Early financial advice manuals for women urged caution, steering them away from the stock market and recommending “safe” investments in real estate or government bonds. Best to entrust one’s capital to a male relation or family friend rather than to some crafty and conniving stockbroker. The author of The American Business Woman (1900) warned against “that army of sharks and rascals” who preyed on gullible women. The newspapers and novels of the Gilded Age were also full of cautionary tales of naïve women financially ruined by corrupt brokers. Of course, such conservative warnings about Wall Street are open to multiple interpretations. They might represent a genuine concern to protect women from financial risk, but could also serve to exclude women from potentially lucrative investment opportunities.
Ambivalence about the stock market was especially pronounced among women’s rights advocates who both denounced Wall Street as a bastion of male corruption and pushed for greater female inclusion on “the Street.” Some feminists damned the stock market as corrupt gambling, but others sought to participate more fully in market capitalism. These conflicting attitudes can be found in the pages of The Revolution, a progressive paper edited by the nation’s leading suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The paper celebrated pioneering business women even as it denounced capitalism in general. In an 1868 editorial, Stanton compared the stock market to a “gambling saloon on a large scale” and vowed to “turn Wall Street inside out” for her readers. Stanton and Anthony later castigated robber barons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk for attempting to corner the gold market in 1869, arguing that such financial scandals would be impossible in a nation governed by women.
Could women reform Wall Street by becoming brokers and bankers, or would they inevitably become corrupted by man’s “bank note world?” The experience of America’s first women stockbrokers, Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, was viewed by many as a test case. When the women opened their brokerage business in New York City in February 1870, they were initially celebrated as the “Queens of Finance.” Women’s rights advocates certainly saw the advent of Woodhull, Claflin & Company as a sign of better times for women. In March 1870, Susan B. Anthony published an interview with Tennessee Claflin in The Revolution, celebrating the “working woman.” Anthony argued that “the advent of this woman firm in Wall Street marks a new era” when women could “be at the head of a banking institution, surrounded by ledgers, high stools, and those evidences of masculine superiority that men have plumed themselves upon so long.” Claflin agreed that economic independence would free women from exploitation, and being a broker was far “better than sewing drawers at ten cents a pair, or teaching music at ten dollars a quarter.”
Male commentators and brokers were far less enthusiastic, many of them characterizing the “lady brokers” as foolish and inept. Their hostility grew when the sisters began publishing a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which devoted considerable space to detailing corporate fraud and crooked stock market deals. As Woodhull later boasted, “we exposed in our Weekly one nefarious scheme after another when we realized that companies were floated to work mines that did not exist…and to make railways to nowhere in particular, and that banks and insurance societies flourished by devouring their shareholders’ capital.” The paper frequently highlighted how women were financially victimized by men. Woodhull and her supporters organized the People’s Party, which fronted her 1872 presidential candidacy and championed the American worker against the capitalist cabal of “money-lenders, land grabbers, rings and lobbies.”
Woodhull’s inflammatory politics, along with her forceful personality and advocacy of radical causes like women’s suffrage and free love made it easy for her opponents to brand her as unwomanly and immoral. In a famous cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, Thomas Nast depicted Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan,” with horns and cloven hoofs, tempting women to abandon their families and follow the primrose path of free love. The Cleveland Leader argued that Woodhull’s “brazen immodesty as a stock speculator on Wall Street” clearly indicated that she was “a vain, immodest, unsexed woman.”When Woodhull’s brokerage business failed in 1873, male brokers and commentators were eager to draw conclusions about the financial incapacity of women in general and the sexual impropriety of women in business. The stockbroker William Fowler saw the dissolution of “the feminine firm” as “evidence how unsuited to woman’s nature is such a field of enterprise.” In his 1875 guidebook, Bulls and Bears of New York, Matthew Hale Smith implied that the Claflin sisters were little better than prostitutes, enticing men to part with money through the employment of feminine wiles. Only fast women, like Victoria and Tennessee, would be attracted to the life of speculation and the sordid world of the stock market.
Woodhull and Claflin had breached the exclusive fraternity of Wall Street, but not for long. During their brief sojourn on the Street, they had exposed its clubbish atmosphere and misogynist attitudes. The macho world of the stock exchange endured for decades afterwards, creating a hostile environment for women. Many brokers’ offices replicated the masculine ambience of saloons, with free cigars, free lunches, and paintings of naked women. In popular novels of the era, like Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) or Upton Sinclair’s The Moneychangers (1908), brokers were often depicted as sexual predators. Many Wall Street men embraced the playboy lifestyle. Legendary financiers like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, and August Belmont flaunted their womanizing, which was accepted by their many admirers as just another part of their oversize, aggressive personalities. According to historian Steve Fraser, “sexual prowess, whether real or imagined, became an enduring part of the mythos of the Wall Street titan.”
