once come to Wall Street as part of a gentlemanly family tradition were joined by a new breed of ambitious high achievers. The focus was on making money rather than on forging relationships or maintaining traditional norms and forms of etiquette. To succeed women needed to follow this lead – to shrug off foul language, ridicule and harassment. Bren cites one woman’s attitude: “You think you’re gong to embarrass me? Well, fuck you!” Another woman she profiles describes a dinner with “some polyester people from Florida”, during which one of them put a hand on her knee: “I think your hand is lost”, she told him bluntly. The recipe, apparently, was to be tough, self-protective and disdainful of those who didn’t wear Armani.

Bren notes that the concept of sexual harassment was relatively unknown until Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas in 1991, but even in the decades that followed – despite a substantial class action suit against Smith Barney in 1996 – most successful Wall Street women were unwilling to complain. Older women in particular, who had weathered some of the worst abuse, distanced themselves from feminism and its “grievances”.

The author moves rapidly through the scandals and failures that Wall Street has experienced over the past forty years: the savings and loan debacle, the insider trading indictments, the subprime mortgage crisis. A few women were working for the men involved in these ventures, but when things went awry none of the women went to jail. Bren says this is because they were excluded from the upper echelons of power – there were advantages, in other words, to being locked out of the old boys’ network.

If few women were involved in the shenanigans, neither were any of them innovators. The math nerds or “quants” who popularized the algorithmic trading that was responsible for the mortgage crisis were men, as were the major business commentators and pundits, such as Louis Rukeyser of Wall Street Week. (An exception in the latter category was Elaine Garzarelli, a market strategist at Shearson Lehman, known as the “wild child of Wall Street”, who in 1987 predicted Black Monday, when the market dropped 508 points, then went lower.) It seems that most of the women who succeeded on Wall Street did so in the conventional sense: they made money and gained leverage within a male model of business. They conformed to, rather than changed, the culture.

The book ends with the attack on the World Trade Center, a seemingly apocalyptic moment on Wall Street. But in the final pages, which jump forward to 2022, Paulina Bren observes that things haven’t changed much since. In 2022 women accounted for only 12 per cent of managing directors and 16 per cent of principals and partners at private equity firms. She concludes: “Wall Street was built for men, and fundamentally, it remains an old boys’ club”.

Paula Marantz Cohen is a Dean Emerita at Drexel University. Her most recent book is Talking Cure: An essay on the civilizing power of conversation, 2023

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