Little wonder that Woodhull and Claflin found their reputations in tatters after a brief spell on the Street. The scandal that drove them out of business cast a long shadow over other women’s attempts to operate as brokers. Women who tried to earn their living selling securities risked being labeled indecent or ridiculous. One such case was Sophronia Twitchell, a women’s rights activist turned broker. She worked as an agent for the Equitable Life Insurance Company in San Francisco, where she speculated heavily, and successfully, in mining shares. In 1880 she moved to New York, where at the age of 50 she opened a business on lower Broadway as a broker in mining securities. Although she ran a genuine stock business and sometimes made a great deal of money, she was very unpopular with male brokers. They may have resented her success, and they certainly resented her manner which was unusually forthright and outspoken for a woman. She was a familiar figure on Wall Street, tall and energetic, hurrying along at an “unladylike” pace and barging into brokers’ offices, where she was not always welcome. Once, when a businessman ordered her out of his office, she struck him with her umbrella and was arrested for assault.
Twitchell’s combination of brokerage with suffrage agitation no doubt reminded some of Victoria Woodhull. Yet, while Woodhull was depicted as a beautiful siren seducing the likes of Vanderbilt out of stock tips, Twitchell was mocked as an outlandish old crone. She was described at different times as a “crazy crank,” a “nuisance,” a “human curio,” and “the Galloping Cow from Frisco.” In 1888 the New Haven Register provided an unflattering portrait: “She is a woman almost six feet tall and she is well along in years, but you see her rushing around at a lively pace in Wall Street in all sorts of weather, looking for tips and watching an opportunity to play the market to her advantage.” Twitchell was clearly an intimidating and bewildering presence, and brokers didn’t know how to deal with her. They tried variously to freeze her out and to discredit her as an unwomanly freak.
By the 20th century Wall Street had become more welcoming to passive women investors, but no less hostile to active women brokers. During the 1920s women constituted 30 percent of the nation’s shareholders, but only 2 percent of its stockbrokers. By the 1950s women made up half of all American investors, but were still woefully underrepresented on Wall Street. Not until 1967 did the New York Stock Exchange finally admit its first woman member, Muriel Siebert, but she did not have an easy time of it, enduring sexist headlines like “Skirt Invades Exchange” and “Powder Puff on Wall Street.”Deregulation of the securities industry in the 1970s, and the consequent expansion, led to new employment opportunities for women, especially in research and sales. Siebert herself noted that although women were coming into Wall Street in large numbers, “they are still not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There’s still an old-boy network.” In 2011, women constituted 55.4% of financial services employees, but only 16.6% of executives.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought several sex-discrimination lawsuits against Wall Street firms starting in the 1970s. Brokerage houses began promoting more women, though not necessarily treating them well. Susan Antilla’s Tales from the Boom-Boom Room: Women vs. Wall Street (2002) documented a pattern of discrimination and sexual harassment in the financial industry during the 1980s and 1990s. Women were paid less than men for the same positions, demoted following maternity leaves, and subject to a constant barrage of crude, sexist behavior.
Popular representations of Wall Street still perpetuate the notion that the world of high finance is presided over by greedy and priapic brokers. The Victorian incarnation swilled champagne, while his modern counterpart supposedly prefers cocaine. Gordon Gekko, the antihero of Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987), embodied the aggressive, hyper-masculine culture of American finance.
The most recent battle of the sexes on Wall Street involves the dueling statues near the New York Stock Exchange. Since 1989, Arturo Di Modica’s giant bronze “Charging Bull” has embodied the power and exuberance of American capitalism. But this meaning was changed overnight in 2017, when Kristen Visbal deposited her own bronze statue opposite the bull—a defiant girl in ponytails with her hands on her hips. “Fearless Girl” was immediately celebrated as a feminist challenge to the testosterone-charged atmosphere of the financial district. That no one had to explain this new meaning only confirms Wall Street’s long-standing reputation as a masculine preserve. Victoria Woodhull certainly would have understood, and she might well have lamented that things hadn’t improved more in 150 years.
About the author: George Robb is a professor of history at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He has a PhD from Northwestern University and was a Fulbright scholar in England. His most recent book is Ladies of the Ticker: Women and Wall Street from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression.
Cover Image: Bronze sculpture of Fearless Girl by Kristen Visbal.